Harbl the cat... only a very different man... TLDR

[blacksmithden]

The biggest thing you need to sacrifice is your time. It all boils down to that.

Agreed.

Harb…..I hate to tell you this, but there some pretty big brains already working on the autism issue and have been for a few decades now. A family acquaintance of ours is one of the leading autism researchers in the world and he's now working right here in Edmonton. He has more IQ points in his little finger than most of us could ever dream of having in our whole being. He doesn't work directly with kids in a therapy sense. He's in the research end of things. Brilliant man.

I'm not saying you couldn't make great contributions to helping (not necessarily curing) people with autism using your talents. As I'm sure you've already learned, autism is a genetic thing. Unless you plan on becoming a genetic engineer, you're not going to "cure" it. I'm going to be really blunt here, so I hope you're not offended. I think you're trying to hide from dealing with your daughter directly and your personal escape is telling yourself that you're going to work on a cure rather than working WITH her. I've seen other parents of autistic kids doing similar things....hiding in their work. Trust me on this. If you focus your energy on working WITH her, you'll yield far better results than trying to find an actual cure. She is going to need a lot of direct work and patience on your part. You are going to have to take her places, work on her speech, work with her on general life skills. Teaching her things like getting dressed and person hygiene are going to take a lot more effort than your average kid. The mistake I think you're about to make is you're going to try and bury yourself in work and leave all the other stuff up to your wife. I can't put into mere words how much I think that will be a huge mistake that you'll live to regret.

[NickYYC]

Agreed.

Harb…..I hate to tell you this, but there some pretty big brains already working on the autism issue and have been for a few decades now. A family acquaintance of ours is one of the leading autism researchers in the world and he's now working right here in Edmonton. He has more IQ points in his little finger than most of us could ever dream of having in our whole being. He doesn't work directly with kids in a therapy sense. He's in the research end of things. Brilliant man.

I'm not saying you couldn't make great contributions to helping (not necessarily curing) people with autism using your talents. As I'm sure you've already learned, autism is a genetic thing. Unless you plan on becoming a genetic engineer, you're not going to "cure" it. I'm going to be really blunt here, so I hope you're not offended. I think you're trying to hide from dealing with your daughter directly and your personal escape is telling yourself that you're going to work on a cure rather than working WITH her. I've seen other parents of autistic kids doing similar things....hiding in their work. Trust me on this. If you focus your energy on working WITH her, you'll yield far better results than trying to find an actual cure. She is going to need a lot of direct work and patience on your part. You are going to have to take her places, work on her speech, work with her on general life skills. Teaching her things like getting dressed and person hygiene are going to take a lot more effort than your average kid. The mistake I think you're about to make is you're going to try and bury yourself in work and leave it all the other stuff up to your wife. I can't put into mere words how much I think that will be a huge mistake that you'll live to regret.

Genetic engineering is not that dissimilar from software engineering. If anything, given the size and scope of the human genome, I'd say genetic engineering is quite amateurish in comparison to some of the systems I've worked on. That said, where I'm coming from was from burying myself in my work to become the best at what I was doing to contemplating completely abandoning my career to heal my child. Fortunately for me, there's massive overlap in the competencies in a genetic engineer and a software engineer.

What you're describing is more or less what I'm contemplating doing.

I'm leaning very heavily towards selling all my possessions and expending most of my wealth specifically so that I can focus on healing and teaching my daughters.

You see, the thing is there is no general "cure" for autism (that being, by Western medicine's standards, there's nothing that can be prescribed for it), but there is a unique way to cure each autistic child.

The key is to form a physical, mental, and spiritual bond with and enable genetic expression and neurogenesis of the brain to develop capabilities within the child to overcome the inherent "defects" in genetic expression that manifest as what we know as autism.

The thing is, it's bullshit that everything is genetic. Some things are, most things are not.

The vast majority of illness is manifest through unresolved trauma in one of the 3 elements of each human being: the mind, body, and spirit.

Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, heart disease and stroke - and yes, autism.

