Pseudoautism – say “NO” to false diagnosis

My child “lags in mental development.” Pseudoautism – say “NO” to false diagnosis.

Today my son came home from school very proud of himself – there is an excellent mark in his school diary. What is more exciting is that he came with a friend. The boys are playing and kidding around, speaking their own language to each other, which I don’t understand.

Watching the boys, I felt like crying…

“Your child is inadequate. He is definitely lagging behind other children. If you want him to succeed in school, you’ll have to hire private tutors for him. Otherwise, there is no chance that he will receive a high school diploma.” – his teacher’s words came as a shock to me. It was only two weeks after my son started school.

“Your son doesn’t listen to my explanations at the lessons; sometimes he can just stand staring at the window instead of doing the tasks. He is not able to socialize with his peers, always keeping away from them; he doesn’t play with others during school breaks. Yesterday he almost disrupted the whole school assembly when he closed his ears (with his hands) and started screaming. I couldn’t stop him. And, please, have his hearing tested – he keeps asking me to repeat what I have said.” 

To say that I was upset is to say nothing. I felt like the whole world was falling down. “Does it mean that my child is abnormal? But how can it be? When he was five he learned to read on his own. At six he could deal with computers better than me. And now it turns out that he is lagging in development…” Being employed in the medical field, I hoped that medicine would be able to help me. I took my son to neuropathologists, psychologists and other specialists in order to understand why he couldn’t adapt to school life and refused to do his class work.

We went through different kinds of examinations and the final diagnosis was that my child has no physiological deviations; however, some “behavior disorders” could be observed. His hearing was perfectly normal. The doctor even joked about it, saying that his hearing was too good. I didn’t pay attention to these words at that time. It was when I first came across the term “the autism spectrum disorders.”

Naturally, I wanted to know what could cause this “behavior disorder” and how it could be treated. Nobody was able to give me an audible answer to the first question. The neurologist said that it was probably due to intracranial pressure, as his head was a little bigger for his age; however, the examination did not reveal any abnormalities.

Our psychologist noticed that this behavior disorder could be a late manifestation of a birth injury. She also asked me to draw a picture of my son. According to her interpretation (I drew a picture of him in a suit and a hat) I wanted him to grow up faster and put too much pressure on him.

As for the treatment, I was given a list of medications for improving blood circulation to the brain. They also assigned a collar zone massage and some physiotherapeutic procedures. 

The massage turned out to be useless, as his muscles tightened even when slightly touched.

Our psychologist suggested taking a behavior correction course. I followed all their recommendations; simultaneously, I had some classes with my son at home, too, to catch up with his peers at school. To my surprise it took him only one week to easily learn the material intended for a whole month.

However, our problems were still there. The teacher was still complaining that he refused to do the tasks, didn’t listen to her at the lessons and couldn’t interact with other children successfully. One day when I came to the school to take him home I saw that his desk (at which he usually sat alone) was moved away from others, because “he was disturbing other children.” My son was becoming an outcast…

I found answers to my nagging questions quite unexpectedly. By chance I attended the System-Vector Psychology Training, and was able to help my child.

Listening to the lectures  the audial vector I realized that it was my child who was being described! About 5% of children are born with the audial vector. Their erogenous zone is their supersensitive ear. Their inborn role: the nocturnal guard of the pack…

The audial vector can show itself differently in a child.

His serous “non-childish” look makes him stand out among other children. When you approach him with “baby” talk, in return, he looks at you in such an attentive and serious way that you feel embarrassed…

Growing up, these children prefer the solitude of their own room to noisy company of their peers. They quickly become tired of action games and play calmly in their own company. These children like hiding in wardrobes – they like silence and shade…  

Audial children are very often late talkers, but sometimes, on the contrary, they can start talking quite early and they speak in sentences and phrases.

Children with the audial vector often have a so-called sleep disorder. They confuse day and night. But if you look deeper into the problem you will understand that it is not really a disorder – these children are naturally programmed for wakefulness during the night. This is how they perform their inborn role.

You should also keep in mind that such children can sleep soundly when loud music is on, but will wake up immediately to the sound of rustling paper under a cat’s paw. Such a reaction can be explained easily: music does not present any danger, whereas a strange rustling sound in the dark immediately awakens the instincts of a nocturnal guard in an audial child’s subconsciousness…

Audial children often start asking philosophical questions early in life, “Where did everything come from? Why am I here? What are the stars? What is life?” As I was listening to the lecturer I couldn’t help thinking that he might be a clairvoyant. How could he so accurately describe a child he had never seen?

We started having problems with sleeping from the day he was born. I used to spend all night walking around the bedroom with the baby in my hands. He was bored with lying in bed and very interested in exploring his mini-environment. As for waking up in the morning – it had always been a problem.

Later, another problem appeared. We started having a “shrieking hour” in the evening. My baby was screaming for about an hour and nothing could calm him down. Doctors could not help us, as they didn't find any pathology. We solved the problem quite accidentally. It turned out that switching off the lights and blocking out noise made the child silent and calm. 

As he was growing up I noticed another unusual thing about him: he was very emotionally reserved. Things that made me cry or laugh loudly would make him smile or wince only a little.

Once, when we were returning home from preschool, we had an argument and I told him that “for his disobedience I was going to leave him there alone right away.” I was expecting his tears or apologies… However, all I could hear behind me was dead silence. After a few steps I turned around, and my son was standing in the same place and looking at me with dry eyes. I got a pain in my heart – how could he be so cold-hearted?

If only I had known what consequences this kind of upbringing could have for my little audial child. When he was five I accidentally found out that he could read. I saw that he was playing some computer games with surprising ease, but one couldn’t do it without reading rules of the game beforehand. Now he reads nothing but encyclopedias. He finds everything else boring. Once he amused his preschool teacher by saying that you can bring a brick to life by adding carbon atoms to it. He was absolutely right from the point of view of Physics.

However, at school they say he lags in development...

In the training I understood why my son was having problems at school. His ear is his most sensitive (erogenous) zone. An audial child enjoys quiet and harmonious sounds. But he feels genuine satisfaction only when he is listening attentively to silence.

Audial children naturally and potentially are given the greatest intellectual abilities. In silence they concentrate on sounds of their inner world in an attempt to catch any suspicious noises. This is how they develop their minds, providing that in the future genius ideas will come to them.

School is a very aggressive environment for an audial child. Noise, screaming, loud music – all these factors made my son narrow his auditory perception. As a result, he started having difficulties internalizing the incoming information. The more his teacher was trying to make him react, the more my son was retreating into his shell.

If you want to understand how an audial child feels being exposed to the everyday cacophony of school noises, imagine that you have very sensitive tender skin and all you can wear is clothes made of the most delicate silk. But instead you have to wear a rough sackcloth, which tears up your skin and causes bleeding. All you want to do is to get rid of this sackcloth.

Cacophony, screaming and shouting causes as much stress to an audial child as itchy sackcloth to tender skin. 

But an audial person cannot get rid of this garment – as his super hearing is constantly on alert. Loud voices, scandals in the family or noises coming from the construction site nearby – this never-ending noise like a red-hot nail hammers into the ear of a little audial child.

An audial child wants to protect himself from sounds that injure his psyche and unconsciously decrease his own sensibility to external irritants; gradually, he becomes more and more self-absorbed and loses contact with the external world. In cases where a small audial child is constantly exposed to such situation, the worst consequences may occur: the self-protection program is activated and neuronal connections (responsible for the learning process in his brain) get severed. As a result, once again psychologists diagnose “autism.”

Loud noises and screaming are not the only reasons that can lead an audial child to mental disorders. His ear is extremely sensitive, not only to sounds, but to the intonation as well.

Some words, even when they are whispered, can be extremely destructive for the psyche of a child.

Audial children’s detachment from the world makes them different from others. They are thoughtful and sometimes seem to be slow and inhibited. A mother, not knowing the true reasons for such behavior, gets irritated and tends to hurry her child. In her irritation she can say the most awful words for the psyche of an audial child: “Freak! Idiot! Why on Earth did I give birth to you?”

In an attempt to hide from these words the audial child gets out from his inner world more and more seldom. He chooses to remain on the other side of his eardrum, and the outer world becomes more and more of an illusion. It is said that nothing can be as harmful as a mother’s curse. Acting from the best motives, mothers can sometimes ruin their children’s lives. 

Statistics are concerning: The number of children diagnosed as autistic has increased four fold in the last 10 years…

As I was listening to Yuri Burlan it made me shudder to think how I had treated my son when he started having problems at school. From the beginning, I had a very tough attitude to the situation and put too much pressure on the child. Sometimes I even lost control and started screaming at him…

Mother’s impatience, endless noise at school, his classmates running around and a tactless teacher – all these factors combined made my son retreat more and more inside of himself.

As for me, instead of creating a safe and peaceful environment which would provide harmonious development for my son, I was hovering over him like a helicopter and pressing him all the time, “Why did you stop? It’s a very simple problem! Can’t you solve it quickly? Look at your handwriting! Why can’t you write more neatly? Rewrite it now!”

I was able to help my son get rid of the label of “a child lagging in mental development.”

Understanding that many features of my son are not symptoms of a mental disorder and absolutely normal, that they are inherent in him and children of other vectors do not have them, helped me solve a lot of problems.

Yuri Burlan has only one strict requirement for his students: “Don’t believe a single word you hear in the training. Crosscheck information. Always make sure that your life experience proves this information is correct.”

I started speaking with him in a gentle whisper. And now he hears me! Not long ago I used to yell at him in a desperate attempt to be heard. I leave quiet music playing all night and my son sleeps soundly and doesn’t jump up in the middle of the night.

We do our homework in quietness with barely audible classical background music. His teacher is surprised by the progress he is making and says that he catches up with the top-performing students in the class and sometimes even does better than they do.

I explained to the rest of the family how our little audial boy feels in the presence of loud sounds and family quarrels. We created two rules: to maintain the ecology of sounds, and to sort things out only when our son is not at home. This rule had an unexpected side effect. We realized that any controversial issues in the family could be solved  without raising your voice. Gradually, we stopped having any family quarrels at all.

I talked to his teacher and explained that my son has super sensitive hearing and loud sounds can be very harmful to him. I also was able to make her understand that his being slow happens because he needs some time to get back to our “external” world. Now he sits in the front of the classroom and even has a girlfriend – her name is Lisa. The issue of hiring private tutors has been forgotten.

Today my son came from school very proud of himself – there is an excellent mark in his school diary. What is more exciting is that he came with a friend. The boys are playing and kidding around, speaking their own language to each other, which I don’t understand.

Watching the boys filled me with overwhelming joy…

My son’s happiness is my most positive result of going through the training. I think that for every mother it is the best thing that could possibly happen…