R.L.Ranch Press -- Impossible Cure

A Brave and Honest Cure story contributed by James K. Feldman
I arrived in this world at 10:40 a.m. on May 30, 1938, here in Akron, Ohio, the first child of an urban, middle class family; both parents were prominent lawyers and real estate developers and both were born in the United States. My paternal grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Turkey through Romania, my paternal grandmother from Germany and Austria through Romania, and my maternal grandparents came in from Slovakia.
My Tourette syndrome was diagnosed early in the game, when I was about six or seven years old, by a local pediatrician, Dr. Panetz. Head, neck, shoulder and arm tics, facial grimaces, growling, snarling, biting, copralalia (swearing or blasphemy), echolalia (repetition of what I had previously said), etc., all of which would sporadically come and go, nevertheless made this diagnosis quite obvious. Another medical term used to describe conduct like this back in those times here was 'likosism' (derived from the Greek word, 'likos', for wolf), to describe lupine-like behavior. More up-to-date information about Tourette syndrome may be found at the website of the Tourette Syndrome Association, http://tsa-usa.org .
At night I would leave our house and go out to hunt and devour other animals, so it became necessary for my parents to lock the house on the inside to keep me in. After I began to figure out how to foil their locks, they acquired a small metal bear cage from our local Perkins Park Zoo and kept me in there while they slept. Our lesser schooled neighbors were even concerned about my having the predatory eyes of a wolf, or actually being either a werewolf cub or otherwise being demonically 'possessed'. Ironically I did feel like my illness consisted of some kind of separate entity which was living inside of me, taking control of me unexpectedly, particularly when I was stressed, and making me do or say things I would not ordinarily be inclined to do. For years I would even try to go into myself after it to beat it out of me by flailing myself with a wide leather strap. This was a rather hellish way to live.
By the end of the 20th century, a Swedish population study of individuals with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, indicated that 20% met the full criteria for Tourette's syndrome, and a full 80% had tics of one kind or another. (Ehlers, S. and Gillberg, (1993) C., The Epidemology of Asperger's Syndrome--a Total Population Study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 34 (8), 1327-1350.) Here in Ohio, ironically, a half-century earlier, in the 1950's, while I was in high school, Dr's. Ulrich and Mueller, local pediatricians who could read medical literature in the German language, had already informed our family that I appeared to have another co-morbid, newly discovered, neurobehavioral disorder besides Tourette syndrome, but that there was no treatment available. They said that Dr. Hans Asperger, who had begun to investigate this new developmental disorder in the 1940's during the Second World War, had survived the conflict and was still practicing in Vienna, Austria, overseas in Europe. Up-to-date information about Asperger's syndrome may be found at the website of the Autism Society of America, www.autism-society.org .
One of my physicians here in Akron suggested peppermint schnapps to take the edge off when things got really bad, hoping that the alcoholic content would prove sedating and the flavoring would make it palatable and soothe my tummy. That 'schnapps treatment' was eventually to become a fortuitous portent of things to come. What would ordinarily appear to be a path leading to unavoidable alcoholic catastrophe would paradoxically prove to bring forth the seeds of its own redemption many decades later in Alcoholics Anonymous.
As I grew into adulthood my condition was subjected to a plethora of psychiatrists and psychologists who applied multiple futile diagnoses over the next fifty years --'exceptional' child, schizophrenia (the catch-all for everything in those days), manic-depressive or bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, endogenous depression, etc. My family and I had long forgotten about the original diagnosis of Asperger's until 2002, when I was age sixty-four, and a local nurse heard me relate my case history in an Alcoholics Anonymous 'speaker' meeting. She had known me since our school days together and suggested that I might have been struggling with Asperger's syndrome as well as Tourette's during my traumatic lifetime. So I then scooted over to our local chapter of the Autism Society of America to find out all I could about it. Bingo! Fortunately by that time I had already begun to avail myself of various alternative/holistic modalities of therapy, and thank God, my problems were already early in the process of being brought under control. I have however become active in that organization, serving on its professional advisory board and helping out otherwise any way I can.
