The Situation

At the beginning of all this there is a very simple fact, and it has nothing to do with any theories. Your child does not respond. You call their name, you repeat it, you try to attract their attention in different ways — but the desired, almost dreamed-of response does not come. It is not that there is nothing there. It is not like staring into a black cosmic hole. Your child moves, looks, does things, sometimes with unbearable intensity. Only these are not the things you expect or hope for. The usual cycle — call, response, recognition — does not close.

At first you take this as a temporary disturbance. You fight fear and uncertainty, push back everything that could discourage you or make you give up. Give up what? Your own child. Horrified, you turn away: better dead than this. Then you come back to yourself. Enough pathos, enough theatre. Supposedly, with time, with the right approach, something will fall into place. At least that is what the specialists assure you — and of course they know much better than you do. At least that is what you believe at the beginning. You start speaking more clearly, simplifying, using gestures, routines, patience. And with time you really do begin to learn things. You learn how to avoid overload, how to anticipate reactions, how to stabilize situations that would otherwise fall apart. You even learn to live with the horror of the constant, painful waiting for the Miracle. From the outside, this may look like progress, even like the beginning of understanding. For you, this is life. A little like in Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

Of course, something remains unsettled. In fact, many things do, but you latch onto one. You simply don’t have the strength for more.

And then, one day, a casually inserted sentence hits you straight between the eyes. A phrase spoken by someone with many years of experience. A woman who has worked with autistic people for more than twenty years — reading, observing, accompanying them — remarks, almost in passing, that she will never truly understand them. There is no emphasis in her words, no trace of disappointment. They are simply there — the result of a long coexistence with a situation that has not resolved itself in the expected way. To you, they sound like a heavy stamp pressed onto a sentence. You shrink, you try to forget. And you go on.

Much later, after many years of painfully earned parental consolations — all of them sips of water in the desert — that sentence changes its weight. It no longer sounds like a personal limitation. It begins to describe a condition that lasts for a lifetime — not instead of learning, but alongside it.

The Promise

From the very beginning, this situation is surrounded by a language that suggests that what is happening can, in principle, be understood.

Doctors, therapists, books, institutions — all of them speak in slightly different ways, but the core message is remarkably stable. There are explanations for everything. There are solid models. There are functioning methods which, if applied correctly, will make the child’s behavior intelligible. The difficulty is not something that stays on your palate like the taste of something rotten, but something that can gradually be clarified and integrated into a coherent picture.

This promise is rarely stated directly. It is carried by tone, by structure, by the way people describe progress. Each new approach presents itself as a step beyond the previous one. Even uncertainty appears only as a temporary condition — a gap that will, in time, be filled.

For you, this creates a very specific horizon. The initial shock of not being able to reach your child is accompanied by the expectation that this inability is not final. You begin to think in stages, in interventions, in gradual improvements that will lead — if not to full clarity — then at least to something close enough to be called understanding.

And because this expectation is shared by almost everyone involved, it becomes difficult to question it. To doubt it means to step outside the common language in which the entire field operates.

What Actually Happens

Time passes, and something does indeed begin to happen. It would be false to say that nothing changes. On the contrary, you learn an enormous amount. The child becomes more predictable in certain situations. Signals appear — small, invisible to others, hints that can be recognized and used. You learn what triggers tension, what calms it, how to structure the day so that it does not collapse every few hours. Communication — limited, but real — gradually becomes less ghost-like.

From the outside, this can look like a movement toward understanding. The initial confusion gives way to a certain competence. Situations that once seemed chaotic become manageable.

But what develops is not access to the child’s inner world. It is a system of working relations.

You learn how to act in ways that produce certain responses, how to avoid others, how to maintain a fragile balance. Interaction becomes more reliable, without becoming transparent.

The original gap does not disappear. It becomes ordered.

And because daily life depends on this ordering, it is very easy to misinterpret it. The fact that you can now handle situations that once were unbearable creates the feeling that you have begun to understand what is happening. The system works better — and so it seems as if the problem is being solved.

But in fact, something else has taken place. The transition is from an inability to act to an ability to manage. This is real — and often necessary. But it does not answer the question that was asked at the beginning.

It simply pushes it back.

The Mistake

At this point, a confusion appears that we rarely question, because it is built into the language itself. The ability to handle a situation is taken as proof that it has been understood.

The transition is subtle. What begins as practical adaptation — avoiding overload, stabilizing interactions, guiding behaviour — is gradually reformulated as something deeper. As reactions become more predictable and a form of limited communication emerges, it seems natural to say that understanding has been achieved. Or at least that it is on the way.

But this step does not follow.

To manage a situation does not mean to know what it is. It is entirely possible to act effectively without having access to the inner structure of what one is facing. In fact, this is how complex systems are usually handled: through models that work without fully revealing their own foundations.

In the context of autism, this distinction usually disappears. The success of routines, the reliability of certain interactions, the reduction of visible tension — all of this feeds the belief that the original gap is closing.

The woman who, after twenty years, says she will never truly understand does not contradict the progress that has been made. She simply refuses to turn it into something it is not.

Her sentence reveals the mistake.

What Remains

Once this distinction is seen, something begins to shift — but not in the way one would expect. The problem does not disappear. The difficulty of reaching the child remains. The need for routines, for attention, for the constant mindset of a sapper does not lessen.

What changes is the pressure created by a promise that, in principle, cannot be fulfilled.

As long as understanding is set as the goal, every limitation appears as failure. The parent who cannot “read” the child, the therapist who cannot “reach” the inner world, the teacher who cannot make communication fully reciprocal — all of them remain, in a certain sense, not yet there.

And this is where the idea of understanding begins to cause damage.

It replaces a real, difficult but manageable situation with an abstract expectation that constantly rearranges experience according to an invisible standard. And because that standard is never clearly defined, it cannot be reached.

The woman who says she will never truly understand steps out of this structure. She does not reject what has been learned, nor deny what works. She simply refuses to call it something it is not.

What remains is more limited — but also more precise.

There is contact, but no transparency. There is communication, but no real access. There is a shared world, but it does not close into a single, unified perspective.

This is not a conclusion.

It is simply the point at which the expectation of understanding gives way to something else — something that does not need to be named in order to exist.