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Autism, Consciousness, and The Love Revolution with Dr. Julia Mossbridge · Inchstones with Sarah | Autism Advocacy & Caregiver Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to an incredibly special episode I have today here with neuroscience doctor Julia Mossbridge. She is a cognitive neuroscience and consciousness researcher and it is launch day for her book, have a Night Exposure. I am thrilled to be able to do one of the first podcast interviews since the launch this morning. And the thoughts and the reflections on love and the interconnectedness that we all share is something that we hit on in a separate interview and realized, oh, goodness, we need to do this one on one and to dive deep into what it means to live from a higher consciousness and a higher awareness. Dr. Juliet, thank you so much for being here today on Inch Stones.
• 0:53
  Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Sarah. And thanks for wearing your beautiful gold sweater on launch day.
• 1:00
  Speaker A: I guess it matches. You know, this is one of those things. It's actually not even a sweater material. It's so soft and fuzzy inside.
• 1:06
  Speaker B: It's beautiful.
• 1:07
  Speaker A: Thank you.
• 1:08
  Speaker B: Shiny.
• 1:08
  Speaker A: Thank you. So, you know, before we begin, you hold space for so many of the different shared experience and lived experience of non speakers and it's become so foundational to your work. So before we dive in, I want to say thank you because as the audience I serve of women, mothers and caregivers of children with profound autism and that are non speakers, it is such a get to know and continue to connect with the researchers who are doing the work that augment and reflect the things that we see every second of every day being in the presence of our children. So I wanted to hold space for that first because there is never enough time to sign the gratitude for the work that you do. So thank you for that.
• 1:57
  Speaker B: Wow. Thank you that I've just begun. I'm excited to be doing more in the coming year and I could tell you more about that, but in the short period of time that I've been doing this, well, you know, I shouldn't say I've just begun because for my whole life I've been studying different kinds of what we call anomalous cognition, different ways of thinking than sort of normally flow with neurotypicals. Even as a kid, I studied anomalous cognition in my family by force in the sense of how else was I going to survive?
• 2:32
  Speaker A: So we both share fathers that are physicists, which is no surprise.
• 2:37
  Speaker B: It actually, which also means we both share fathers who have some form of ocd and probably on the autism spectrum, without a doubt. Yes. If I can say that confidently without having met your father, it's almost if.
• 2:49
  Speaker A: You met him and I bet your dad and your. My dad would actually get along Famously. Or sit very near, as you know, s isomers of each other.
• 2:56
  Speaker B: Totally. Chirality would be perfect. Yeah. But specifically working with non speakers, that started in March of this year, and that's been profound. Like, I feel like I found my people.
• 3:11
  Speaker A: What a. I mean, that's a luxury. To know that you say that. To have found your calling and your people, and to. To say it with such joy and depth and groundedness below it. That's amazing.
• 3:25
  Speaker B: Well, yeah, because these people, I mean, so when you're a smart woman who's very creative and thinks outside the box, as they say. Although that phrase irritates me because I was like, the box is like this tiny part of the. Like, where's the box? I have no idea.
• 3:38
  Speaker A: I've never been even part of the.
• 3:39
  Speaker B: Box, but can't even locate the box. But when you're a woman who's like that, your experience is different than. Than men who are like that.
• 3:48
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 3:49
  Speaker B: And so I've been hearing a lot because I work a lot in technology and science, and I hear a lot from men who are my age or older. So I'm in my 50s. Men who are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. And they talk about how, oh, as soon as they realized how smart I was, they, you know, I skipped grades and then they took me out of school and then they. I started working for the government and all these things. And I'm like, interesting. That's not how I was treated, even though I had the same test scores.
• 4:13
  Speaker A: Right.
• 4:14
  Speaker B: And. And so it's being with people who are like that and who are not sort of defending their status, who are really, really brilliant, but aren't defending their status and are not sort of used to the egoic competition about, like, who's smarter, yada, yada. That's what it feels like to be with non speakers. Here are people who see and experience the same things that I do, and they know they know about things in the same way that I do from the inside out.
• 4:44
  Speaker A: Very.
• 4:46
  Speaker B: I haven't met a non speaker who's like, well, I'm better than that. Per. I mean, maybe. I'm sure that might exist, but I have not met a non speaker who's into that egoic thing. It just feels like that's much more left hemisphere. And non speakers seem to me to be coming more from the right hemisphere in most of what they do. So, yeah, it really does feel that way.
