Rethinking Autism

The Mirror and the Message: What Neurodivergent Children Are Here to Teach Us

I want to start this blog by saying very clearly: I’m not an expert in autism. I’m not here to diagnose, debate, or convince anyone of anything. But I am a mother and I am someone who views the world through a spiritual lens—a lens shaped by lived experience, inner work, and an ongoing commitment to healing the layers within myself.

Both of my children would be considered “not neurotypical” by today’s definitions. And rather than seeing that as something to fix or fear, I’ve come to see it as one of the greatest gifts I’ve been given. Because these children—all children, really, but especially those who don’t fit neatly into the boxes society builds—have held up a mirror not just to my parenting, but to my nervous system, my triggers, my pace, my need to control, my wounds.

And that mirror hasn’t always been easy to look into. It’s shown me where I was disconnected, dysregulated, or still operating from fear. But it’s also shown me something profoundly beautiful: a way of seeing the world that’s not distorted by performance, people-pleasing, or egoic noise. A deeper frequency that’s raw, honest and present,

This blog isn’t focusing on the causes of neurodivergence, it’s about something bigger—what these children are here to teach us. About consciousness, healing and ourselves.

Whether you’re spiritual, sceptical, or somewhere in between, I invite you to read with an open heart. Because maybe, just maybe, these kids aren’t here to be brought up to our level. Maybe they’re here to bring us back to something we forgot.

The Limits of the Earthly Framework

I’m writing this after being deeply moved by the Telepathy Tapes—a body of work that challenges everything we think we know about how communication works, particularly with non-verbal children. It was like someone handed me a lens I didn’t realise I’d been missing. A lens that not only made sense of what I’d felt intuitively for years, but also expanded my understanding of what these children are here to show us.

During my time running When Push Comes to Shove, I’ve had the privilege and heartbreak of speaking with hundreds, possibly even thousands, of parents. Parents who have shared stories of devastation: how their child changed after a vaccine, a traumatic birth, or exposure to toxins. I’ve spoken with mothers who’ve grieved the moment they lost the spark in their baby’s eyes. Fathers who’ve watched their child scream for hours and felt powerless to help. Families who’ve turned their whole lives inside out looking for answers. It still astounds me that these families are ignored, gaslighted and even labelled conspiracy theorists just because they have witnessed change in their children after vaccines.

But I’ve also listened to parents whose children were born gently at home, into peace and calm. No interventions, no jabs, organic food, no screens and yet still profound neurodivergence. Non-verbal, self-harming, no sense of danger and no idea why.

This is the part that compels me to speak because when we only search for earthly causes, whether that’s vaccines, environmental toxins, birth trauma, or even epigenetic wounds, we’re still looking through the lens of physicality. And while those factors are absolutely valid and must be acknowledged, I believe they don’t give us the full picture.

There’s a macro view we’re missing. And that view asks us not just to examine what’s happened to the body, but to ask a much more confronting question: What if these children didn’t come here to be like us? What if they came here to wake us up?

I’ll go deeper into that in the next section, but for now, just feel into that possibility. That the child in front of you, who doesn’t speak, or doesn’t comply, or doesn’t behave the way they “should,” might not be malfunctioning… They might be broadcasting from a frequency we’ve forgotten how to hear.

From Cause and Effect to Frequency and Form: A New Lens on Neurodivergence

Let’s start in a way that satisfies the logical mind. Two children, same home, same meals, same jabs. One goes on to develop severe autism traits—non-verbal, no sense of danger, sensory overwhelm, violent outbursts. The other? Neurotypical and unscathed.

If we’re staying within the conventional lens, we’d scratch our heads and call it bad luck, bad genes, or bad science. But that answer doesn’t satisfy anyone who’s actually lived through it.

So we go deeper.

Some now look to the emotional root cause of illness. A body of thought, now increasingly supported by somatic science, trauma-informed therapy, and mind-body medicine, suggests that where and how we store unprocessed emotional pain plays a major role in how our body reacts to external stressors, including medical interventions.

For example, two people may receive the same COVID-19 vaccine. One walks away seemingly unaffected. The other develops heart palpitations, chronic fatigue, autoimmunity, neurological issues, or even sudden cardiac episodes. Why? Because the body isn’t a blank canvas. It’s a living history book written not just in DNA, but in emotion, memory, and meaning.

Unresolved grief, for instance, is often held in the chest. When someone has experienced profound loss but never fully processed it—maybe because they had to "be strong," or were too young to understand—it doesn't just disappear. That pain is held & stored. The body remembers, lungs constrict & the heart tightens. Then, when a foreign substance is introduced, such as an injection that the body perceives as a threat, the area already under emotional strain may be the first to respond. We might see heart inflammation, breathlessness & panic, but few connect the dots.

Let’s take anger, for example,especially the kind that's been buried or internalised, is often stored in the liver. It's the part of us that wants to assert boundaries, to say "no," to express rage that may have been shut down in childhood. When that anger is never metabolised, the energy stagnates. And what do we see in recent years? Aggressive, fast-moving liver cancers are being reported post-vaccine in people with no obvious physical risk factors. Again, the mainstream looks for a genetic explanation. But the emotional root is often overlooked.

We could go on:

• The gut and anxiety

• The throat and unspoken truth.

• The skin and self-rejection. Because the truth is: the body doesn’t lie.

