Ten Things THIS Autistic Kid Learned from Being Bullied
by Memoirs Of A Dead Woman
[TW: Bullying, Abuse, Gaslighting,]
Dear readers, I begin by presenting you with ten things I learned as an autistic kid from being bullied, in response an article written by Karen Kabaki-Sisto for Autism Daily Newscast.
1). Pretend to be “normal” — fit in at all fucking costs. Do anything less than that and you become target practice for the bullies — and perhaps the adults. If you become practised at feigning normalcy, you will trick yourself into believing that you are, indeed, “normal”. Only your subconscious mind will know the truth, and it will nag at you every time you deviate from your own construct of what is “normal”.
2). Do NOT trust ANYONE. Adults will not stand up for you (contrary to what Kabaki-Sisto might believe) — in fact, they may tell you the bullying is for your own good and will build character. And if a classmate is nice to you, it’s probably a trick to hurt you or make a fool out of you. Do not be surprised if you hear them mocking you behind you back when they think you’re out of earshot. Continue to believe this as an adult — you’ll protect yourself, never mind it’ll be difficult to form stable relationships as an adult. Your paranoia is right.
3). If you fight back, you will be penalised. Expect to be disciplined by school officials for fighting against your bullies. Visits to the principal’s office, detention, suspension, or expulsion may be in your future if you even dare to stand up for yourself. Expect the same from institutions as an adult — do not trust them to listen to you.
4). Learn well the art of isolation, withdrawal in disgust, and invisibility. It helps to be able to vanish from your peers’ social landscape. (I don’t think that’s quite the idea you had in mind, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto. But it’s one possible side effect of bullying.) If you flip through your old yearbooks as an adult and see barely any photos or mentions of you, you’ll know you’ve succeeded. If you find people who care about you and to whom you matter as a person, consider yourself very fortunate — but still, only trust them so far. Maybe you’ll be able to break out of your tendencies to isolate yourself. Maybe.
5). Talking will get you into trouble. Either the bullies will use your speech against you to taunt you — be it your words, your prosody, your eloquence (or lack of it), your vocabulary — or the adults will critique it endlessly and suggest you change to “fit it”. Ascertain the environment and people around you very thoroughly before you speak. Continue to do this as an adult.
6). You will not cross your 18th birthday without a wicked case of PTSD. Expect to spend either your own money out of pocket or pay towards your insurance deductible to try to undo all of the damage — that was supposedly YOUR fault, by the way. (I await your answer to that, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto.) Speaking of which…
7). It’s YOUR fault you’re being bullied. You’re too “weird”, you don’t “fit in” on purpose, you make people uncomfortable with your style of communication and mannerisms, you don’t fit the norms for the gender you were assigned at birth, you flap your hands, you stim, you speak too eloquently for someone of your ethnicity/race. The adults and bullies will pick any reason at random, or throw several at you. It doesn’t matter. It’s still your fault, and you could have prevented it.
8). Emotional inhibition is a very useful skill. Because the world — and people in it — are very dangerous and untrustworthy, you must be very careful about your reactions — the looks on your face, your words, your body language, even your immediate emotional reactions. Any and all of these will be used against you. So the more unreadable you are, the better. Continue to do this as an adult, no matter how much those who love and care about you try to provide a safe space for you to comfortably express your feelings. (This is another “useful skill” ABA teaches, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto.) CAUTION: you still may fail at emotional inhibition, no matter how hard you try.
9). Avoid touching and being touched. No one will want to touch you unless they aim to hurt you, anyway. Because you’re autistic — or “different”, if you’re not yet identified/diagnosed — others will be taught that it is okay to hurt you, no matter how much it does hurt you or what you say. Better to go years without skin to skin contact (if your sensory situation allows for touching) than to be shoved into a locker, punched, slapped, groped, etc. This is also useful, for if you restrain yourself from striking back or even touching anyone, that’s one less thing you can be accused of — maybe. Continue to believe this as adult, no matter how your situation has changed.
10.) Your words are unreliable. Perhaps you’ve imagined the whole bloody affair. Or even if you’re sure you didn’t, your words will not be believed. Your bully/tormentor will be seen as the victim, or perhaps it will just be dismissed as a case of “boys being boys” if your bully is male, or “a little spat amongst girls” if they’re female. (How is any of this a perk, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto?) You may be criticised for not standing up for yourself and fighting back (never mind you have some idea of the potential consequences if you do). Your side of the story might be dismissed as a silly complaint, or you may be outright accused of lying. But no matter what, your words will not be believed. You’re not a reliable narrator. Eventually, you will do them all a favour and start gaslighting yourself, leaving their hands clean of the affair while you suffer. You will be uncertain as an adult of your own perceptions and words — but sorry kid, this is life. Get used to it.