• 5:06
  Speaker A: Tell me then, as it is launch day for your book, what are you most proud of in sharing the process of writing it you said it's about 100 page, you know, digestible book. It's not nothing too lengthy. What do you feel most proud of with it? I cannot wait to delve in and, and and experience it as a mother to non speakers. Hopefully we learn ethically required to do as a humanity.
• 5:33
  Speaker B: I love that question. What are we ethically required to do? So there's two things that come to mind. One is I love that book. It's my favorite book of all my books. And that's not always true. Like sometimes I'll publish a book and I'll say it's okay, but it's not. I don't like it as much as that book. This book is my favorite book of all my books. Because I said exactly what I wanted to say, exactly how I wanted to say it. And I didn't apologize to anybody. I was like, sorry, this is the thing. And that's just feels so freeing. I feel very free about it. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I want people to know about it is that freedom comes from telling my truth. So in the book I not only tell my truth when I'm writing this story to help people feel the connection between their insides and the outside world and the. And the spirituality and the love in that connection. So that's. But then that had its own act like it had its own act of power on me just writing about that. I wasn't going to include the second part of the book. It was going to even be 60 pages.
• 6:37
  Speaker A: Right. And the second part being what you realized?
• 6:40
  Speaker B: The second part is as I went through that process again, as I was helping people go through it, obviously I was helping myself go through it again, this recognition of my own disclosure. And I realized I had to speak the truth and really investigate my own experiences as a kid being in this special gifted and talented program. And I put gifted and talented in air quotes because it was really creepy. Now before I sort of go into that program and why. What that has to do with ethics, I want to be very clear. Gifted and talented programs are very important. They bring people who are thinking differently are really just too smart or too not smart, too exploratory in certain ways of thinking for the mainstream. And they really need to be opened up and allowed freedom to explore in some. Some particular subset of their intellect or their creativity. Gifted and talented programs are fantastic. So I do not want to put down gifted and talented education at all. It's very important. Okay, so the part that I objected to is I was put in this gifted and talented program without permission from my parents. So I told them I was in it. And then I told them the parts that I felt comfortable telling them about, and there were parts that I didn't feel comfortable telling them about. And that's weird. So the parts I felt comfortable telling them about is like, well, they tested my IQ like 30 times different ways. Like, that's insane. I know how to take an IQ test, let me tell you. And this is ridiculous. And, and you know, my mother at the time was getting her master's degree at Northwestern in. In learning disabilities. She ended up leading a school for people with non speaking autism in northern Illinois. So it's very interesting that I learned from her in some things. But she did an IQ test as part of her training. They had to learn how to do IQ tests. And so everyone used their kids, Right? So I came in to do an IQ test. I was like, oh, this again, old hat.
• 8:48
  Speaker A: It's like sitting at a therapist, you're like, what do you want to know?
• 8:53
  Speaker B: Okay, and the next question is going to test my spatial memory, right?
• 8:57
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 8:58
  Speaker B: All right. Oh, you guys are all really happy about my auditory memory being so good, right?
• 9:02
  Speaker A: Wait till you get to the next question. I'll tell you.
• 9:05
  Speaker B: Great. So. So that was weird, but that was kind of like, okay, I get it. For a gift Intelligent program, you're going to want to know, like, did we get in? What way is she really, like, why is she different? You know, there's. They're clearly studying me. I get that. Okay, maybe feel a little special. It gets weirder. So like we would go every week, we being like, me and one other person from the gifted intelligent program would go every week to the nurse's office and get our hearing hearing tested. And I'm putting that in air quotes because I actually studied psychoacoustics in graduate school and I actually know what a good hearing test is. And those were not hearing tests. They were. They were giving us bizarre little but much higher frequency than I just produced tones, especially in our left ears. And they were having us do weird exercises with the tones. Probably related to whatever the Monroe Institute was doing at the time, I'm guessing. And that guess I don't know for sure, but that's based on the follow up program. So my program was called soar, which creepily stands for students on active Research. It stood for that when they first came out. That's a creepy name.
• 10:11
  Speaker A: What year did that come out?
• 10:12
  Speaker B: Well, soar came out near Augusta, Georgia first as far as I can tell. In the early 70s.
• 10:21
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:21
  Speaker B: And then I was in Illinois and they changed the acronym to something like also creepy, like Scholarly Opportunities in the Academic Realm, which also, like, you guys are bad at acronyms. You need to have us figure out the acronym. Right, right. At least we can help you with that.