  None of this is abstract—it’s the lived reality of thousands who’ve begun to link their physical symptoms to the emotional terrain beneath them. And while we can throw all sorts of labels at what’s happening—post-viral syndrome, vaccine injury, autoimmune disease—none of those terms explain why that person, at that moment, in that specific organ system had that response.

That answer lives deeper. The body doesn’t just respond to what happens to it. It responds to the meaning it has silently carried for years. This gets us into terrain that many avoid because it challenges the comfort of a tidy diagnosis. But this is the terrain of healing. That doesnt mean ‘managing’ or ‘suppressing’. Healing.

And while understanding emotional root causes gets us a bit closer to the truth, it still isn’t the full picture. Because even trauma has layers, and some souls may have chosen to arrive with a completely different blueprint altogether.

Let’s look at that next; this is where things start to open up.

Because we’re now talking about more than cause and effect. We’re talking about the relationship between consciousness and matter—how the invisible impacts the visible.

We can go further still, into generational trauma. The science of epigenetics tells us that stress and unresolved trauma can be passed down—literally imprinted on DNA expression. So a child born into a “perfectly calm” environment may still be carrying inherited trauma from war, abuse, systemic oppression, or ancestral grief they’ve never personally experienced. And that child may have a lower threshold for external stressors—even those that appear benign to others. This brings us closer to the macro view.

But we’re still operating in the realm of reaction.

Now let’s zoom out even further. What if these children aren’t just reacting to trauma or toxins? What if their very being is a kind of message—an embodied invitation for humanity to see itself more clearly?

What if they’re not here to adapt to this world, but to show us that this world is no longer fit for the soul?

The Mirror of Frequency: What These Children Are Reflecting Back to Us

When we stop trying to pathologise everything outside of the norm, something magical happens: we begin to listen, not with our ears, but with our nervous systems and hearts.What if these kids are not broken, but attuned to a frequency we’ve forgotten how to hold?

We live in a society that praises performance, noise, speed, intellect, and control. But these children, particularly those labelled autistic or neurodivergent, often reject all of that. Not consciously, but energetically. They recoil from artificiality. They struggle with environments that are loud, fast, overwhelming or emotionally incoherent. They can feel when we’re not being real and they know when we’re bloody pretending.

And the more dysregulated we are, the more they act out. But what if that’s not misbehaviour? What if it’s feedback? I think they are showing us one giant mirror of how fucked up our collective state is as a society.

I’ve seen time and time again that when an autistic child is having an outburst, what they often need is not a behaviour chart or a new label—it’s attunement. Not control, silence, or forced eye contact.

Attunement.

That means being present with them without an agenda. Meeting them where they are, not where we think they should be. Slowing down enough to notice the subtle contractions in their body—the way they rock, or stim, or glance sideways before making a sound. These are not random. They’re communications are on a different bandwidth, and when we respond with presence something opens.

When we become coherent, they feel safe. We stop trying to fix and we start to feel. And in that space, healing becomes possible, not just for the child, but for us.

Because they are not just here for our sympathy. They are here to show us ourselves.

• To show us how far we’ve strayed from the language of the soul.

• To show us how disconnected we’ve become from the body.

• To show us how desperately we try to control what we don’t understand, instead of simply being with it.

And that’s why this goes beyond autism. This is about all of us. About how humanity has externalised everything—healing, power, truth, safety, when it’s actually an inside job.

So many of us were never met in the way we needed to be. We were trained to perform, please and obey. But these children aren’t here to repeat that cycle; they’re not wired to fake it.

They are here to shatter illusions. And that’s uncomfortable. But if we have the courage to thank the mirror instead of blaming it, the entire dynamic shifts. Because the moment we stop asking, “How do I fix my child?” And start asking, “What is this child showing me about myself?” That’s when the healing begins.

We Came Here to Remember

There is a quiet revolution unfolding here but it’s not marked by force or fury, but by frequency. These children are not here to fit in, I believe they’re here to show us where we’ve lost ourselves, where our systems are out of sync. They point to where we’ve traded presence for productivity, soul for strategy, and truth for tolerance.

We were taught to believe that intelligence looks a certain way. That communication must be spoken, that behaviour must be controlled, and that success means conformity. But these children defy all of that. And perhaps that is precisely the point. Maybe they are not here to be trained into this world. Maybe they are here to re-train us, back into something we’ve forgotten.

When we stop pathologising their differences and start observing our own reactions, we begin to see the real work. It’s not about fixing them—it’s about feeling ourselves. Our discomfort, our frustration, our fear, our need to have things make sense. These children bring that all to the surface, not to torment us, but to teach us. They are the mirror. And they will hold it—fiercely, unflinchingly—until we are willing to look.

And if we’re brave enough to look, we’ll see what they see: that we are out of rhythm with life. That we are rushing, numbing, performing, pretending. That we live in a society where coherence has been replaced with control. Where presence has been buried beneath productivity. Where stillness is feared, and yet, it’s in stillness that we finally meet ourselves—and them.

This blog is not a conclusion or a diagnosis, a protocol, or a theory to debate. It’s an invitation to soften and pause. To ask deeper questions about what these children are here to do, beyond the labels and the interventions and the therapies. Because maybe they’re not here to rise to our level of functioning. Maybe they’re here to bring us back down to the truth.

We came here to remember.
And they are showing us the way.

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