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Looking back on my life now, I realize that my family and I must have known I had some mental disorder even before I was diagnosed. There were patterns and signs from the very beginning. I see them at my adult age; I recognize them all now. However, when I was growing up, autism, retardation, abuse, pedophiles, sexual molestation, and mental disorders were just some of the things most people had no knowledge of because these situations were never discussed in families and especially not mentioned in public gatherings or in the media. Oh, my God, I grew up in an era where no one even mentioned adoption or divorce unless it was in whispers far away from the parties involved, if it was even talked about at all.

So even if my parents were aware of some of my unusual or neurotic behaviors, it certainly was not discussed and was always overlooked with the hope that I would grow out of it all soon. I didn’t.

I was diagnosed with autism at the age of 6, but no one, including myself was ever informed of my condition. My mother thought it would be best to keep it quiet even from my own siblings and other family members. Believe me, this “secret” caused huge wedges in my relationships with my family who was embarrassed by my inability to relate to society and life situations.

The word and condition of autism is more acceptable now, but that’s not how I was referred to.  The word that was used for me at the time of my diagnosis was considered shameful. My first grade teacher was the first to call me retarded. Of course, I heard her boldly pronounce my condition many times to whomever was willing to listen, including me. 

But I always wondered what the doctors told my mother. I always wondered what words they had used. My mother never told me, and even though I had been in the room at the time, I hadn’t been listening! It is not hard to imagine that while my mom spoke to the doctors, I was not really there in the room with the three of them. Of course, I wasn’t paying attention. I was off in my own world and amusing myself as I had always done for the first six years of my life.

I just remember originally being told that I was going to a speech therapy class. I was taken to a facility or hospital. I don’t know what it was. I was placed in a very colorful room that had bright yellow walls and multiple games and toys on short, hanging shelves. I was in the room alone without my mother but it didn’t worry me. I was comfortable being alone.

When the young speech therapist entered the room, I thought she was pretty and very nice and I liked her immediately. For the full hour we worked together, I only remember one activity, and I’m not sure why this one stayed with me. I remembered that the therapist and I sat at a table across from each other. The therapist took my hands and pretended that we were about to send our clasped hands down a slide together. She pulled my hands up as she said, “We are climbing up the ladder now. We are climbing…” Then as she swooshed my hands back down to the table, she stressed that we were going down the slide. “We are going all the way down the slide now!” she enthusiastically  emphasized.

Now, we practiced the same motion while saying words that started with the letter S. We made the hissing ssss sound as the therapist pulled our hands up the imagined ladder and then completed the word as we swooshed down the invisible slide. I think I just remember this one activity caused I liked holding hands, and I liked the motion, and I liked the SSSSSS sound.

I think with this activity the therapist was trying to encourage me to think about the words I was going to say and to slow down my word patterns. I’m not really sure. I didn’t ask. I was just a six year old kid who was being educated in a Catholic school. I just knew how to follow and obey and believe what anyone told me. This would proof to be a major problem later. But at the time, I never questioned why I had to go to speech therapy. I never asked why I was doing these activities or what they were meant to achieve. I just knew I needed to do what I was told.

After that first session, I remember sitting in this rather bleak gray room that seemed overcrowded with boxes and files that lined all four walls. As my mother talked to the doctors, I sat in a rolling chair and continued to spin myself around and around. No one told me to stop as I made myself dizzy, and my feet kicked or brushed against the nearest wall. I was fascinated by the two way mirror. I would spin myself around, stop and stare out the mirror into the session room and then spin myself around some more. I was completely oblivious to the conversation about my mental condition that was going on around me. I was just happily entangled in a world of my own. Was this part of my autism or was I just being a kid!? I don’t know. I remained quiet and did not talk. Due to my experiences, I only talked in gibberish when I was forced to talk at all.

So I never told anyone what I was experiencing or what I was thought. This was where it gets confusing. I had been sexually abused from the age of 3 years old to 7 years old by a family member. When I went to see a psychologist many years later, she told me that when a child suffers through trauma, especially sexual abuse, speech is the first thing they lose.

Information from websites such as the International Society for Traumatic Stress, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and Speech Pathology conclude that childhood sexual trauma can significantly impact communication abilities, leading to speech and language disorders, delays, and functional speech impediments as a coping mechanism. Trauma leads to fragmented, less coherent speech, and increased repetition, which are associated with post-traumatic stress and dissociation.

So while the doctors talked to my mother, I never spoke up and said, “But I was abused. Maybe that’s why I can’t talk.” What stopped me from participating in the conversation? Was it autism again that kept me silent or was it the demands of me to keep the sexual abuse secret? Was the sexual abuse a cause of my autism or the result of it? Was I considered an easy target because of my condition? To this day, I still wonder if my autism caused the abuse or the abuse caused my autism.

Abuse, speech impediment, autism. Everything just always seems, especially in my memory, all tangled up together. There is no separation. They all worked together, but no one ever knew this but me.

https://www.speechpathology.com/articles/effects-stress-and-trauma-on-20323

https://columbian.gwu.edu/untangling-trauma-speech-connection