• 10:40
  Speaker A: So we could do the work for you and give you a free acronym for it.
• 10:44
  Speaker B: Please.
• 10:46
  Speaker A: My gosh.
• 10:48
  Speaker B: So anyway, it started down there. It started with the wife of. I'm just saying this because she's dead already. I read this in her obituary. She's the wife of a man who was at the Savannah River Nuclear Lab. And then, interestingly, both the counselor and. And that ran the program or set up the program in our schools up in Illinois. And my teacher had relationships to Savannah River Nuclear Lab through their husbands. So this is like. So that's an interesting read. And over the course of the book, the end of the book, I won't tell the whole thing, but basically I come to the conclusion that they were the government or government contractors. It doesn't matter. Because if government contractors are working for the government, the government should, you know, be aware of what they're doing, and they're responsible for what they're doing. Whomever it was was administering this program. They were studying the effects of radiation, ionizing and non ionizing radiation, and whether it was from our parents, because everyone in my class had a tie to the federal government. My dad worked for the Department of Energy. My best friend, her father was army reservist, but then her uncle worked for Department of Energy. It goes on. There was an Air Force kid, et cetera, et cetera, no matter who was administering the program. And I just want to just say this very carefully. I don't know who was administering the program. I also don't know who. Where the program originated. But whoever was doing that for the government was doing it, I believe, to do something good. I believe that they believed they were doing something good. I believe that they risk a nurse.
• 12:30
  Speaker A: Something positive from the humanity of children.
• 12:33
  Speaker B: That were put into radiation. Right. Like, let's screen for people who had a positive, like, who had these, like, special skills as a result of it. I mean, it sounds like a comic book.
• 12:42
  Speaker A: It does.
• 12:43
  Speaker B: Right.
• 12:44
  Speaker A: But at the same time, you think someone thought of this, and it does have some roots that potentially are ethically really positive. So I. I applaud that. You know, I would feel the same way. Maybe that's the. The, you know, mindset that I try to lead with as well. But yes, continue yes, exactly.
• 13:01
  Speaker B: The reason you and I both feel that way is because we know that we have experience going through times when things are really rough and you. And you have to go through the trauma, you have to go through the recognition. I'm not even talking about my lack of memory of what happened in this little room with me and this woman and then this woman and her husband. I know that they were there. I know that I would go down the hall, I could see the lockers. I would dread the walk there. Something would happen in the room every week and then I would leave and I would dread the walk back. But that like, that was related to this program probably. It was the counselor of the school and her husband, both air Force related. So who knows what I was doing in that room and what I was trained to do. There was weird thing like drinks they gave us. That was. There was weird, weird crap. Right?
• 13:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 13:47
  Speaker B: But I have been through the part of my life where I've been like, all right, my family was. Was difficult. There was a lot of mental illness, a lot of eccentricity, a lot of some fr. Neglect and abuse. And what I learned from that process is that when you come out the other side, like it's really important to disclose to yourself what went on and to, to be in therapy and to work with it or however you need to work with it with a mental health practitioner. And then when you get to the other side, you recognize everyone was doing the best they could, period. Yes. And so there is this program or has been this program and I'm not convinced it doesn't still exist. But anyway, there was this program in the 80s, there was this program in the 90s, there was this program in the aughts. And it has gotten a little bit of more relationship with the non speaker world in the following way. So in my class there weren't any non speakers because that was in 1980, 1981. No one was, you know, there was no integration of the classroom in the aughts. A fellow named Jordan Jozak, you can find him. I think he goes by Merciful Martin on X. He's out of the, out of the closet now. Talking about his time in the aughts, being taken away from his family and put in a day program. They tried to make it a boarding school or maybe it was a boarding school, I forget. But anyway, for people who had were, you know, special education program and they diagnosed him with all sorts of mental illness, which seems a little bit like fake to me, like all of too many diagnoses for One person.
• 15:15
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 15:16
  Speaker B: Like everything from giving them all just.
• 15:19
  Speaker A: Under the assumption that one or two might.
• 15:22
  Speaker B: Well, right. And also by the way, with mentally ill students that's not the same thing as special education. So it just seems like a cover story. So anyway, he ended up in a school where primarily it was autistic non speakers in him. And what he knows is that he was asked to interact with what, what he says is that he was asked to interact psychically with non human intelligences.