You might already know about the horrendous article recently by Karen Kabaki-Sisto posted by Autism Daily Newscast if you’re reading this. Yeah — the one titled “10 Perks Kids With Autism Get From Bullying”. (If you haven’t read it, Autistic Academic has a link to a PDF of the article here — I don’t particularly feel like driving up their site traffic.) And while the author tries to portray bullying as an opportunity to help autistic children learn to deal with bullies and defend themselves and to fix institutional problems in schools that either do not effectively deal with or encourage bullying, I can’t really see bullying as an opportunity. I’m sure my list above made that rather clear.
Autistic children who are bullied often receive no help from adults or from the school systems in which it’s happening. Those children eventually become adults. I graduated high school in 1994; I’m nearly 40, and I’m still dealing with emotional trauma of not only being bullied by classmates but receiving no help and support from my family.
I REPEAT: those bullied autistic children eventually become adults.
Right now, autistic children are suffering from the same kinds of trauma that I and other autistic adults suffered when we were children ourselves. Framing bullying as an opportunity does little to help those children, no matter how many good intentions the adults around them have (sorry, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto). We are the children of the revolution (Marc Boland saw us coming), and we have seen adults and school systems fail us when we needed them the most. And judging from all the propaganda from Autism $peaks and its sad and lost apostles* — plenty of whom portray autism as a tragedy and promote ABA to make us autistics all “normal” — asking our younger counterparts to place faith in institutions without a show of trustworthiness on their part is problematic at best, especially when ideologies that seek to cure us and make us “normal” pervade the landscapes of those institutions.
The items on my list above are all negative core beliefs I adopted before I was 18 years old. They are a direct result of my being bullied and also my family of origin either doing NOTHING to help me or siding WITH the bullies. Right after I typed out my own list, I read Neurodivergent K’s list, which she shared on Facebook; in some spots I feel they are hauntingly similar and illustrate the both sides of the classic fight-or-flight response. Also, the Autistic Academic testified in her post (which I’ve linked to below) how childhood bullying scarred and damaged her, writing in counterpoints to the original points of ADN’s article. Finally, I’ve chatted with many more autistic adults who like me still bear the scars of childhood bullying. There are many more of us existing than most people know, and successive generations are suffering in the same ways we did. (Consider that, Ms. Kabaki-Sisto.)
I repeat: we are the children of the revolution.
Other articles.
- “Ten Things Autistic Kids Pick Up Faster, Better, and with Less Trauma If They Aren’t Bullied into Learning Them” (Autistic Academic, October 15, 2015)
- “Ten Perks Kids with Autism Get from Bullying: The Honest Edition.” (Musings of a Wandering Autistic, October 14, 2015)
*Borrowed from R.E.M.’s “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.”
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re:4 I’m in the debate team photo as a freshman and in my box in each of the 4 years. That’s it. I am not listed on the alumni page online.
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The “Autism Daily News” people have LIGHTLY re-edited the article (changing “perks” to “strategies” and a very few other words) _and_ they have closed comments there, removing several people’s comments (mine among them) It’s still at the same URL …,and, of course, the ten things they are calling “strategies” now are even less “strategies” than they were “perks”!
So go there, read the article, then (if you agree that it’s even worse than it was!) DIRECTLY reach the author and editor (the author is VERY easily Googled, and the editor/owner gets messages via Facebook Messages at Autism Daily News’ Facebook page.
Below is my response, in full, to the (unacceptably) rewritten article, which I have sent to the persons concerned. Feel free to use it to,spur your own ideas, if it helps.
The article’s vaunted change of title is a “Band-Aid” superficiality: plastering over the tiniest fraction of the surface of the wound you caused (which your article continues to inflict).
Changing the title, adding a word here, shading and a phrase there — without _fundamental_ change in the underlying presuppositions and attitudes — reveals itself clearly in thexslightly revised piece’s ineffectiv attempt to purvey ten alleged “bullying perks” as now, oh-so-nicely, “strategies.”
Let’s look, point by point, at what you are now dubbing “strategies.”
SISTO: “1. Promoting Autism-Friendly Programs: Bullying in schools can sometimes be the result of prejudice against the unexpected ways that children with autism speak and socialize.”
———– RESPONSE: To say that bullying is “sometimes” the result of prejudice is false. There is NO act of bullying that does not stem from someone’s prejudice. Prejudice instigates EVERY act of bullying — or (to call things by clear names) every act of torture, harassment, and assault.
(Torture, harassment, and assault are the words that the English language uses when these things are done to someone we care about. When they’re done to someone we don’t care as much about, such as someone else’s child, the same things get called “bullying” instead.)
