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Monday, May 22, 2017.  Part of what contributes to my writing so few posts for this blog over past months has to do with the fact that the blog was never created to cover aspects of Autism Spectrum Disorder information.  I haven’t wanted to write “off topic” for my own blog!

But I, as my own independent person, have always been an inseparable part of everything posted.  That cannot change no matter what the subject of a post is about.  For long term readers, and I know there are some who have been faithfully reading since the blog’s inception, I doubt there would be anything unsettling to them in anything I write.

My conundrum is MINE!

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Time is always marching every aspect of life as a whole forward.  That we all live at a time in the history of the evolution of our species when new information – even as it is accentuating massive difficult problems our species must face and learn to address – is an amazing fact all by itself.  We are in the midst of Niagara Falls type power of change itself.

Yes, these words spoken by Mahatma Gandhi – “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” – will always be true, the PROBLEM I see in this world is that while so many people are willing to help create a better world for all life, we do not have the answer to this one simple, power, one word question:  “HOW?”

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I recommend to everyone an online search for all information connected to “CDC ACE study”; “N.E.A.R. science and ACEs; community building and related topics.  I try to take my own advice but find that I become super-saturated with information very quickly and have to take my time – however long it takes – before I can return to my quest for answers to the big HOW question.

This IS a quest.  Not for one of us.  Not for some of us.  It is a quest for ALL of us at this point in time.  Time?  It is time, I believe preordained by our Creator (the One Who has given humanity information through all of the world’s great religions – respecting the fact that humans have, over time, “messed with the messages” of these great Holy Ones – meaning each of us must follow our own independent investigation of truth outside of fantasies, false doctrines, idle imaginings, etc. that humans introduce where they do not belong.

We as a species WILL leave our trauma histories behind.  All the new information being discovered (truth coming from the One Creator), is part of building the tools themselves that we need to recognize we are truly one global family.  We are discovering our own operating system manual, how our body is designed to optimally operate!

All the ACEs information, the N.E.A.R. science application options, all the positive global community building patterns, are parts of this process.

HOW will all of us work together to put all this information together and into practice to bring justice, peace and plenty to this world?

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Now, returning to my thought about Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) – which I now know powerfully impacts by physical reality, I can comment upon my experience of watching/listening to the powerful video I posted a link to in a short post last evening.

Sustainable community development: from what’s wrong to what’s strong  by Cormac Russell

Well, this speech is connected to — www.nurturedevelopment.org

= absolutely incredible!

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Now, with background on my own info-learning absorption and processing – it is simply to Temple Grandin’s info-packed video (one of many on YouTube) I turn in my thinking to:  My Experience with Autism – where Grandin describes with ASD there’s nothing wrong with a person’s hearing, yet although words might be heard they can have no meaning whatsoever.

The full details about the insane abusive trauma of my first 18 years from birth are in the book (below) – suffice it to simply mention that although I have known for a long time I do not process ‘social information’ in ordinary ways, and that much of communication is difficult to me, I have long believed this was so BECAUSE of the abuse from birth.

Mother, who psychotically could NOT do ANY part of what an infant needs from birth – I mean NONE of it – no attunement, no joy, no reflection of me, no mirroring, no empathy – ZERO love, replaced by psychotic hatred………. (etc.)

NOW I am understanding that of course I have been “on the ASD spectrum” since I was conceived.  NOW I can begin to understand that when I listen to the video — Sustainable community development: from what’s wrong to what’s strong   — the reason I cannot HEAR it is because of the way my autism brain is arranged, designed, and operates.

This information – while actually and finally setting me free to be me – at the same time requires of me an exhausting amount of inner processing to make use of.

What Do We Know about Noise Sensitivity in Autism? | Interactive Autism Network

As I listened – in my evidently very special way – to the community development video – I worked on one of my in-progress weavings (so soothing, orderly, predictable, focusing, calming, etc.).  At the end of my intense (version of) listening I realized…..

I DID NOT REALLY HEAR HEAR HEAR A SINGLE THING SAID!

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Now, I don’t believe the rest of this information is really relevant to this blog in any way except that I am certainly a completely severe torture/trauma abuse survivor — and — “This is my blog.”

Yet if I consider this NOT my blog but a blog that is meant for this blog’s READERS?

= quandary

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I am at this point going to not only bridge the chasm between my trauma history and my ASD patterns, I am going to close the gap completely.  In this unification process I am allowing myself to “use my words” in any post I wish to about my ASD experience, probably most often in a bottom-of-the-post designated space that non-fascinated readers can simply choose to ignore (not read)!  So here goes!

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Before this blog was ever a glint in my mind’s eye I voraciously pursued a study whose backbone is listed at the REFERENCE tab at the top of this page.  I intuitively and instinctively knew how to pursue this vast study to my own advantage.  There are thousands of pages on this blog, tucked away where even I would have to work to find them, of my personal reflections combined with the trauma-related development facts I found.

I outran the edge of the proverbial research envelope at the same time this blog was created.  I knew what researchers were going to find.  I knew that in this time lapse process what I knew was true.

I have moved on.

