Autistic estrangement from parents
Estrangement between autistic adults and their parents is not exactly a rare phenomenon. There are a lot of reasons, many complex, why an autistic adult may make the difficult, or, frankly, not so difficult, decision to sever contact with one or both parents.
In my experience, a lot of the writing on this tends to focus on the autistic individual being “unreasonable”, “unable to understand the neurotypical behaviour of their parents” etc. They are portrayed as taking offense from perfectly normal things, and then blowing that up into something far bigger than it was. The writing, and many experts, put the blame for the separation on the autistic person, and tell us that we are the ones who should repair broken relationships. I don’t buy into that.
Look, I have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria as one of my more unwanted, and unnerving, autistic traits. I get the idea of making criticism into something far bigger than it was intended to be at the time. This is not the case for when dealing with a parent who should be trying to make life easier for their child, rather than harder. I know it is particularly not the case with my own father, as I have seen the way he treats others as well.
Simply put, and not to go into too much of a sob story, my father is an arsehole. No, he did not always “try his best”. In fact, by his own admission, albeit phrased at the time in a way to make himself sound good, he avoided my brother and I as much as possible. After, and before, my mum died he was away for long periods working. Fine, he was trying to support his family. It was in my late twenties that I discovered he had kept a separate property and deliberately did not come home during breaks between contracts.
When he got engaged again a few years after my mum died, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, he neglected to tell his future wife that he had children at all. The first she found out was when my brother travelled to the hotel he stayed at when working away and confronted him about something at a table in the restaurant. This, then, strange lady demanded to know who he was to talk to my father like that, and was then suitably shocked not just finding out that he was the old man’s son, but the eldest, and therefore there were more than one. My father had completely failed to even consider that telling someone he was planning to marry that he had children might prove relevant at some point.
Him not being at home was, in my view, actually a good thing, because when he was he was emotionally and physically abusive, in ways which even some of those closest to our family would never see, although he would claim he was just trying to “toughen up” my brother and I, and the physical violence was “horseplay”. This went far beyond simple “rough housing” though. He was, and likely still is, a conman. I know that he stole money left to my brother and I in my mum’s and grandfather’s wills. All of this is secondary in my mind to the greatest single piece of cruelty he committed though.
When my mum was dying, she wrote letters to my brother and I for us to be given on our 18th birthday. These would be the last words from a loving mother to her sons. The old man destroyed mine before I could ever read it. I have never found out what prompted this particular act of cruelty, but it is one I can never forgive.
I did try and rebuild my relationship with my father. At the age of 27/28 I moved to North Cyprus where he was living, that it is a non-extradition country potentially playing a part in this, with the intention of doing so. It did not work. In fact it failed spectacularly, including a memorable moment of him shouting that he had “always wanted me to have been aborted” on the main street of the village we lived in, in front of quite a lot of people.
I am fortunate, in a manner of speaking, another of my autistic traits is a lack of “emotional objective permanence”. It isn’t that I don’t care about people when I can’t see them, but I kind of forget the feelings and people become more distant in my mind. This helps me to not worry too much about having no contact with my father, although it does make me wonder how many of my autistic traits I share with him.
The last time I spoke with him was during the pandemic. His brother, my uncle, who I had only recently reconnected with at the start of it all, was dying from lung cancer. Despite the brief time we had started to reconnect I recognised more in my uncle of myself than I ever had of my own father. He was strong in character, and cared deeply for others, something quite opposite from how my father acted. I summoned my reserves and called my father to let him know and that his brother would love to speak to him and reconnect before he died. The old man didn’t call him. He didn’t call after the second time I phoned him to try and get him to. The third time I called, and the last time I spoke to him, was to tell him that his brother had died. He said that it was not relevant to him as they had spoken so little over the years. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a lack of emotional object permanence presenting itself. I personally think that it was just pure nastiness on the old man’s part though.
I have father figures in my life though. People I care for deeply and have brought me up more than my own ever did. One of whom is a wonderful man who is as much my uncle and father figure as any biological connection could ever create. He is someone I love even when I cannot see him, and who I owe being the person I am today to in large respect. His daughter is my sister in all bar biology, and she is one of the most important people in my life, and someone who I would do anything for, even if I can be totally inept at keeping in touch, that lack of emotional object permanence kicking in again.
I suppose what I am trying to say, and this goes as much for non-autistic people estranged from their parents as autistic individuals, is that no-one has the right to tell you it is “your fault”, or your responsibility to repair things. Whatever the cause of the estrangement it is no-one else’s place to tell you how you should feel about what prompted it, and whether you want to reconcile.
Just because someone is biologically related to you it doesn’t mean you owe them your well-being. If being separated from them is what is best for you, then it remains your choice to maintain that separation. I know for estranged parents this may be hard to take. In that case it is on you to rebuild the relationship, and accept if the damage is too deep that your child does not owe you unconditional love.