The problem with Western medicine is it's reliance on scientific empiricism through study of the physical properties of the body. However the mind and spirit don't operate under the rules of the physical world.

All science at it's core is the sampling of states of of matter and energy within linear units of time. The thing is, the mind, and with it, human consciousness demonstrably does not function within the boundaries of the time scale we rely on for scientific experimentation. Try some psychedelics like cannabis and develop a meditation practice and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

This is why so many illnesses, including the one's that are in the top 10 list of causes of death within the West (most specifically, Canada and the US) "have no cure."

Western medicine is great at healing mass physical trauma, but completely neglects mental and spiritual trauma. I am certain integrating treatment modalities for all 3 is key to remedying the worst symptoms of autism... challenge is, it all comes at a cost... mine may well be everything I've worked for the past 20 years.

[awndray]

After a huge THC vape session, meditating, and praying, God revealed to me that truth.

In my training as an engineer, I never learnt how mobile GIS platforms worked, nor military C4ISR systems, nor electrical grid power pool billing, hotel booking systems, construction management and fixture scoping management, or contracts for financial and physical commodities trading... oh and blockchain technology. I'm fully confident in saying I can demonstrate expertise in all of these fields close to or exceding an expert level.

Genetic engineering is not that dissimilar from software engineering. If anything, given the size and scope of the human genome, I'd say genetic engineering is quite amateurish in comparison to some of the systems I've worked on. That said, where I'm coming from was from burying myself in my work to become the best at what I was doing to contemplating completely abandoning my career to heal my child. Fortunately for me, there's massive overlap in the competencies in a genetic engineer and a software engineer.

The vast majority of illness is manifest through unresolved trauma in one of the 3 elements of each human being: the mind, body, and spirit.

Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, heart disease and stroke - and yes, autism.

The problem with Western medicine is it's reliance on scientific empiricism through study of the physical properties of the body. However the mind and spirit don't operate under the rules of the physical world.

Wow. Good luck. Unsubscribed.

[Grey_Wolf]

Wow. Good luck. Unsubscribed.

Yeah, I'm with ya

[blacksmithden]

I wish you all the luck in the world sir. After raising 3 kids with autism, I think you're going to need it.

[R&R Rancher]

This isn’t the US where you read horror stories of people going 6 figures in debt to try and get help for their autistic children. There is financial aid available and if you advocate hard enough, trained workers who can do more good in those early years than you can. Quitting your job and selling off most of your worldly possessions will bite you later. You still need to provide a home for your family. Balance is needed.

[DanN]

It's difficult to say this without sounding like a complete a-hole.. but it's what I would say to the very best of my friends, even if it meant risking our friendship...

You gotta lay off the THC, man. Before you liquidate everything you own in the belief that you can fix something experts all over the world are working on, you need to clear your head. THC is a mind altering drug; Harbl the Cat was a much more intelligent sounding person than NickYYC. You sound like an old hippy now. I'm honestly concerned for your well being.

[NickYYC]

I wish you all the luck in the world sir. After raising 3 kids with autism, I think you're going to need it.

I'm pretty sure I know how to both RAISE and RECOVER my autistic girl. Like I said, I've been redlining my formidable engineering intellect harder on this than I have anything in my professional career - and I've done some pretty hardcore stuff as an engineer.

I was at my daughter's school yesterday meeting the teachers and I was taken a back by a few key points. Namely the limitations of their abilities to connect with and train my daughter and of the bleak outlook of the prescribed education path set out for her.

Basically, to throw her into the conventional academic system, with (by my expectations) limited support for her significant disability.

In my heart, I know that's a recipe for failure for her.

The recipe for success for her is in my (and my wife's) presence during the prime waking hours and expansion of techniques we have been using over the past 2 years that have garnered results.

2 years ago, she was a zombie child.

She couldn't socialize, couldn't verbalize, couldn't learn.

But my wife (primarily) moved heaven and earth focusing especially on her diet, and saw rapid improvement on many of her worst symptoms.

One of the major challenges we face is that 2 years ago when we were starting her in her special needs school, she cut and dry had all the symptoms of an autistic child, but there was a miscommunication between her main teacher and my wife to the affect that: "an autism diagnosis doesn't really matter." What she meant was: "In so far as services offered at the school are concerned, the autism diagnosis didn't matter."

She just had a GDD diagnoses, but everyone including her teachers, knew she was autistic. We thought that was enough, and didn't get the diagnosis in time.

So my wife and I went on a crusade to try every treatment modality possible to bring her out of it, and she went from being unable to go out 5 minutes in public without stimming to the point of unable to walk, violent headbanging, smearing her feces on her face, with the skin on the rest of her body melting from eczema, being in a disassociated stupor to being almost verbal, able to walk, run, and climb, interact with strangers and family members, almost potty trained (but still feces smearing occasionally), and semi-cognizant of her surroundings (but not to the point of not knowing to not run into traffic).

One of the ironies is because we didn't get the diagnosis 2 years ago and we've progressed ahead light years from where she was (but still nowhere near to the point of being neurotypical) -
we might not even be able to get her a formal autism diagnosis now (so said her teachers).

It pushed us to our limits, since, primarily, we went to an organic, vegan, no grain, no dairy, no processed, whole food diet (which with 4 kids isn't cheap - we spend about $5k/month on groceries). Not to mention the sheer amount of time it takes doing food prep.

Tack on a full time caregiver as well so my wife could still work part time, and I'd say around $100k of our annual budget goes just into that element alone.

I have to say, it's been truly miraculous the PHYSICAL turnaround in my daughter's condition - but the MENTAL and SPIRITUAL elements are the next step in either fully recovering her or in at least developing her to the point that she can be independent enough to not fail in the system designed for neurotypical children.

There is practically zero focus on either mental or spiritual health in either our healthcare or education systems, but both elements are vital for the health of everyone.

It doesn't matter what you do to take care of your body if you don't take care of your mind and spirit. The mind and spirit guide the subconscious faculties, which themselves have cognitive and computational powers far beyond the conscious faculties - whose primary focus is to simply analyze, contextualize and prioritize sensory input, then keep it in volatile memory for other neurological faculties (both conscious and subconscious) to process either for emotional or memory regulation (i.e. - learn).

The biggest problem is our society is purposely designed to leverage the crystallized intellect as opposed to fluid intellect. That's why Engineering was considered a reputable trade in the past - because Engineers were supposed to have substantial crystallized intellect through their training. We were supposed to remember facts and figures and know how to repeatedly apply them in generally similar circumstances. That worked building a bridge, road, or well-site.

In contract, Architecture, relies much more on fluid intellect and the ability to imagine new, novel concepts. Most architects don't get paid very well (compared to Engineers), because (for now) our society doesn't value the architect's ability to produce novel concepts and ideas and instead values the Engineers ability to regurgitate established facts to solve specific problems.

What gives me the confidence to recover my daughter from her autistic symptoms is that Software Engineers like me are able to create automation bots that make those kinds of engineers redundant - and that process requires a synergy of both crystallized and fluid intellect.

A good software engineer has to have the ability to mentally regress almost into a child like state and view the world as it is: a chaotic whirlwind of infinite potential, and then to apply learnt development techniques to structure a completely new and novel order out of that same chaos.

That actually is the process of learning. It's quite a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that's sufficient of a generalization to make the point. (Fun side fact: almost EVERY software engineer in Silicon Valley microdoses either cannabis or psilocybin. So do most billionaires.)

Every autistic child is different, but I'm pretty I know the sub-processes that my daughter either lacks or that is dysfunctional and I know how to solve it. I'm actually a software tester and my job is to find bugs in software. Our cognitive functions are just like software.

That's what I categorize within the domain of the mind and spirit, what the Bible calls the psyche (soul) and the pneuma (breath), and just as ALL software has bugs, our internal psychological software has bugs as well. With autistic kids, it's just a matter of finding and fixing them.