I do not remember when, where or how I first encountered the CDC ACE Study findings.  I did feel vindicated, happy, and hopeful that this information was available.  Yet, as Dr. Nadine Harris Burke states, what is happening with this information is in the form of a “Movement” that NOBODY understands fully – if at all.

This is where, in my thinking, critical information such as what the above community development talk is about, matters at this juncture in time equally with the scientific patterns of trauma healing.  HOW humans will use the information they acquire is up to THEM!  In their “backyard revolutions” as the video expert describes.

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So everyone will co-create these healing changes in their own time in their own way.  Unlike how I could intuitively predict the research coming down the pike post-2009 would confirm what I knew was truth, it is now true that NOBODY can predict what happens next!

So, the ASD part for me?

I would not so much use the word NOISE as I would use the word SOUND in describing my version of the ASD experience.  I think all humans are basically “assembled” in similar, but not in identical ways.

When it comes to SOUND – obviously listening to these so-important topic videos requires SOUND.  BUT there are, within my experience, unfathomable layers and levels to the experience of language (as Grandin mentions).

Words in all cases that I can imagine exist because of the sound they make.  This means that for all of us, the way we are assembled in common means that the words in our THOUGHTS, OF our thoughts, have SOUND.

Words are made of sound, an inextricable factor in my world that combines with the fact they MAKE sound every time they are brought (again and again) into existence, into appearance, into use.

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Now at present now….  I am considering that ASD might be “the place” where human experience is actually able to experience paradox in living action.  This is a BOTH AND world.  As the article above about ASD and noise speaks about, the ASD experience with sound is not predictable – probably in any way.

So with my extremely sensitive and sensitized ‘hearing’ abilities, I cannot, for example, make any kind of annoying environmental sound vanish.  I cannot vanquish sounds discriminately.  I hear them all – and if they are not within what I NEED for peaceful calm experiencing – my “anxiety” becomes painful within my body as it overrides all hope of calm.

Where others might be able to ‘control’ patterns of sound through habit or choice, I have to be able to “manually override” noxious sounds.  And in today’s virtually polluted-on-every-level world = good luck with THAT!

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Information has levels of ramifications.  Ramifications and the complex interactions of meaning presented to me along with the “ordinary bandwidth” of what the speaker provides in the community development talk, prevents me from being able –at this point in time – to KNOW that I understand a single “word” said.

So one must consider – WHAT IS MEANING?

What did that speaker MEAN?  What does the information he presents MEAN?  What does it mean to me personally, to any of us, to all of us collectively – within WHAT span of time – and for what REASON?

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Now HERE is one of the places where I suspect my ASD and my severe trauma history overlap and intersect.  It is obvious in the descriptions of developmental neuroscientists such as Dr. Allan N. Schore, early severe trauma prevents ‘the body’ from creating its ‘resting point of balanced equilibrium’ at peaceful calm.

As I have written on this blog in the past, early trauma survivors – those who never had any safe and secure early attachment experiences with their primary caregiver – have a very different set-point.  Calm is NOWHERE within us a natural state.

We have to learn.  We have to work for calm.  Which is its own paradox!

My body does not give me a natural place to rest without sound/noise.  (Neuroscientists know that a living brain is always turned to noise – even our brain’s resting state is noisy.)  So I would go with “quiet enough” – which basically means, for me, that I have to be in an inner place WHERE I AM NOT THINKING ABOUT ANYTHING because thoughts-in-words are ALWAYS making a sound!

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I was, as ole timey readers know, very fortunate to have lived on a wilderness Alaskan homestead during much of my growing-up years.  I therefore KNEW occasions of silence – and very nearly silence.  Part of me both carries THAT silence within AND craves it ‘out there, back there in time’.

Yeah – at age 65 this is all kind of an exhaustive process!

I do have creative gifts that can allow me to stop thinking entirely.  Weaving is doing that peace-building-within for me now.  Creating my massive garden “once upon a time” did that for me. Yet ‘being in the inner quiet’ does not help me, for example, to move toward comprehension of material that is very important to me – such as that contained in the community building video.

I would PREFER to be working with some kind of a local team of people on relatively the ‘same page’ so that THEY who COULD understand that video would be able to explain it to me in real-time, face-to-face, in storytelling fashion!

Short on that possibility right now, I will try and try and try again to HEAR what this “backyard revolution” has to teach us about finding ways to bring ACEs and N.E.A.R. science info into our communities.

(I listen to this river soundtrack a lot.  I would prefer silence, but there are noisy horrid evil male pigeon roosters outside, traffic, NOISE!  This is the best I can come up with in my negotiations between myself and the environment I live within (which is a billion times better than the horrible apartment I was stuck in up north for three years!).

All these words.  Tiring.  There are ways of both knowing and not knowing at the same time; of understanding and not understanding; of hearing and not hearing at the same time.  I do wonder, “Are those within the autism spectrum range living in a more paradoxical world than “usual” for others?”  (Once we pass out of toddlerhood we are certainly able to FEEL more than one feeling conflictual emotion at a time!  Are we not all both living and dying at the same time?  What IS paradox, really?)

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Here is my first book out in ebook format as it provides an outline of the conditions of my malevolent childhood.  Click here to view or purchase–

Story Without Words:  How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?

It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge.  A daring book – for daring readers – about a really tough subject.

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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame