As I mentioned, there can be a lot of guilt involved with raising a child with autism. What I didn’t mention, though, is the guilt from having a child with autism.

“It’s my fault,” you say. “I shouldn’t have vaccinated him,” “I shouldn’t have had that sip of wine,” “I shouldn’t have been in that extreme fighting cage match while 8 months pregnant,”... etc etc. Though your rational mind and your friends may reassure you that it wasn’t your fault, that darn guilt center in the dark recesses of your brain won’t listen. As soon as you start to feel better, the guilt center releases some viscous guilt hormone that floods your vessels and makes you feel like dirt again.

I could say that it’s not your fault and tell you to stop feeling guilty, but someone’s probably already told you that -- if no one has told you that yet... it’s not your fault, so stop feeling guilty. For those of you who persist with the pangs of guilt, though, try this technique recommended to me by my older daughter Madeline. It can work for anything that you feel bad about. I’ll preface this by saying that if you really did do something heinous, then you should try to make real amends first... this is just to alleviate any debilitating guilt that persists.

First, write down what you did (or think you did). Don’t hold back -- really let yourself have it. Then, take the paper and tear it up.

That’s it. If that didn’t work, you could do what my sister’s ex-boyfriend and I did to a humongous spider that bit my sister years back. I’ll spare you the gruesome details (lest some arachnid rights organization boycott me), but I will say that the ordeal (for the spider) ended with me burning its corpse with a magnifying glass in the sun (that’s what you do when you’re a boy with a magnifying glass) and the boyfriend running over it in his kickin’ gray Camaro with its two maroon racing stripes. That was a sweet car.

But if you don’t have the sweet car or the Texas sun and a magnifying glass, you could take the scraps of your guilt and burn them with a match (of course while abiding the applicable local fire regulations and whatever else needs to be done to avoid my getting sued), or bury them, or give them a stern talking to, or put them in God’s hands (figuratively, of course, unless you have some serious connections). Whatever you do, make sure that the paper, along with its poisonous message of guilt, is gone. Forever.

It’s not your fault.