• 15:44
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 15:45
  Speaker B: And give them information. And about that, that was his experience that he talks about. And he doesn't remember if the other students were there, but he assumes that they were, you know, they had a principal who gave them, you know, drugs, like, I don't know how else to say it, like mind altering drugs. So like there's, there's an ethical problem here and there's also a solution and that's why the non speaker community I feel needs to get really involved.
• 16:11
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 16:12
  Speaker B: In what's going on with your kid. Now many well resourced parents would never let this happen to their kids.
• 16:19
  Speaker A: Right.
• 16:19
  Speaker B: But Jordan and I, we both came from families who were like divorced parents. There was all sorts of mayhem. Like they don't know what's going on. Not only were they not asked about it at first anyway, in Jordan's case and never in my case, they wouldn't be around to ask what were you going to do?
• 16:33
  Speaker A: Where were they? Right, right.
• 16:36
  Speaker B: So it was like in de facto. Now in Jordan's case, his mother was much more on top of it and was able to, you should talk to him about that separately. But, but if there are or have been non speakers who have been asked to be screened for psychic abilities because of course that's what they did with. I do remember that part of my training or screening and certainly Jordan was they should be get informed consent. Their parents should give informed consent and the child should give informed assent. So children cannot give consent because they're not of legal age, but they need to give informed assent, which is a human subjects research term, which means they need to understand what the protocol is to meet the people doing the research, to understand the risks and to say okay, I want to do this period, period. And that has been known as a human subject standard in the intelligence community from the 70s.
• 17:30
  Speaker A: Right.
• 17:31
  Speaker B: So the fact that this was going on after that was already known to be an ethical problem is an issue if you assume that these contractors or the government intelligence communities were involved and if it's still going on in the aughts It's a further issue.
• 17:48
  Speaker A: I know it shouldn't become some bleh. It shouldn't seem such a surprise to me because that doesn't seem that long ago. And I want.
• 17:56
  Speaker B: It's not that long ago.
• 17:58
  Speaker A: Not that long ago. And as some. I mean I graduated high school in 2001 and. And I'm sitting here thinking about my own experience in public school and those gifted and talented programs and I believe I know that I'm going to go through my own journey and reading have a nice discernment.
• 18:14
  Speaker B: Have a nice disclosure. But I like how you renamed it have a nice discernment.
• 18:17
  Speaker A: Sorry, my own discernment right now. Yes, but no, have a nice disclosure that the what and the who and the why and these ethical questions. I mean it's my. I don't know, my body right now is brewing.
• 18:31
  Speaker B: It does make you angry. And it at the same time, what I always come up with because I work with. I live in the D.C. area. My neighbors and some of my friends are involved in the intelligence community. I really respect them. I have a colleague who does a podcast with me, Carmen Medina. She used to be the deputy director of analysis at CIA. I heard. She's one of the people I respect most in the world. Right. I don't think this is a thing where like, oh, those bad people are just doing bad things. This is not an us versus them thing. This is like someone felt so compelled that it was so important for our country and maybe humanity to understand different ways of thinking, to understand. My bet is to understand the effect of radiation on students that they administered this program for decades and they also felt that they better keep it quiet or else some problems would happen. I don't know what those problems are, but like we are in the age of disclosure now. Speaking of films that are coming out soon.
• 19:36
  Speaker A: Right.
• 19:38
  Speaker B: And so it's like it's time to just say everyone was doing the best they could with the information they had at the time. We can do better. I still think it might be very important based on what I've seen working with non speakers to harness their capacities to do good in the world. Absolutely. I think that might be very important. But we have to do it in an ethical and sustainable way, full stop, period.
• 20:03
  Speaker A: And to do it from I think so much about the population I serve of these women and mothers and caregivers with this deep maternal instinct and desire to bring their children to the best version of themselves, to do exactly what you said to provide such meaning to what the next age of understanding and of ethical, you know, improvements for our world. And I don't see there being any other pocket of leaders like mothers aligning with what you're saying. We want it ethically sound and to have everyone rise from this. Of course, there's no not to. And I'll tell you, this likely adds more work to the day to day, and that's okay. It's amazing when you realize how deeply a mission can be embedded in a way that lifts everyone else to then create more energy for you to keep going. And I think that the audience that listens to this would feel so fueled by this work, self healed, because that's.
• 21:08
  Speaker B: Who it needs to do it. I'll tell you, as mothers, we have this experience of I created this being. I mean, yes, like this being came out of me, you know, or if you adopt a child, this being was delivered to me by the universe. Right. So it's like this being has been magically brought to me, no matter how this baby got to me. And all I want is for the universe to see and honor and cherish the gifts that this being has.
