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Borderline Autism in adults and children - ADHAD, ASPERGER ...

*** My and my son's story *** They told me I was wild, uncontrollable, unyielding. I felt I wasn’t understood, accepted and I was always ready for a fight.

Me and my brother were raised in the same household by the same parents, so how was it that they were going berserk when it came to me.

They told me I was wild, uncontrollable, unyielding. I felt I wasn’t understood, accepted and I was always ready for a fight. I had many difficulties socialising, learning, concentrating and I was tired all the time. Or better to say I hade energy spikes and then really deep falls. I had constant wild parties going on in my head with so many intrusive thoughts and an inside life that would give a script writer a lifetime of work. I talked too much and I was heard, seen and felt everywhere. But I thought that was normal.

Then my son came to my life and he was just like me.

I started to understand how difficult it was to raise a kid like me, but still didn’t understand what was the big deal. He was just normal for me. He had difficulties at school, just like I did. He didn’t understand why he needed to abide by the rules and regulations that had no logic for him, just like me. He always forgot and lost his stuff, just like I used to when I was his age. He wasn’t easy to control or regulate, because he had his own ideas about life, just like his mom. He had problems with reading, writing and concentration. I didn’t see anything wrong with it because I understood him. I thought it was genetics. 

I am not saying I had it easy.

I didn’t get a good night sleep for more than two years with him when he was a baby. Well I didn’t get any sleep to be exact. I could’t go out with him to any social gatherings because he was either crying or screaming all the time. When he got older he even became a little aggressive, mainly toward his younger sister. It was so tiering, but somehow it was easier for me, because in a way I understood him and I subconsciously used psychological tactics that were natural to me and came intuitively.

One day I went to a children’s party and my son had a fit for no apparent reason. I knew there was something, but he was so engulfed in his emotions that he couldn’t concentrate and was on the verge of destruction. We had a deal, that if he needed to say something to me so I would understand him, he needed to ask for help to calm down. We had a couple of tactics. One was to scream into the toilet all his frustrations and then flush it away, another was The Power Hug *see explanation at the end, or to do a task he could concentrate on for a while, or some kind of a sports activity. This time we chose for him to run around the swimming pool 5 times and then come with the explanation why he is frustrated. As he was running a woman who was also invited to the party asked me where do I go with my son. I didn’t understand the question. She told me that I am very good at coping with my autistic son and she wanted to know who is his psychiatrist or if he is visiting any special needs school. I was numb. I had no idea what to say.

I didn’t think about it much. Those days and mainly in our country there wasn’t anything out, not much information to make me understand what she was talking about. I just thought that he was hyperactive like me. That was almost 15 years ago.

But then my nephew was born.

He was exactly like my son, but they weren’t like me.

But then, when my nephew was born, my brother and his wife, for many reasons, started digging. ADHD and *Asperger syndrome. That was the diagnostics. It wasn’t only a diagnostic of my nephew, but also the realisation that my son and me fall into that categorisation. Now things started to make sense.

I started to dive deep into what it was, what it meant and what to do about it.

I was lucky. I was lucky because I knew in a way how to work with him, just because I knew how I wanted my parents to cope, communicate and act towards me. I was lucky, because I was different. I was also training to be a psychotherapist, I was a coach and a licensed teacher, so I had some knowledge about how to work with him. I even worked for a private school that just opened up and didn’t have many kids, so the teachers took my son in and had time and space for him, to help him, teach him, be patient with him. I was lucky in many ways. Mainly I was lucky because I didn’t need to officially diagnose him for the school system for the exact same reasons that I have mentioned. My brother’s family wasn’t that lucky. Many parents who have a child like us have many problems and go through many difficulties.

Each of us coped with it differently. My brother’s family fought the system. Tried to build awareness and opened the topic of the problem of inclusivity in schools. My brother wrote a beautiful book about their life with their son. The name of the book is “Thank you for being different”.

I on the other hand learned a lot from my son and he motivated me to be a better Therapist, to support parents to take care of themselves, to heal themselves or to learn how to live with their “different” functioning brain. He taught me patients, flexibility and made me understand myself too.

But one thing is true for all of us and that is it’s so exhausting for many reasons. The kids need so much attention from you, because they are so misunderstood and there are so many misconceptions. It is frustrating because you are fighting the system for inclusion and acceptance. it is not about them being difficult because they want to, it’s in their nature. They are not born to be the same as society expects. They cannot conform to the system the way it is now. They have their ideas, opinions, deep feelings and empathy, and they have their own chaos and they don’t know how to cope with it all. Society isn’t build yet in a way to teach them to understand their thought patterns and their inner feelings.

It is not only about children. Adults with the same issues don’t have it easy in life either. In the work environment, in relationships or in families. It is as if we are not “allowed” to have any such problems. Yes, we do have more information today, we have much more understanding of how some of us function, but we need to search the complex information around us and be more self aware, because each of us is different. I had to learn by myself to cope with the issues that the diagnosis brought without me knowing that I “have it”.

Different Borderline Autisms like Asperger, High Functioning autism, Neurodivergent and others. What is interesting for me is that Autism was considered a “male” condition. Most research was conducted on males. That is why women are usually misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Not only because of lack of studies on girls and women, but also because it is found that females are more likely to mask, or camouflage, their autistic traits. The stress of masking symptoms may cause increased anxiety and overwhelm in woman so it creates other diagnosis like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), depression or other. I know what I'm talking about, it took me a long time to understand my conditions and I spent years searching for how to work with it. Meditation helped me, learning to ground myself, breathe, slow down, perceive my thoughts and validate my emotions. Various therapies also helped me a lot. It took me a long time to find what was right for me, so I experimented. What helped me, I also learned to do to others in my practice. For example, craniosacral therapy, which releases tension in the body and mind. Everyone is different, but my advice is to work with it.

There is a lot to write about this topic. Many stories we have experienced. Good and not so good. I would recommend to read my brother’s book or listen to his podcasts for example “Fotroviny podcast with Nidal Saleh”. But I will leave you with a beautiful dialog I heard not so long ago:

Mother: “My son suffers from autism.”
Son: “I do not suffer, I only have it.”

Explenation to the text:

*it is a tactic where you hold the child tight telling him/her that they are safe and they had a safe word that they could use at any time and you let go. This method let him feel engulfed in power and feel safety and he learned to breathe deeply and count to ten until he was able to say the safe word. It is not ok for everyone. My son asked for the power hug many times, because there he could full on let go of his frustration physically and because I was strong, I was able to hold him in a way without either of us getting hurt)

*Asperger: even though you will still find this label on the internet, the Autistic community sees it as offensive for different reasons. There still isn’t a suitable “label” to use instead of this word or definition, so I will use it here as such.