Childhood Struggling to Untangle Autism from Intentional Sexual Abuse

[Sadwetcat]

I do deeply appreciate all the responses I've gotten, and every reply has given me some form of helpful input.

I remember being incredibly shocked by the lack of "empathy" of my abuser... that they seemed literally incapable of understanding that this was hurting me, was massively detrimental to me, was harming me... It was like it didn't register with them at all. It made them seem "inhuman" to me... Like they were some weird kind of monster, incapable of "normal human" responses.

I do relate a lot to a large portion of what you said, my abuser poised his abuse as a helpful thing, that he was teaching me about how to 'love' or 'please', in the end I suppose I will never be sure what he thought or what his intentions were, but I think, at least in my situation it was... very obvious that his actions would cause harm, i think most people partaking in any acts of sexual predation can understand that if nothing else it is illegal/deemed as immoral by most, there is a reason why they hide it after all.
A large part of his abuse was demoralizing and demeaning to me, treating me like an animal or an object of sorts.

I guess from my experience, and my knowledge on autism, I know that his autism didn't inherently cause him to abuse me, and I do think it is akin to any other trait, like what Sideways said

Abusers come in all forms.
Yours came in the form of a person who happened to have autism.
Your suffering is just as valid as the suffering of victims of any other abuser.

It is ultimately inconsequential to what I went through, abuse is abuse and what traits or disorders someone has doesn't predispose them for being abusive, it never does and it never will, at least with the way I see it. The same way as I see narcissism being irrelevant to abuse, as not all narcissists will be abusive, and not every case of narcissistic abuse that you hear is actually from a narcissist. Abuse is still abuse, and that is the issue at hand.

I don't have much stock in the Theory of mind/empathy conversation, and I don't know if it's bad of me to say, but I appreciate hearing from both sides, at the end of the day autism is a spectrum, some autistic people struggle more with empathy, and some struggle less. It feels more like a tangential conversation, but I understand why it was brought up. Like I said though, I think I also have autism, and it wasn't mentioned prior but I do have a lot of experience with other autistic people, I know it's not because of autism, but his abuse and his autism just feel so intertwined to me.

The comments of not understanding my difficulty are somewhat unwarranted I feel(unwarranted feels like a harsh word but I'm not sure what else to use), I think it's in large part because of how my family made excuses for him, potentially I'm just a little too sensitive to it though. I understand nothing was meant by them, I just guess it's a bit of a sore subject for me, spend the majority of your abuse being told that you need to be kinder to the man with autism and it gets fairly hard to decipher what was autism and what was abuse or grooming or whatever it be.


Also I'm a guy :) I use he/him or it/it's! no harsh feelings tho, again, I really do appreciate the time everyone took to reply . It's definitely a hard subject for me but it's all been good food for thought!

 

[Ecdysis]

It sounds like you're on a pretty good track to figuring it out. I think you're able to differentiate stuff well and I'm sure over time you'll be able to find the explanations and understandings that are most helpful to you.

It's a messy process, with lots of back and forth, in my experience. Sometimes anger is dominant, sometimes sadness, sometimes confusion, sometimes helplessness, etc. So many things to work through until we get to a place that feels like a kind of resolution. I don't know if you've heard of trauma therapy being compared to an onion? It can feel like peeling off one layer of the onion and dealing with that only to find the next layer beneath that, and then another beneath that.

It seems that your parents have added a few unhelpful layers to the trauma, so I assume that'll take quite some untangling too. There's a lot of red flags in terms of their contribution to what happened, imo.

Ultimately only you can decide what is helpful for you in terms of the question you stated here. The autism thing may be 100% irrelevant and just be a sort of red herring that's part of your parents behaviour in terms of enabling and justifying boundary violations. There's certainly many people here on the forum whose parents enabled perpetrators in all kinds of messed up ways.

On the other hand, if this perp's behaviour was so weird/ inappropriate/ noticeable/ outside of social norms that people were going around warning/ explaining his behaviour in terms of a mental condition, then presumably it wasn't a mild case of autism (or whatever it was). Back in the day, people didn't often get autism diagnoses for mild traits, so there may have been something objectively inappropriate/ unnormal in his behaviour generally that does provide helpful clues in terms of trying to "understand" it in some way. (I don't think we can really ever "understand" why perps are perps, but for many of us, our brains do seem to circle around those sort of questions of "why" and trying to "make sense" of what happened.)

 

[Sadwetcat]

I guess it's easy for me to say things but hard for me to believe them. I struggle a lot with I guess excusing his behavior as autism, a lot of the abuse was under the guise of teaching me and it was definitely... implied? as a positive thing for my growth as a person. It's not really something I've talked about, because it just makes me feel bad honestly, but I debated mentioning it at a few different points as it's a contributing factor to my struggle. It's a weird subject for me. I probably just need more time in and out of therapy to let everything sink in or something. I like the onion comparison as well.