• 21:37
  Speaker A: Right.
• 21:38
  Speaker B: And so I feel like we're the ones who. We really get diversity of thought because, you know, like, you can see there's diversity of thought even between you and one child, Even if you have one child, if you have two child children, there's a diversity of thought between you and the children and your partner. And, you know, it's just. And none of that is not to be loved.
• 21:58
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 21:58
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 22:00
  Speaker A: You and I hit so many deeply beautiful pressure points together. But the unconditional love that is so centered in both of our work, while we're in different, you know, obviously genres of. Of this level of consciousness work, it hits so deeply because it is true, Julia, that the being that we have for children, or even just in the work that I'm doing to elevate others doing, it feels so unconditionally full of love.
• 22:26
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:27
  Speaker A: Without a doubt. There is nothing else that can rattle that because it's so tied to my maternal instinct.
• 22:35
  Speaker B: Yeah. And this is not to say if you don't have children, you don't have that. It's just that what we're talking about, right? Because there are people, I mean, there are, first of all, there are men who have that right. Who are parents and who are not parents. There's women without children who still have that. So it's just that it's something that is easily accessible, I think. I mean, you can even say this Scientifically, like one of the most accessible ways to ask people about unconditional love is, you know, are you a mother? Do you have a child?
• 23:03
  Speaker A: It's again, it's so primal. It's so. There's so much evolutionary discussion about it, whether or not current science wants to augment and support or not. It is so deeply baked in. And you can go to any group of mothers, whatever their children are, and you will likely have a resounding 100% raise their hand and say, yes, I feel that.
• 23:22
  Speaker B: Yeah. And maybe they might say, well, I did feel that when my baby was born. And like sometimes I have a hard time because now my kid's like, you know, 17.
• 23:30
  Speaker A: Right.
• 23:32
  Speaker B: But it's there somewhere. It's an experience in the repertoire. Yeah, yeah. So I feel like the future, I feel. So if I had to put, you know, what comes to my mind is if I had to put my finger on what non speakers can offer us as we move into this, what I call the love revolution. The non speaker revolution is a love revolution. Like that is the big message.
• 23:55
  Speaker A: Right.
• 23:56
  Speaker B: And it feels like what they have to offer is sort of, if you have to put an analytical or a conceptual label on it is the deep awareness that the insides of ourselves are bigger and more important and influential than the outsides. And so because they evidence all the time this capacity to connect on the inside. So what does that mean? That means like in a practical way, what that means is good luck with secrets.
• 24:27
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 24:28
  Speaker B: Which is really radical. Like if you take that from your family and culturally, like good luck with secrets. And love has physical influence. It's not just, just a feeling, it's not just a human weakness. It's in fact like a natural force that they tap into that they can show us how to tap into. But that's not their job and they.
• 24:58
  Speaker A: Don'T consider it their job either. I think that's what's so beautiful about it. With the removal. I think you say they don't even lack an attachment in any egoistical manner at all. That the beauty is that they almost bring about the physical, like you say, the love revolution of it to those that experience it. And I know that one of the gifts that I have in being their mother is experiencing that over and over again. But then when it's experienced by others in the most natural of ways, without any ego driven desire to do anything but to just share from the inside.
• 25:40
  Speaker B: Universal love is like a natural force. And the experience of that connection is unconditional love. So it's all in there together. It's all this grand awareness of the truth of who we are. It. And that's the next. I mean, that's the love revolution. And that's, I mean, I'm very excited that that's what's coming because it's coming like today.
• 25:58
  Speaker A: I, I couldn't agree more. You know, I always laugh in having a non speaker that's both a boy and a girl and how differently I've watched the, the, the, the, the shared conscious nature of the love between the two of them so differently. And just being a boy and a girl and again, it.
• 26:18
  Speaker B: Can you talk about that a little more?
• 26:21
  Speaker A: I, I think there's so much. Again, I'm an elder millennial. I was born in 1983, grew up in the 90s. You know, 9, 11 happened my freshman year of college. You know, very analog. You know, going college through the digital world. I feel so grounded in the way I, which I learned about Mary and evolutionary things with boys and girls and how that was taught to me growing up and what relationships look like and what, how boys feel and how girls feel, how they learn, which is a very basic acceptance, I'd say, on my part. And then having a non speaker, a boy and a girl, and watching them develop as non speakers, they are so typical in how boy and how girl they are in every aspect except this development of consciousness and how they share it. My son is so behind in what I know my daughter. It was like by the time she was 18 months and I look back on the videos of us, she was already honed in on sharing that with me. Yeah, right.