Calling prejudice only “sometimes” a cause of bullying is not only false, but dangerously false — because, when you only _sometimes_ identify the roots of any evil, that evil will remain and spread. (Imagine where we’d be today, if we still thought that scurvy was only “sometimes” caused by lack of vitamin C!)
SISTO: “Not unlike other prejudices, this is an opportunity for parents and the school to promote social justice, tolerance, respect, and acceptance.”
———- RESPONSE: Promoting justice, respect, and so on, definitely matters. But justice, and all the rest of it, should have mattered _before_ the torture and assault. Treating these important and non-negotiable values as mere “strategies” to be hastily patched in after the fact … that is like watching me break my arms, then telling me that health and restored function are “strategies” which you will now use to promote a campaign to build a hospital. (And why does anyone call justice “_social_ justice”? — it is as if someone imagined that simply being just, simply being fair, couldn’t possibly be worthwhile unless it was “social” too. )
SISTO:
“Along with your help,”
——— RESPONSE: Who is the “your” here? Whom do you consider your audience? Us autistics? Our parents? If you meant to write the parents should be helping here, why not be clear about whom you’re talking to? Why not write “Along with the help of parents”?
The context, evident throughout the rest of this piece, does of course make plain an unstated presupposition that “you” = “parent.” I’ll return to this a bit further down, at the point where you begin to make inescapably plain that you wrote as if you assumed an autism-interested audience to be parents and _only_ parents. It is just as if you and your editor had forgotten, or had never learned, that a VERY large percentage of the people reading anything with “autism” in the title are — surprise! — us autistics (Many of us are NOT parents, and are more than a little sick of the presupposition that “a person reading about autism = a parent = probably a person without autism. “)
SISTO:
“schools should focus not only on integration within the mainstream for education but also guidance of how to better connect socially to their peers with autism – possibly through workshops or specially-structured activities.”
———- RESPONSE: That isn’t strategy: it’s a goal (which could, presumably, be reached _by_ strategies which you aren’t, here, spelling out). Calling it a “strategy” is like a speech pathologist telling a patient who stutters that “your treatment strategy should be to not stutter.”
SISTO:
”2. Team Work: Working together as a team in partnership with you as the parent,”
——– RESPONSE: Why, again, equate “you” (each reader) necessarily with “parent”? Why not write “in partnership with _the_ _parent(s)_,” instead of presuming that everyone in your audience can be described as “the parent”? Writing “in partnership with parents” would have conveyed your meaning WITHOUT the exclusionism of using a “you” that immediately specifies it doesn’t REALLY mean _everyone_ present.
SISTO:
“the school’s teaching staff, aides, principal, counselors, and psychologists will provide the safest environment for your child to learn and enjoy.”
——– RESPONSE: Again, do you or your editor Imagine that “Autism Daily News” is only for parents? Why assume that “your child” makes sense about every reader? Why not “provide the safest environment for _each_ _child_ to learn and enjoy”? (This would include each child — and each parent — without leaving so many of your other readers feeling, once again, as though “Autism Daily News” had a sign on the door reading: “Parents Welcome — People With Autism: We don’t mean YOU.”)
SISTO:
”3. Autism Awareness Every Month: Not just during October’s National Bullying Prevention Month but always, more awareness of the bullying of kids with autism means more awareness of autism overall.”
——— RESPONSE: Again, this is not a strategy — in fact, it isn’t even a sentence. It’s relabeling a hoped-for goal as a strategy (“Treatment for stuttering: Don’t stutter”) because you had to give up calling it a “perk”
SISTO:
“4. Kids Learn Skills: Teaching your child how to deal with bullies increases her verbal communication with words, nonverbal communication like body language and facial expressions, survival skills, civil liberties, and independence.”
———- RESPONSE: Again, this is not a strategy. It’s a vaguely worded curriculum item (“Teaching your child how to deal with bullies” tells _what_ to accomplish, not _how_), followed by some hoped-for outcomes (one of which is poorly expressed: “verbal communication with words” is pleonastic, like “female adults who are women.”)
SISTO:
“5. Builds Strength: As your child learns defensive skills from you, his friends, and his teachers, he is growing stronger connections with everyone.”
———-RESPONSE: “Builds strength” (with what follows) is, again, not a strategy, but an expected outcome. Further, “stronger connections with everyone” are not always even _desirable_ outcomes. “Everyone” after all,,includes the child’s tormentors. It is immoral to expect — let alone to teach — the victim of tortures to grow stronger connections” with his or her torturers. (Further, it is psychologically destructive. Google “Stockholm Syndrome.”)
SISTO:
“6. More Friendships:”
———- RESPONSE: “More friendships” is not a strategy.
