The Root Cause

I don’t think things happen without a cause, and I don’t believe that becoming depressed is like getting the ‘flu – something that happens by accident and is a result of the environment you are in. There are the root causes, the things that trigger it, and the person’s ongoing method of coping with it, all of which are different things. In the last section I talked about what triggered my depression, and I touched on my coping or lack of it. But I am talking here at what was the at the root of it all.

The primary root in my case is shame, and this is a very common root, especially in those who become suicidal. By shame I mean the following: the deeply held belief that you are unacceptably defective in a way that is permanent and cannot be removed. For me this is a direct result of being teased and bullied at school. Nowadays, this is quite widely understood, but in the 1970’s it was not, and it was tough luck for anyone considered to be “fair game” – people were expected to be able to stand up for themselves.

The reason why being treated this way led to shame was that I believed what was being said to me by my peer group around me. The reason I believed them was that I had no solid under-girding belief in myself and who I was as a person, with which I could dismiss what was being said to me as incorrect and irrelevant. This kind of self-belief is instilled by father-figures in your life, particularly your own father (but also people like school teachers and other people you respect), and in my case it was very lacking. The reason why it was so lacking in my case was partly due to the fact that my own father did not have a lot of his own self-belief that he could pass on (and his father before him, and so on), but primarily it was because the kind of approval that builds self confidence is often transmitted in a subtle and non-verbal way and, being autistic, it failed to register properly. However, all the teasing and bullying was very verbal and unsubtle, and so it won the day.

It is tempting to believe that the wounds of childhood just fade away with time, that so-called great healer. But nothing could be further from the truth. What happens is that they get smothered over with coping strategies and techniques that get developed to avoid a repeat of the same experiences. This process results in hard-heartedness. Seeking God for inner healing unearths what has been buried for a long time, bringing to the surface things that you hope, deep down, would never have to be faced again. As psychological and emotional wounds become healed then, like the tide going out, the sunken debris from the past comes to the surface. This is really what happened in my case when I was healed of autism.

Anyone who has deep wounds from the past, who wants to be healed, has to be prepared to run the gauntlet of facing what is buried. I have to admit that God did warn me before all this started, that what I was facing would not be easy, but I was not prepared for the scale of the upheaval.

If there is any lesson to be learned from this, it is that when people are healed of autism, it is only the start of something much more extensive, and this will always be the case. It is not reasonable to expect such a person to be able to cope on their own, just as it is not reasonable to expect a child to be able to grow up on its own. It is likely that the pressure of being newly connected into the world around will lead at some point to the person becoming overwhelmed and possibly depressed, and when someone becomes depressed they withdraw. However, autistic people often have the habit of being withdrawn anyway, so it can easily slip under the radar, as habit patterns typically won’t change straight away.