Academically math and any subject requiring mastery of that discipline would be far beyond my ken. I did somewhat better in subjects like social studies, and I was even able to perseverate extensively in subjects like geography and history, and did extremely well in those. I even produced my own collection of full-color replicas of the national flags of every country in the world, for example, and I can still draw them all for you today. And so I doggedly pursued my academic education, starting at Old Trail, Portage Path and Rankin elementary schools and Buchtel high school here (there were no middle schools in those days) in Akron, Talmud Torah religious classes on Judaism after public school hours, and thence continuing at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The regimen of law studies was more difficult for me, so I dropped out of law school first at the Ohio State University and subsequently the University of Akron eight times more in the following fourteen years before I could take Ohio's bar exam, but then succeeded in passing with flying colors. I had trained as a paralegal in the law firm of my parents for several years at the end of each high school day and during high school and college holiday and summer vacations, so extensive knowledge of the law gained thereby managed to pull me through.
In between periodic forays into law school, I attempted to study off and on over the years at the nearby Telshe Yeshiva rabbinical college in Wickliffe, Ohio, but I could not adequately focus my attention on the highly demanding Talmudic studies there. Medical studies over in Europe at the University of Poitiers (Vienne), in southwestern France, for a few years were equally unsuccessful.
Both of my parents, now deceased, and my brother, still living, appear in retrospect to have presented elements of high functioning autism spectrum and/or pervasive developmental disorder as I look backward in time. Dad had been diagnosed and treated with bipolar disorder and Tourette's at Cleveland Clinic and Mom was considered by family physicians to have schizophrenia and Tourette's, although she remained in denial of these and never accepted treatment. My paternal grandmother's paternal grandmother from the locality of Ulm, in Germany, was reportedly a sister or cousin of the late Albert Einstein's grandfather, and that family line of autism genes may possibly have descended down to me, for better and for worse.
Both of my parents were highly intelligent and very productive in their joint law practices and real estate development businesses, despite their psychological issues, but our home life was quite chaotic for the most part, despite my father's Herculean efforts to provide us with a secure and loving home life. My brother, 11 years my junior, fared somewhat better than I. He was able to marry for a while and did conceive three children. He and I were certainly difficult children to rear. We both needed to be kept on leashes out on the street before the age of three or four or we would simply run away from our parents. Small wonder we did not drive our parents even crazier than they already were to begin with.
If you look at where I would have fallen as a child on the Asperger's diagnostic testing scale, developed by Dr. Tony Attwood, of Australia you will see set out before you the beginnings of disaster. It would appear that I would not stand a chance to lead a successful life from the 'get-go'. I was a complete loner. I just could not play with or otherwise relate to other children. My motor skills were poor, and participation in their sports was not feasible. I could not comprehend that social world of other kids out there--I took no part in it. I lived in my own little world of books, hobbies and other interests in my bedroom. I had minimal self-confidence, and I needed a lot of reassurance from my parents.
Other than that, I rarely had much contact with my family as I grew up. I could go into a melt-down very easily, and my emotions were extreme. Eye contact was sparse, as were conversational skills. I was not really interested in what you people had to say, unless I needed information from you. I was sometimes regarded to speak with an unusual accent and to walk with an unusual gait, so my nicknames were 'Martian' in public schools and 'Golem' in Jewish schools. I was no devotee of fairy tales or other fictional balderdash. I was the school's walking encyclopedia. I had a memory like an elephant, (we had no computers in those days) and was considered to be a 'far-out' genius of some kind. I always stuck to regular behavioral routines or rituals, and tolerated no interference with this basic internal security system of mine. I did have a tendency to rock back and forth or to flap my legs when stressed, and had a low sensitivity to pain. I have rarely needed a local anesthetic for dentistry over the years, other than for extractions or root canals. I also had plenty of symptoms of ADHD and OCD as well, but if something really grabbed my interest, I would perseverate on it endlessly.