SISTO:
“Discussing the communication and social deficits experienced by kids with autism puts greater social responsibility on their peers who don’t have autism. When it comes to a child with autism, being a proactive observer can make all the difference to prevent bullying and protect them. As a result, your child will spend more time with good friends, make new friends, and possibly will want to get involved in different activities with them.”
———- RESPONSE: Again, this is not a strategy; it’s what you _wish_ would happen. “Discussing the communication and social deficits” does not mean that the people with whom they are discussed will _do_ anything about the “greater social responsibility” they now supposedly have. It does NOT mean, for instance, that the target of torture will now get better friends. Too often, all that “discussing the communication and social deficits” actually _does_ is to give a a child’s actual or potential tormentors a better idea of just how and where to take advantage of these and damage the child further.
SISTO:
“7. Overall Well-Being:”
———- RESPONSE: That isn’t a strategy, It’s a wished-for outcome.
SISTO:
“Monitoring potential bullying activity”
——— RESPONSE: This, at last, is a strategy … or might be. ONE strategy, 3/4 of the way down a list of ten, is a very poor intellectual or practical return for an article that claimed to deliver strategies.
SISTO:
“requires the te7. aching staff”
——– RESPONSE: Hmmmm, “requires the …” _what_, exactly?! That glaring typo (“teaching” misspelled to include a numeral, a space, and a punctuation mark) appeared also in the earlier (“perks”) version of your article. Anyone can make an error: but preserving the error, in two successive versions of the document, provides clear evidence that it was carelessly edited both times — if it had been carefully edited for its revision (as the circumstances demanded), an error of this size would have almost certainly have been caught before the article appeared in its (barely altered) new form. (Especially disturbing is the fact that the particular error made — involving, as it does, a space added within the word — causes the five letters of the intended word “teaching” to appear as the separate word “aching.” Of all the words which might be created — and retained — through careless editing, the word “aching” is particularly unfortunate in an article on the subject at hand.)
SISTO:
“to supervise more and create new interventions to ensure the well-being of your child.”
———— RESPONSE: This (which of course should be done _before_, rather than after, any child ends up tortured) is not a strategy. (If a professional exam in any professional field were to ask for a list of strategies for attaining some curricular or practical goal, how many of the strategies in this article’s list of ten would be evaluated as being concretely and specifically measurable enough to rate as strategies and to monitor in action?)
SISTO:
”8. Healthy Relationships: Ways to deal with bullying also help your child deal with sibling rivalry, ‘stranger danger’, or any other personal threat.”
———– RESPONSE: “Healthy relationships” is not a strategy. To state that “ways to deal with bullying” exist and have advantages — without detailing what those “ways” are — is, again, to call a non-strategy a strategy.
SISTO:
“9. Increased Life Skills: With your child’s increased communication, survival skills, and independence, she will become more aware of the people around her. This makes your child a conscientious citizen and a good Samaritan towards other people who may be in need overall, not just due to bullying.”
———— RESPONSE: Again, you are using the label “strategy” to (mis)name a goal — or, more precisely, a wish. It is as if a nutrition article on”ten strategies for losing weight” told readers to follow a “strategy” which was: “With losing weight, you will be healthy and you will start helping others to lose weight.”
SISTO:
”10. Self-Esteem: Ironically, and in spite of the bully’s goal to do the opposite, your child will grow self-confidence and self-preservation esteem.”
———– RESPONSE: Again: this is not a strategy. Further: “self-preservation esteem” is not good English, but is (once more) most likely to be sloppy editing.
CONCLUSION:
The “Band-Aid” quick-fix quality of the revision suggests a rush job — as if the writer, and/or the editor, thought that changing the title and a couple of surface details would prevent people from noticing that the piece remains substantially unchanged. In particular, as shown above the decision to reclassify alleged “perks” as “strategies” makes the content and structure of the work even more difficult to take seriously and to apply as real-world advice. The problems throughout the revision (notably including the weaknesses of structure and content which were created by misusing or misunderstanding the concept of “strategy”) do not speak well for the writing, editing, or other expertise involved. (I cannot speculate on whether the problems were allowed to pass into print because of sheer haste — people scrambling to fix a misguided article, and hoping that a surface retouching would pass muster — or because someone assumed that not everyone in the audience would bother to read very carefully after having discerned problems with a previous version of the work — or because of some other reason. Whatever the cause, though, the [slightly] revised article remains conspicuously inappropriate, in more than one regard, for “Autism Daily News” or any publication which strives to be helpful, fair, and respectful of its readers and of their experiences and concerns.)
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They have removed the original article!! They changed it first, but then they removed it.
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Excellent post you have there. A lot of your comments hit home.
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