By Christel Broederlow
I sincerely believe that children with Autism, Asperger’s, ADHD and similar are born with the strongest degree of empathy on the planet. I’ve been very blessed to be around a family of 5 children who were all diagnosed with Autism and/or Asperger’s who came to visit my family and I some years ago.
My sons are all natural empaths and soon after Mum and the children arrived, Mum noticed something very peculiar, how calm her children were in our presence. She continued to visit for some weeks after. Mum rarely ventured out of the house because the children were extremely sensitive to strangers and unfamiliar surroundings and on the rare occasion she did do so, she found it incredibly stressful.
With each visit I could sense that the children were calm in our presence, a calmness Mum had only seen when her children were with their puppy (the very reason we met), and here they were feeling quite ‘at home’ with us. We also visited the family at their home and each time the children were calm around us, why, because they could sense our empathy which resonated subconsciously with the children.
Over the years I’ve been around other children with the same diagnosis and continuously sensed how incredibly sensitive they were and equally misunderstood. Go back to an experience in your memory where your empathy was at its strongest and amplify that energy tenfold that is what they experience in every moment of their lives. Their emotional sensory goes into overload and trying to distinguish this is hard enough for adults let alone little bubs and children. The way they view the world is through their all powerful empathy, their innate (natural) sense is acutely attuned to energy, all matter of energy. They can sense in advance what type of human energy is about to walk in the room or is around them and will respond accordingly. Even in a group of people, if just one person’s energy is off (overloaded, intense, high strung, stressed etc.) they can sense whom it is coming from.
I believe that the rocking, fidgeting or movement of hands is their response to calming the amount of energy that has built up in and around them. The more intense the vibrational energy the more they rock etc. to create a disbursement of that energy, in a word, they are dissolving how much they feel because it just feels way too intense for them. The calmer the environment, the more content they are, (this is my sense of it all from what I have both sensed and observed).
It’s kind of like the different frequency of music, if its heavy metal that energy will be intense which will affect their energy levels, if it is meditative and soothing it has a calming energy. We are all responsive to the energy that music emits, but for these children all forms of energy they are far more sensitive too.
My twin sons were born 11 weeks premature at 3lb 12 and 3lb 13oz, they were non-identical twins however their placenta’s ‘fused together as one’, which was a rarity in the medical world who believed that when this occurred, the twins would have even stronger traits then that of identical twins, which inevitably would be proven to my husband and I.
By the time they were ready to start school I was a nervous wreck, for they had the most beautiful purity about them that I had not ever sensed before let alone experienced and I feared society would taint that purity with its ugliness. In the first year of school the teachers noted that my then 5 year old twin sons were always fidgeting in class and never paid attention and asked if they could get in a specialist to observe them over the coming weeks, which we permitted them to do. The report came back astounding the specialist and the teachers, in their findings my twins totally ignored the teacher in every lesson, every single day and doodled at the back of the class or looked everywhere else but at the teacher and yet when asked what the teacher had just taught, they were both able to recall in great detail. The report also found they both had an above average IQ.
As they grew, mainstream school was always incredibly overwhelming for them and by the age of 14 years they could no longer bare to be at school and eventually I pulled them out and put them into a technical institute for adults where they excelled. I knew it was the maturity of the environment that appealed to their senses, it was much calmer and yes the people were mature (in energy).
They are extremely sensitive to energy (that of people) and had been bringing home wounded or stray animals for as long as I can recall and I knew that would eventually become people, friends and even kids they didn’t know who were living on the streets or going through tough times would be brought home. They were always highly protective of anyone who got bullied at school and even as they became adults they would continue to defend the ‘underdog’. They have the most beautiful loving nature and are so compassionate to life, Mother Nature, animals and people and cannot fathom when people hurt others, they simply cannot comprehend why? As parents it’s not easy to watch others act with ignorance towards our children when we see what kinds of affects it has on them. I had some battles over the years with schools and teachers who quite frankly lacked empathy on even the smallest level.
My twins learning ability really suffered when we moved from our home country New Zealand to Australia. Over a period of a few years I was constantly demanding the school to acknowledge how much they were suffering and to test them, it wasn’t learning support they needed, it was far more than that. Finally after my ongoing persistence they were both tested. The eldest twin was doing far better but the younger twin had fallen behind a few years, I was in the least bit surprised to hear that. He was put into a ‘Special Education’ class with children who had either been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, Autism, Asperger’s or other severe learning disabilities. Within a short space of time, my sons learning hyper jumped and we were all truly delighted with the obvious results. These kids were just like my son, extremely sensitive and all born with very strong empathy. He had a profound effect on his classmates and his teacher who would all become such beautiful friends; they were a joy for me to be around.
The method of learning was anything but mainstream, it was hands-on, fun and interactive and stimulating to their senses and wow what a world of difference it made. These babies are not analytical, quite frankly it absolutely bores them. Teaching must be creative and flowing around energy be it the movement of colour, sounds, numbers and touch and awaken their senses, if its monotone they will switch off and lose focus. They are the most stimulating children in the right environment.
We must not settle for less, and always be observant of our children’s needs and act on their behalf for there are schools like the Montessori who specialize in educating gifted children. It is also up to us as parents to educate the uneducated, our children aren’t just special with special needs, they are truly gifted, all our babies are, and they simply are not recognized for their individual gifts that they bring into this world. They are all treated the same, which is both ignorant and arrogant in mainstream education and throughout the societies in which we live.
Christel Broederlow
© 2014 The Universal Empath 101