Neuropsychological testing, which was finally done in 1992, when I was 54 years old, by Dr. Delphi Toth, of Akron, indicated much frontal lobe of the brain dysfunction and right hemispheric visual/perceptual dysfunction. This may provide us with extremely vital insight into structural brain issues in autism in general and Asperger's syndrome in particular. Although my overall IQ appears to have been preserved in a very high range, there are deficits in specific tests demanding a skilled function of the frontal lobes and skilled function in the visual/perceptual and sensory/perceptual areas. The frontal lobes are the executive control areas of the brain. On a practical level the frontal lobes control my ability to organize and follow through. They control the ability to stop following through and to change tasks. They control my interaction with the outside world and how it is manifested. They control my ability to perceive my own inner world and react appropriately. They mediate judgment and reasoning and they mediate analysis and synthesis of complex information, both verbal and non-verbal.
Among the many ways that my frontal lobe dysfunction has affected my behavior is that I have had trouble discontinuing activity. Or I would become bored easily and move on to a new task, leaving any previous tasks undone. I would have problems judging the level of social appropriateness, especially in regard to aggressiveness of interaction and problems with maintaining a sense of well being. My frontal lobe would not let me know that I feel alright when I query myself. It is typical with frontal lobe dysfunction that when there is no response of 'things are alright, things are fine, there is no need to worry about myself.', that I would assume that things are not alright. In the absence of response indicating a positive feeling I would assume a negative feeling and 'freak-out' or 'melt down'. But this assumption would actually be invalid. The correct response would have been that there is no feeling and I should have erred on the positive side. I would not be feeling endangered or depressed, for example; there would simply be a complete absence of emotion. This would set me up for chronic anxiety or depression and a chronic feeling that my life would be a living nightmare.
Moreover in terms of visual /perceptual processing these brain dysfunctions would cause me to be visually disoriented and otherwise uncoordinated in my movements. I would not be a mechanically oriented person, I would be someone who might get lost easily or misplace things easily or lose my balance easily, or be incapable of drawing accurately. And so I would be living in a world perceived to be very threatening and depressing, one that I could not expect to function safely and well in.
In 1998, when I had reached the age of 60, Dr. Harold Schaus, of Akron, performed some electronic testing, specifically a listening and other sensory testing and qualitative electro-encephalography (QEEG). Findings on the listening test showed a normal, for my age, decline of hearing above 4K Hz, but other testing indicated presence of a great deal of anger, and problems with laterality and balance, and other motor issues. Emotionally it would appear that I would want very much to relate to people, yet pull back from them. Yet I would persevere. I would also maintain very high expectations of myself which I would have much frustration trying to live up to.
The striking thing about the QEEG test was the overriding presence of beta (fast activity) even under conditions of eyes closed as well as eyes open. There was a great deal of coherence in the beta band, principally in the left hemisphere, but also seen in some inter-hemispheric cortical connections. This beta coherence was seen over the entire left hemisphere, anterior, central and posterior. What this translates into is that my brain was likely to be going too fast and in an undifferentiated manner. This is fairly consistent with what is seen in some obsessive-compulsive disorders. Practically it means that I would be likely to have a number of things going on in my head at once, with little in the way of organizing activity. Thus I would bounce around in my mind, much like a pinball machine. In terms of QEEG signatures, however, this is not an ADD/ADHD disorder as classically defined with a preponderance of theta/beta at the vertex.
None of the myriad of doctors who later treated me for the five decades of my life after childhood diagnosed my Asperger's or Tourette's syndromes, and basically doped me up with all kinds of tranquillizers once they came out in the 1960's. Psychiatrists at the nationally acclaimed Cleveland Clinic started me out on highly addictive Serax by day and Seconal by night, both barbiturates, and then after those drugs turned me into a zombie, arranged for me to be hospitalized for a number of years at the also highly reputed Institute of Living psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.