As far as i know he's had an autism diagnosis for longer then I've been alive, I have no clue if there was anything defining about his traits that made him get diagnosed, but it is an interesting thought. At the end of the day it's also possible he was simply misdiagnosed or something or other. It is somewhat relieving to hear that I'm on a good track though, I really am trying but I guess it's just hard for me. I think ultimately it's best for me to try and let go of any notions of disorders being a defining factor of what I went through, he was an awful person and I think its probably best for my health to leave it at that? I just need to sisyphus my way through it I suppose. There are some things that I think were at least related to his autism, but it doesn't make a difference when I try to look at it objectively. I'll get there eventually

 

[Movingforward10]

lot of the abuse was under the guise of teaching me and it was definitely... implied?

This is where absuers manipulate the situation to get more compliance and dominance. It's all a lie to get to abuse. Which is why I questioned whether he did have autism and whether that was a lie to get tj you, because that seemed to be the thing that your parents hooked everything on. Maybe he was autistic and used it as an excuse to behave the way he wanted and groomed your parents into getting access to you.
Who knows.
But all these twists of reality (abuse was good for you, he was teaching you etc etc) that he did: are what abusers do.
It's so messy and hard to unpack those messages and get in tune with your truth.

But like @Ecdysis said, it really sounds like you are far along the journey of working this out.

 

[Ecdysis]

abuse was under the guise of teaching me and it was definitely... implied? as a positive thing for my growth as a person.

This is, unfortunately, a thing that many pedophiles do... This aspect is not an autism thing, it's a pedophile thing. It's definitely worth mentioning to your therapist because it's a very common thing and definitely something you can get help for dealing with. If you think it might be helpful, you can search for it here on the forum or start a thread about it - I think you'll find a lot of people got told this as part of their CSA.

 

[scout86]

Here's a possibly related question. (I'm kind of fascinated because I'd totally never thought about this before.) Comorbidities exist. So, does it happen that a person with autism might also be a psychopath?

I don't know lot of people that I know live somewhere on the autism spectrum. The ones I DO know might think differently than I do, and they might express "empathy" differently than others, but they don't come across as totally lacking in empathy and/or cruel. On the other hand, I've met enough people who DO seem to really lack empathy and who really ARE cruel, and none of them have been on the autism spectrum , to the best of my knowledge. So, this has me wondering, do autistic psychopaths exist? Autistic narcissists? What does that look like?

 

[Weemie]

So, this has me wondering, do autistic psychopaths exist? Autistic narcissists? What does that look like?

You see stuff like this most commonly in forensic settings. The guy I'm thinking of is clearly both autistic and killed someone due to curiosity. He got an insanity plea because he went right to the cops and admitted it in complete detail, has no remorse but also didn't gloat about it. A guy asked him if he should be executed and he said yes.

Psychopathy isn't diagnostic per se but originally Asperger's syndrome was actually called autistic psychopathy. Initially people didn't separate psychopathy, schizophrenia or autism but now they are recognized as separate. But we see blunt affect with all three (with autism being the outlier as plenty of autistic people have a normal demeanor). I like this visualization a lot. there are some overlaps and then some hugely glaring distinctions in brain patterns.

Like @Sadwetcat concluded though there's no necessity to determine if it was impacted by his autism or not. Presumably he was actually autistic, it would have affected all of his existence. I personally have known more than one autistic person who use it as a get out of responsibility free card, not because being autistic made them behave that way but because they are both crappy and autistic.

That's why I say it isn't relevant to the offending. It's obviously important to contextualize for your specific experiences (especially as your family have avoided holding him accountable for this reason), but there is no hard evidence that autism plays a role in sexual offending for gratification (more profoundly affected people may have a higher incidence of acting inappropriately as they do not know better, this is different to the purposeful behavior this guy demonstrated.)

We have this kind of infantilizing landscape particularly around autism in our society where it feeds into this like noble disabled person shit. Oh they're so brave and etc etc etc. We don't want to admit they can be shit, too. They're just people. People aren't good or bad because they're disabled. They're just disabled.

 

[Weemie]

(Less relevant altogether: conversely, most of our data on schizoid, which is solely an affective impairment, is also obtained in forensic settings. A good example of someone I think is genuinely SZPD is Ed Kemper.

There is no determined risk factor for being a serial killer due to the disorder, but you see it represented more commonly in populations that are naturally socially deviant/aversive. Mostly because there is very little voluntary psychiatric data to begin with; our results are skewed because we only draw from the forensic pool.

Kemper had a similar demeanor as the man above. Very emotionless, very frank, not justifying himself. The factor 1 traits are present but with a lack of egoic fragility/grandiosity typically seen in those with NPD for example. Different disorders, but there is overlap between them all because they are genetically related, and psychopathy also has affective impairment.)

 

[Ecdysis]

I don't know lot of people that I know live somewhere on the autism spectrum. The ones I DO know might think differently than I do, and they might express "empathy" differently than others, but they don't come across as totally lacking in empathy and/or cruel.

I've worked with preschool autistic children whose autism is too extreme for them to be able to attend normal day care/ Kindergarten. They were in day care especially for severely disabled kids. I didn't observe them having *any* notion of "empathy". They'd hit other kids, just to see what happens and laugh if other kids fell over and cried or screamed. It was just "entertainment" for them. In "normal" children you can observe this when they're really young too - when they're 2 - 3 they'll also hit other children, without any concept at all that the other child is a "human being" that "feels pain when you hit them".