Thing is, it's often the case in software engineering, and I think equally so within the human psyche that finding bugs can be easy, fixing can be VERY hard (or vice versa).

Anyways, I'm really just writing this because I know for me, one undesirable feature of my internal psychological software is my tendency to hyper analyze to the point I get lost in the details. What is uncharacteristic about me as an Engineer is that creative writing is one outlet that helps me clear those forms of thought paralysis (you should see my handwritten journals over the past 2 years).

Speaking also helps me as well, and if you're interested, I have been making a lot of videos on this topic over the past 8 months on my YouTube channel, which started off documenting my shooting escapades, but once I had identified shooting as becoming a harmful addiction, I re-purposed to focus (more) on autism recovery.

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole of my mind, please check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe9...A0ao8qw/videos

This video was my breaking point back during Christmas. The context of it was that I was "medicating" the pain of the impact of my daughter's autism (and more specifically, the pain it had on my wife) by shooting and buying guns... I'm at the point now, I think I'm ready to give up on shooting.

A few grams of bud are a lot cheaper than a new rifle and cases of surplus ammo...



Oh, I'm also pretty proud of the fact that with hypnosis and cannabis, I've get myself in the best physical shape of my life. I was a real fat-body before.



And of course, one of the 4 times I hit the range this year. I think I placed 5th/40 overall despite my screwups. I guess I should have been carrying more ammo or done more pushups.

In truth, I don't think I'll hit any matches next year.



I also was interviewed in CCFR's show Canada Down Range last year. I haven't seen it, but the guy in the OD 5.11 Tactec - that was me. I liked kitting up, wearing as much gear as possible, and doing pushups so I don't feel guilty about abandoning my wife and kids to "relax" shooting.

[DanN]

...once I had identified shooting as becoming a harmful addiction...

That might not be the only one at play here.

I wish you luck, and I wish you well. I'm sure you will do all you can to help your daughter - just don't forget to step back and not only enjoy watching her grow, but continue to enjoy life with your entire family.

[NickYYC]

That might not be the only one at play here.

Well the last time I checked in with my doctor, she told me my dosing was pretty typical of most patients, only she recommended I do more "off" days, which I'm on right now.

The thing about cannabis is that for recreational users, it's about inducing enough of a high to disassociate from reality.

As a medical user, I use it just enough to alleviate the symptoms of my illnesses: depression, anxiety, and insomnia.

To be honest, this attitude is why I'm not voting conservative (if I vote at all). Conservatives for years have held to this dogmatic belief that cannabis is this evil substance that rots your brain.

Certainly it has the potential (as do practically any pharmaceutical, as well as legal drugs, like alcohol and caffeine, but also environmental toxins, particularly news and social media), but dosed properly and with an informed mind, it is absolute miracle medicine.

The problem is all the propaganda on the War on Drugs basically lead to an intellectual black hole concerning something that should have been obvious.

Societies for hundreds of years before science was even invented knew cannabis was effective medicine, but with all our modern intellect and gadgetry we couldn't figure out something that pre-science societies figured out with ease.

You know when we talk about guns, "our side" likes to play up the idea that better mental health care is needed or that mental health is the cause of all gun violence; meanwhile, so many on "our side" hold to irrationally dogmatic and ill-informed beliefs about what is essentially a medical health panacea.

Medicinal cannabis saved my wife, my life, and my marriage.

When we first thought about using it, I was completely against the idea. I was a good "conservative."

Now I realize just how wrong "our side" has been, and how the consequence of that has been immeasurable human suffering.

If "our side" was wrong about that, what else have we been wrong about?

I wish you luck, and I wish you well. I'm sure you will do all you can to help your daughter - just don't forget to step back and not only enjoy watching her grow, but continue to enjoy life with your entire family.

Life isn't about enjoyment. I have very little enjoyment in my life.

I have purpose and meaning.

When enjoyment comes my way, I'm grateful for it.

But purpose and meaning, though not as enjoyable, vastly beat enjoyment.