There the disheveled mental patients were let out to shuffle around a large oval track on the grounds in back of that institution for exercise on nicer days past the doctors' shiny Rolls Royce and Bentley automobiles parked there--it was like a bizarre scene from such novels then popular as, 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden' or 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest'. A commissioner of mental health for the state of New York was locked-up in there with us, ironically, as well as one of the developers of the drug, Tofranil, who actually had the drug he helped invent, prescribed for him! One doctor, nicknamed 'Sparky' by patients and staff alike, administered the electro-shock treatments--one of his most illustrious victims had supposedly been an unsuccessful candidate for the U. S. Presidency. He 'zapped' our leader for trying to organize us to form a perimeter and fight-off Soviet paratroops he expected to land on the back Oval, while wearing a U. S. Air Force general's cap and flight jacket., and ordering us to shoot at them with brooms from the closet on our ward. We were all actually bombarded with overwhelming dosages of Thorazine, Mellaril, Stelazine, Haldol, Prolixin, Kemedrin, etc.
Life in those years passed by for me like some kind of nightmarish, horror movie where one is strapped to one's seat and cannot leave the theatre. Patients were inevitably released from there, however, when their hospitalization insurance and other family financial resources finally ran out---'spontaneous and instantaneous cure!' Life was hardly much better, however, after I was released from that hospital. I returned to treatment by psychiatrists in Akron only to be prescribed an endless blanket of such habit-forming benzodiazepine drugs as Librium, Valium, Tranxene, Ativan, Xanax, etc. A sympathetic uncle in New York took me to a Hassidic rabbinical seer there for help, who told him that I would eventually start getting better in my forties and that I would be mostly cleared up by my sixties. Meanwhile the Guidance would come to me to help the other ones like me.
I had meandered in and out of law school at the Ohio State University in Columbus and the University of Akron about nine times before 1974 in a blur until finally passing the state bar exam. I knew the law backward and forward---Asperger's patients are hardly stupid---I just had trouble spitting it out under pressure. I worked in the law office and real estate business of my parents until Dad passed away in 1984, and Mom in 1988.
I could find no answers as to why I had been so cursed by Divine Providence. Prayer and religious learning over the years, including rabbinical studies at the reknowned orthodox Telshe Yeshiva in Wickliffe, Ohio, back in 1969, were all fruitless. The best efforts of the now highly esteemed Rabbi Avrum Chaim Feuer there were futile. I shall always wonder if his devoted attempts to ameliorate my suffering eventually played a part in galvanizing his later writing and publication of a seminal work on the Tehillim (Psalms) in 1985, which are used so much in prayer on behalf of the sick and afflicted by the Jewish people.
Finally I came to hate God for bringing me into this world to be so sick. Helpless and seemingly hopeless, I wished I could only afflict Him with the same degree of pain with which He afflicted me, frequently referring to Him in the Yiddish language as der Grosser Himmelmamzer (the Big Bastard up in the sky). And presenting plenty of Tourette's copralalia in my case, I produced some choice retro-curses for Him indeed, in English, such as, 'Cursed art Thou, O Lord our God, Source of all affliction, who maketh Thy children to suffer!' I constantly feared the day when my parents would die, and I would thereafter languish in my illness, isolated and rejected, a lone pariah in society or incarcerated in a mental institution. Profound frustration, rage, grief and bottomless depression were fed by then perceived hopelessness and a prognosis of incurability. I was quite selfish, for what little I had of anything would eventually run out, and I would then have no more. I believed myself to be under siege by a hostile Divinity. As they used to say in those old, wild Western movies, 'Circle the wagons!' 'Katie, bar the door!' And I was always lazy, for what was the use of trying to accomplish anything---that would be like trying to arrange chairs on the deck of the ill-fated steamship Titanic. Most frightening through all this, I was either driven or frustrated by forces I was barely conscious of and which were utterly beyond my control.
