Autism>Fears

The Fears and Terrors of Autistic Children

Elemental instinctive psycho-biological panic reactions to fright, especially those of a baby’s premature awareness of bodily separateness from mother/carer

1. Bodily Terrors

especially when becoming aware of being a person and having a soft vulnerable body:

• part of their body will fall off, spill away, be lost, torn off
• feeling so small or meaningless, that they could fall apart/ dissolve/ disintegrate/ disappear down a small hole and never get bigger/ stronger/ grow up
• feeling so small they could be squashed like insects
• afraid that the sky might come crashing down on them

Experience of Skin:

• afraid that their skin or hair will wash, fall, rub or peel off
• damage to their sense of skin, holes in their shell, of being wounded
• pierced by sharp voices, nasty sights, ‘hard’ eyes
• having no skin, skin breaking, dissolving, leaking,

Bodily Holes:

• parts of themselves spilling, seeping, emptying out
• anything ‘bad‘ entering their body through their mouth, eyes, ears, nose, anus, genitals

2. Black Holes and Nothingness

• pervasive sense of despair, - of hope not lost but extinguished
• threat of not-being, - worse than the fear of dying
• fear of being dropped down a black hole, abandonned, lost, forgotten

Petrified by Grief

• devastated by wordless baby-experience of utter loss
• loss of a ‘something’ never found: to experience its loss, you have to have had the experience of having found something

Frozen with Terror

• a bottomless void having opened up before them with nothing to hold on to
• falling down endlessly into nothingness
• terrified of their own flaming rage and icy panics and of
• being burnt by their own rage/ exploding in their tantrum

Threatened by the Dread of Being

• attacked, or hacked to death, by archaic nameless monster-like terrors
• devoured by predatory mouths and savage creatures
• bitten up by sharp teeth, stabbing voices, driven out of their minds