So I think this inability to feel empathy is programmed deeply into all of us initially, but in a (relatively) normal brain development, kids begin to understand that the other person is a human being exactly like them and that if you hit them, it hurts them, just like if they hit you, it hurts you. Depending on the degree of autism, I think someone can either fully or partly develop the ability to "empathise", or not at all or only very barely.

 

[Charbella]

I've worked with preschool autistic children whose autism is too extreme for them to be able to attend normal day care/ Kindergarten. They were in day care especially for severely disabled kids. I didn't observe them having *any* notion of "empathy". They'd hit other kids, just to see what happens and laugh if other kids fell over and cried or screamed. It was just "entertainment" for them. In "normal" children you can observe this when they're really young too - when they're 2 - 3 they'll also hit other children, without any concept at all that the other child is a "human being" that "feels pain when you hit them".

So I think this inability to feel empathy is programmed deeply into all of us initially, but in a (relatively) normal brain development, kids begin to understand that the other person is a human being exactly like them and that if you hit them, it hurts them, just like if they hit you, it hurts you. Depending on the degree of autism, I think someone can either fully or partly develop the ability to "empathise", or not at all or only very barely.

I’m wondering if this line of information is helpful or hurtful to the OP. For instance any other person who was placing blame of CSA at their own feet we would ardently support that not being a thing, yet by saying this person may have lacked empathy, the blame seems to shift away from them, which I’d say is not okay, but just my opinion.

Also even though most 5 years olds are aware of hurting others I wouldn’t say that’s general. Falling within normal lots of kids will find it funny when someone gets hurt depending on context, hell even adults which is why shows where people run through a million obstacles to reach a target but most don’t make it are popular.

If @Sadwetcat observed in his relative a lack of empathy in every facet of their life then it might be a symptom of their autism (which still wouldn’t excuse his behavior), but one thing I’ve noticed is that the examples he’s given of when the family thought he should be kind could’ve been the same concession you’d give lots of family members who were just a little off (older family member, younger kid, someone who has Down syndrome) not specific to autism. The examples given to when they were in private are not any I’ve heard of with an autistic person (especially as those who are more severe lack empathy, but also tend to not want to touch someone or be touched) but certainly those who are pedophiles. This in fact should help him separate the autistic traits from the non, which it seems to me is what he is asking for.

@Sadwetcat i think those of us who’ve been through CSA will always find a way to absolve the abuser of their responsibility. I’m sorry you have a unique way, but he did not do it due to his autism he did it because he could and he wanted to. I’d guess there are other people he’s done it to either before you or after because pedophiles are like that. You know plenty of people including yourself who are autistic, it does not make them perverse. I’m sorry that happened to you.

 

[Weemie]

So I think this inability to feel empathy is programmed deeply into all of us initially, but in a (relatively) normal brain development

Spoiler: empathy blah blah

Very true. Most of the data I've found on this subject tends to agree that neurotypical kids start to develop proper identity conceptions of themselves and others around age 8. It's less about affect in children though (as even newborns demonstrate social engagement, attachment, feelings, bonds) and more about higher processes of cognition that don't begin to coalesce until early adolescence.

The man who established the institute where I received treatment as a teenager wrote a book detailing his experiences with child soldiers in Rwanda and very frequently the adults exhibited more fear and distress around the children than the adult fighters because they knew instinctively that the children had no proper conception of human life (on top of appetitive aggression, amphetamine abuse, inverted systems of reward where brutality is praised and "weakness" deeply denigrated) and often the kids wound up doing the most harm.

Not because they were more evil than the adults (of course) but that the adults around them capitalized on their lack of foundation to overlay an inverted moral system that the children accepted as normal with almost no question. When an adult goes to something like BCT, it's quite different as adults come into that environment with a fully formed relational and object hierarchy that must be re-wired. With kids you don't need to break them down, you already start from the ground up.

Appetitive aggression is particularly relevant to PTSD as it is specifically about how children exposed to violence and who react violently are more likely to be aggressive and violent in the future. We form pathways in our brain that lead us to fire the same mechanism again - the more often we do it, the more often we will do it. That's why @Friday gets so irked when people talk about catharsis like throwing dinner plates and shit when you're feeling angry. That's just training your brain to react to anger with violence.

yet by saying this person may have lacked empathy, the blame seems to shift away from them, which I’d say is not okay, but just my opinion.

Also agreed. It's good information to understand the context within the gestalt. While personally I don't view it that acknowledging emotional or cognitive impairment is inherently removing their agency over their own behavior - I agree ultimately it really does not need to be that deep. People who cause intentional distress for personal satisfaction do it because they enjoy doing it. Why they enjoy it, the type of pain they enjoy causing, their diagnoses and formative experiences etc. is useful data for the professionals involved in their care, but as the victim @Sadwetcat you are under no obligation to take that stuff on.