The experience of being raised in a dysfunctional family obviously generated dysfunctional ways of coping with life, diagnosed by the mental health care professions now as codependency, which added still another layer to my afflictions. Moreover bilateral electro-shock therapy I was administered appears to have immediately given rise to vague memories of my prior derech gilgulim (Jewish belief in former lives in previous centuries which I had lived in), call that illusion or reincarnation, whatever one's modern scientific or spiritual beliefs might be; and I became vaguely aware of unfinished business, particularly guilt over misconduct from those lives which my soul may to need to work out in this lifetime to effect closure. Two internet websites which delve into this type of phenomenon are www.rogerwoolger.com and www.brianweiss.com . The academic institution doing research in this field, University of Virginia, Department of Psychiatric Medicine, Division of Perceptual Studies has a website discussing their work at www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/personalitystudies/home.cfm .
Both this phenomenon and the codependency pathology could account for the way I would seem to unconsciously seek out more painful or difficult ways to do things. And perhaps guilt from any misconduct deriving from possible previous lifetimes would require me to balance that out in this lifetime, all of which might perhaps resulted in my unconscious but frequently resolute self-abusive and/or self-defeating behavior, and sabotage of constructive self-help or help offered by others in the present.
By the time I was in my fifties both of my parents had died, there was no one left to take care of me, and I would have become a homeless, friendless derelict or an lifetime inmate in a mental institution if I would not have been introduced by a concerned neighbor to local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings earlier, on March 7, 1981, to wean myself off that habituating cocktail of alcohol and prescribed drugs I had been administered since childhood. The A.A. website on the internet is www.alcoholics-anonymous.org Releasing those chemical crutches, I somehow began to trudge forward on the road to a happier destiny with the help of new-found friends in that fellowship and that previously feared and hated Higher Power whom I begun to reconcile with. I still felt crazier than a 'hoot owl', but I was somehow functioning at least at some basic level, and I no longer felt alone and isolated.
Whoever arrives upon the doorstep of AA carries huge psychological baggage with one's addictions, and I and my burden were readily accepted among the lot. I was 'volunteered' to help maintain the property and receive AA guests from around the country and from overseas at the home of Dr. Bob Smith, cofounder in Akron of AA, which was just being restored early in the 1980's, so I no longer felt 'good for nothing' or useless. I would find actual purpose in life--new promises would take hold. The therapy program of AA teaches the newcomer in recovery to turn his life and will over to the care of a Power greater than himself, enabling him to invite the Divine Will for his future way of life replace any former needs to act out in codependent ways or to pursue any punitive agenda deriving from former lifetimes.
Eventually I would recover enough to come out of retirement to re-establish the family's law practice and real estate business, resume the learning and observance of my religious beliefs, and sit on the board of our local chapter of the Autism Society of America and to contribute my knowledge and efforts through them in behalf of my afflicted brothers and sisters still suffering with this challenging spectrum disorder. More recently I have been able to follow Albert Einstein's footsteps, to work with some local inventors to help research and develop a new system to convert gravitational energy into electricity in accordance with this cousin's earlier work with his projected Unified Field Theory. I can finally say that I have been guided through highly perilous waters by a Supreme Navigator who now has me living a fruitful and fulfilling life far beyond any of my previous expectations. I now simply tell folks, 'THERE IS NO SUCH THNG AS A HOPELESS CASE---NEVER QUIT TRYING BEFORE THE MIRACLE HAPPENS!'
Also by the 1980's I was beginning to explore the possibilities of using vitamin and mineral supplements and dietary measures to control my problems, which had been suggested by Unabelle Boggs Blackwood, PhD, a nutritionist on the faculty of the University of Akron. We AA's knew from our organization's history that Dr. Bob Smith had begun using tomato juice, 'Karo' syrup, and sauerkraut to nourish the early recovering alcoholics in his care, and subsequently switched to vitamin tablets and mineral salts, so I needed only to pick up his trail at our local Mustard Seed health food store, with the expert guidance of its caring proprietors, Phil and Margaret Nabors. Vitamins B-6, magnesium, zinc and omega-3 essential fatty acids seemed to help considerably. I found that I needed to avoid oatmeal and whole grain wheat. The more gluten there was in a food, the more it seemed to bother me, as did foods high in gluten and the amino acids serine and argenine. Reading about the research of Drs. William Philpot, of South Attleboro, Massachusetts, and Theron Raldolph, of Chicago, Illinois, I also began to rotate different types of food around in my diet, to reduce allergic propensities.
