Autism Therapy

In 1964, psychologist Bernard Rimland, the father of an autistic son, challenged the blame. He argued autism came from biology, not cold parenting, and helped families organize for support.

In 1967, Bruno Bettelheim, who ran a school for troubled children in Chicago, compared autistic children to prisoners in concentration camps and blamed their mothers.

In 1986, Temple Grandin published Emergence: Labeled Autistic, one of the first books about autism written by an autistic person.

In 1987, psychologist Ivar Lovaas reported that intensive behavior therapy made some autistic children seem indistinguishable from their peers. His methods spread, and so did the goal of making autistic children look less autistic.

Autistic advocate Jim Sinclair and others founded Autism Network International in 1992, run by and for autistic people. The next year, Sinclair wrote the essay Don’t Mourn for Us, asking parents to accept their children instead of grieving the child they expected.

In 1996, Leilani Muir became the first person to successfully sue Alberta over its Sexual Sterilization Act. At 14, she was sterilized at the Provincial Training School in Red Deer and told it was an appendix operation. She had been labeled mentally defective after a single test. From 1928 to 1972, the Act led to about 2,800 people being sterilized so they couldn’t have children, many of them labeled mentally defective, including people with developmental disabilities.

In 1998, Australian sociology student Judy Singer wrote about neurodiversity, an idea growing in online autistic communities that saw brain differences as natural human variation, like biodiversity in nature.

In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada heard a case about funding intensive behavior therapy for autistic children. Autistic researcher Michelle Dawson intervened, challenging the science and arguing that treating autistic people as broken caused harm. She went on to research autistic strengths in Montreal.

In 2012, autistic researcher Damian Milton challenged the long-held idea that autistic people lack empathy. He described the double empathy problem: when autistic and non-autistic people misunderstand each other, the gap goes both ways. He argued that understanding has to come from both sides, not only from autistic people trying to fit in. Later studies found that autistic people often communicate just as well with each other as non-autistic people do.

But acceptance hasn’t always reached everyday life.

Behavior therapy kept growing, and some programs still focus on making autistic children seem less autistic. Many autistic people are taught to hide their differences, which can lead to exhaustion and burnout. And many women, girls and adults go undiagnosed for years.

Schools, workplaces and communities are still often built for one kind of brain and body. In 2018, a survey of Alberta families found 80 percent said school seclusion rooms had left their children traumatized or distressed. The province banned the rooms, then reversed the ban the next year, before it took effect.

Autistic people are more likely to be bullied, traumatized and misunderstood. Their trauma is often missed, because shutdowns, meltdowns or withdrawal are read as autism instead of distress.

Trauma-sensitive autism therapy works inside those gaps. It respects autistic ways of being. It looks at the environment, not only the person. It makes room for the hurt of years of masking and being misunderstood. And it sees shutdowns and meltdowns as signs of distress, not behavior to correct.

Trauma-sensitive therapy starts by accepting you as you are.