Nigel

Healed of Autism (Aspergers)

My Child Has Aspergers

My wife and I seem have heard this said to us many, many times now (can’t think why!). And the sentence goes on to say, “we are praying and hoping that God will heal him [it’s usually a him] but He hasn’t yet”.

The first thing I would say is: have you considered the possibility that he might have got it from you, or more specifically your husband? [It’s mostly mothers who say this to us.]

As you probably already know, Autism is a spectrum so the symptoms are quite wide-ranging in their severity. The symptoms are often described as excessive maleness, which tends to imply that most men have some of these characteristics in a mild form. Also, Aspergers generally went undiagnosed until about the mid 1990’s, so most adults who have this don’t know it unless they’ve had it pointed out to them, and even then they will often disagree. What’s more, as people grow up they learn how to cope with life and avoid things they can’t handle, and so it gets masked over and everything appears perfectly normal.

One other thing that’s worth pointing out is that the severity of the inner deafness (as I call it) does not necessarily map directly to the severity of the undesirable personality traits. The medical profession will generally view it as mild or severe depending on the mildness or severity of the symptoms, and that’s because there is typically nothing else to go on. I say this because your husband (or wife) may not be all hung up, but may be as thick as a brick when it comes to sensing other people’s feelings and realising that they need consider how other people feel about how they behave.

That’s one of the things that makes it so much harder to spot in girls and women. Girls tend to be much more relationship orientated, so they are always looking for how people feel and how people feel about them. Even so, that doesn’t mean they are getting it right, and of course being ostracised from the main group and having just one or no friends is not something most girls or women will want to own up to, yet autism is so often at the heart of this kind of thing. Nevertheless, a girl with Aspergers may not be unpopular in this way, but she may completely miss that everyone is smirking over her eccentricities.

The point I’m trying to make here is that autism is so often a family trait which is unevenly spread about. In common with other family traits, it often seems that all the worst aspects end up being concentrated in one particular child. Because of this, it is often missed in a milder form in the other children.

If this has in any way been an eye-opener to you then I would ask you, please don’t allow a root of bitterness to grow up in you against your spouse, forebears or other family members, or even God. It’s easy to say, “If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t have all this grief.” We all have our ways of being a thorn in the flesh to our nearest and dearest, myself included. Some people will say that we all have our crosses to bear, but I regard this as a misappropriation of a Bible verse. After all, crosses in Roman times were an instrument of slow and painful death, and Jesus didn’t carry his anyway. Jesus died on the cross to take all our pains and afflictions, so it’s best to cast them onto him rather than carry them all ourselves. The way to do this is to say to say to him, “I recognise that I feel such-and-such towards so-and-so, and I choose not to think this way any more. Please forgive me and cleanse me from this attitude.” (See 1 John 1:9)

If you have recognised that autism has come down the the family line of one or both of you (and it is often both), then this needs to be confessed and dealt with. If you are in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, then there is a strong possibility that it is linked to Freemasonry (that is, the curses and vows made by your ancestors as part of the rituals). You may not be aware of this in your family line – after all their tendency is to be very secretive. If this is the case, then I would suggest you pray and ask God to make it clear whether there has been any involvement. I myself only found out by accident .

There are books you can get on renouncing the curses of Freemasonry, and we use them in our church when we take people through it. However, if your church doesn’t have this ministry, then I would recommend you go on one of these weekends that are run. The organisations that I know of in the UK than run these are (in no particular order):

A set of prayers similar to what we pray can be found online at Selwyn Stevens’ Jubilee Resources in New Zealand.

The important thing to note here is that, once you have dealt with the issues in yourselves, you then have the spiritual authority to deal with them in your children. In fact, with our children, Ellel came to our church, and we took them along. This was about a year-and-a-half after I was healed, and those of our children that had it were healed then. They were 12 and 10 at the time, and they then also faced many of the issues coming out of it that I faced. I would say, that the younger they are, the easier it is for them to re-adapt, but as they get older (e.g. puberty and beyond), then the decisions are very much in their court and they increasingly need to take the responsibility for renouncing and receiving from God themselves.

There is one final point I would like to make here. In the UK, the National Health Service provides diagnosis and support for families with Aspergers, and the support and coping strategies they provide are by-and-large very good (I believe it is the same in Australia too). It is well worth pressing through with getting a diagnosis and participating in their support programmes. It is particularly important to be well armed when dealing with schools, as teachers often don’t understand what it is all about. (This may have changed since our children were at school, but not everywhere, I would expect.)

It is a lot of work training a child with Aspergers to relate well in normal society, but it is worth the effort, and a severe case as a small child may turn out to be able to fit into society quite all right, due to the hard work of the parents. I have a relative (who I won’t name) for whom just this is happening. And this is without them being healed. If they are healed, then there is still the re-adjustment that needs to take place. After all this happened with us, we still had argument with our son that lasted 18 months over whether he should take the bins out. Now though (and he’s in his 20’s at the time of writing) there is no sign of this. In fact he is very much a people person.

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