Hope really dawned late in 1996, a few years before I reached the age of sixty, when Gail L., historian, archivist and curator at the Akron AA intergroup museum, recalled that Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith a cofounder of AA here, had a colleague, Dr. Charles Dickson, a specialist in homeopathy, who worked with him on alcoholics who were dually diagnosed with various behavioral and other disorders during the 1930's and 1940's. I located a physician in town, Michael Garn, M.D., who had studied homeopathy in Munich, Germany and conventional medicine at the Ohio State University, and who had done a segment of his residency on the Ignatia Hall ward of St. Thomas Hospital, in Akron, the first alcoholism and addictions treatment program in the world, initially established by Doctor Bob Smith. Would this Dr. Garn be able to properly diagnose and treat me after so many others had failed over the previous six decades?
Much to my surprise, he told me that no specific medical diagnosis of my case would be necessary. He informed me that homeopaths do not diagnose or treat disease entities as such---they prescribe very highly diluted or attenuated, titrated, and succussed remedies of a substance which would cause given symptoms, to neutralize those same symptoms. The founder of homeopathy in the eighteenth century, Samuel Hahnemann, of Koethen, Germany, had established it on the basis of 'Simila sylabus curantur', ('Like cures like'). Hahnemann and his colleagues may have been precursors doing research in what might perhaps now be called an early medical application of nanotechnology. This position was most fortunate for me. The long forgotten diagnosis of my disease entity would not be re-established for over four more years until common knowledge of Asperger's syndrome would reach American physicians after the year 2000. And this was about sixty years after it was first discovered by Dr. Hans Asperger in Austria, in the 1940's and fifty years after two long dead local pediatricians here first read about his work in the 1950's. Wheels of progress in field of medicine can in certain instances grind very slowly indeed.
After Michael Garn passed away, Karin Cseak, an osteopath, became director of his clinic, and with her associates, Paul Christian, Sowmia Subramony, Barbara Davis and Becky Rupert, who is now in West Salem, Ohio, began to prescribe for me. So was it my good fortune to reap the advantage of the thinking of many diverse homeopathic practitioners. Layer by layer, my hitherto implacable strata of Asperger's and Tourette's symptoms were inexorably forced to yield before the irresistible juggernaut of homeopathy.
To quote Dr. Rupert: 'In gathering information from this client, as single theme struck me. He basically felt tortured, tortured by man, tortured by God, tortured by his environment. The proper remedy would not only help this inner feeling of torture, but also help in all other areas of physical and emotional symptoms. Homeopaths use information from all areas--mental, emotional and physical to find the indicated remedy, and all areas must fit the pattern. The clarity of the information he gave me pointed to Lyssin, a remedy I knew particularly well. It is important to note that any given remedy is specific for each client's particular case. Other Asperger's clients may frequently need other remedies, as each case presents somewhat differently.
'After the remedy was administered, changes were seen in the client's entire being. This is not an overnight magic trick or placebo response, but the results within one month were wonderful to see after so much struggle. In homeopathy, you see the person transform, the entire person, and they become the best they can be, because that is what true health is! So within one month, he saw changes in the way he related to the world around him. His obsessions decreased dramatically, his depression and tortured feeling subsided, and he returned to the synagogue and religious beliefs of his family. He could read an entire book and even study the Jewish Talmud which he could not do before, and his anger remitted dramatically. He had more confidence in himself, and he became to set and follow through on his priorities. His energy also improved, which was much less before the remedy. This gives a brief overview of what can be seen within the first month on a homeopathic remedy. He went back to work in his career again, which he could not do before beginning the remedy.'
For fine tuning of my recovery program I also use flower essences from Nelson Bach, www.nelsonbach.com and Flower Essence Services, www.fesflowers.com . I have used 'self heal' and 'rock water' to get things going, and then 'cherry plum' for rampant emotions, 'gorse' for depression, 'evening primrose' and 'mariposa lily' for codependency issues, 'sticky monkey flower' for sexual issues, and 'tansy', blackberry', and 'madia' for ADD (attention deficit), concentration, or focus issues.
Romance and love life can comprise a particularly difficult gauntlet for the recovering Asperger's syndrome patient to negotiate. We simply live in our own tightly controlled, little worlds. The concept of opening one's self up for total and irrevocable merging with the body, mind, and soul of another human being is scarier than Hell---the mother of all phobias. Yet there is nothing we crave more than the ultimate relief for the mother of all pain, the futile yearning for a mate. And so we have the mother of all frustrations. In the course of recovery, that alone a hitherto unimaginable concept for us, I would place mating at my farthest frontier.
Two early relationships failed, one in college and another during one of my forays in law school. Subsequently there were furtive, futile and love-starved relationships with over a dozen women who were just as messed-up as me or worse. Ironically a very accomplished and dedicated psychiatric social worker in our community had actually fallen deeply and profoundly in love with me during the 1980's but I could not permit myself to respond to her adoration because I did not feel at that time that I could ever meet all of her expectations, hopes, and dreams for us. I just never dreamed that I could ever achieve my present level of recovery. Thank God, however, she eventually found a wonderful husband here in town and they are now happily married.
My circumcision was done improperly shortly following my birth and needed to be corrected by extensive subsequent surgical procedures. Due to this trauma my capacity to become involved in successful relationships in adulthood was most gravely affected. Also, one of our family members was engaging in some inappropriate sexual behavior which I had observed. Certainly I would now advocate that children with any type of behavioral handicaps receive special protection to protect them from damage from such exposure as I had incurred.
I frequently think about all the challenges which will be faced by future young people with autism spectrum disorder who will be inevitably thrust by the passage of time and the inexorabilities of their biological makeup through the stage of puberty and into sexual maturity. They shall be tormented by the craving for love and demand for sexual release which they shall have overwhelming difficulty coping with, and this challenge boggles the mind. And the feasibility of marriage would always be questionable. This is a real time bomb. This will be their worst hurdle in life, their most formidable gauntlet. May God have mercy upon their souls.
In 1998 I was afforded the opportunity to help raise two young relatives, a girl age 15 and a boy age 11, whose father had become involved in an apocalyptic, 'Y2K', year 2000, 'end-of-this-world' church cult. Thank God I already had the benefit of 17 years of recovery in the Alcoholics Anonymous program and was also several months into recovery from Asperger's and Tourette's syndromes on the various modalities of alternative/holistic therapy I had sought when the kids arrived at my doorstep. God's good timing! And the kids remained well behaved, perhaps in a way too well behaved---they had hardly been eager to shake hands with those Four Horsemen at the church's predicted 'Last War at the End of Days' between the armies of Christ and the evil forces of the anti-Christ, and they had been very severely traumatized. Their mother had cracked-up in the course of that family disaster, so I was one of the few familiar pillars of stability these children were able to find.
And I took them to quite a few AA meetings with me--they had been prescribed Valium drops while babies in arms, due partially to their mother's difficulty in dealing with the crying of the children she had conceived, and they had been continued on other highly addictive drugs of that ilk and Ritalin later on, due to other issues which had developed. And of course we shared in the application of a lot of alternative/holistic modalities of therapy which had already helped me to deal with my problems.
Mendel Sasonkin, rabbi of a local synagogue which had originally been established with the participation of one of my great-grandfathers back in the 1920's, helped us greatly in restoring Jewish family life. In a home thereby blessed with our own religious tradition they thrived and grew and we all found great happiness together. Things have turned out quite well, thank God---the girl is now teaching kindergarten at a Jewish day school in Cleveland, and the boy is now pursuing studies in business administration at the University of Akron.