• 27:34
  Speaker B: Even though it's very typical for girls, is that relationship. Yeah.
• 27:38
  Speaker A: I mean that the depth of how she was sharing at under 2, even with behaviors that were, I mean, the most powerful and profound realization that she was absolutely deeply on the spectrum was being unable. The most perfect time of day, perfectly hydrated, well rested, unable to go to a new park at like the most beautiful golden hour of the day. Couldn't be held, couldn't walk, couldn't stumble. I mean, she was, I jokingly say, I mean it was a disaster. She could not function in being in a new beautiful spot. You bring her home and I would say, sweetheart, that was so difficult for you. I'm so sorry that I was unable to understand that. And you look at this piece, come over this 18 month old, and she was sharing that with so deeply from such a young age. I laugh because my son does not do that at even 8 years old. It's just a different way of sharing his inner world with as a man, as a boy, as a male.
• 28:48
  Speaker B: What is it? How does he do?
• 28:50
  Speaker A: Is so much more silly. It is so much more play based. It's so much more of the energy of a sled dog that you have to run and chase and then collapse into something and pie on the leaves. It's just so much more physical, which I do and I know his dad does too. And other people in his life augment. It's not as. It doesn't surface nearly as easily for him.
• 29:21
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 29:22
  Speaker A: Takes a lot more conscious effort as his mother to almost have him feel like he can reveal that too.
• 29:31
  Speaker B: It's so interesting because I bet if you had another boy who was a non speaker, he might be different.
• 29:39
  Speaker A: I know.
• 29:40
  Speaker B: I like. So I'm listening to this and when you explain the. When you explained the first story with your daughter, I'm thinking that's my speaking son at 18 months. Yeah, totally like hardly said a word, but eventually spoke. But like not in 18 months. Completely like I will psychically tell you all the things.
• 30:00
  Speaker A: Huh? Right. No, you're probably. You know, you're. You're absolutely right. I think it feels like to me in my. In my exact home and world that like they are so painfully typical of what I was taught to be. Boy and girl development. Aside from all the things that actually make them the most beautiful little souls, which are, you know, he is the most emotionally developed little boy you're ever gonna meet. Now you're gonna see that through. Whenever he's watching his favorite shows and the characters get hurt and he watches it over and over again, his lip is shaking and he's looked like Deese. See how hurt Daniel Tiger's friend is? And I have to always say I do. And I'm telling you, isn't that amazing to see Daniel help his friend. It's like. And he will say in his voice, he exposes it all, but it's not to me. It's always through something else.
• 30:51
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 30:51
  Speaker A: My daughter to me.
• 30:53
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. She's through you. Yeah. The. The attunement with non speakers to emotions. Social, emotional perspective. The big pict rather than the broken up analytic picture. And the. And music are all right. Hemisphere functions and speaking is a left hemisphere function. And I just. More and more I have to write about this. And I have one amazing research team and we're working on a paper but I want to write in this paper about this. How the low functioning to high functioning spectrum of autism is for shit It's, I'm sorry, this might be. Children will be listening. It's bad. The low, low functioning to high functioning spectrum of autism is no good. Because what are we saying? We're saying you're high functioning in the culture that only respects left hemisphere functioning. And that's our culture right now. We say, oh well, without a doubt. Yeah.
• 31:53
  Speaker A: And so it layers over to mothers too, right? You're only a good mother if you are left brained or able to apply that to your motherhood as well.
• 32:05
  Speaker B: That's right, yeah. You have to be this analytical to kind of especially where you live. I mean you live in New York, which is super like analytical and like you better be able to figure out the right decision for your child without a doubt.
• 32:20
  Speaker A: And I found I've done my own, you know, research on this through my own peer counseling. The amount of mothers that fall exactly into the bucket that you say they want to know exactly what to do, when to do it, how to do it. I'm here is to try to show you that it's all within you to do that for your child. But the analytical nature that has been conditioned even in brilliant of societies and the world that we are living in, just the educational and academia environments. These mothers that I talk to that are, you know, they're, you have other children that are attending Columbia and the primary school and all these amazing educational places, yet they are paralyzed when it comes to next rating for their children that are high, low, whatever who are Right hemisphere gifted.
• 33:09
  Speaker B: That's my new term, Right hemisphere gifted.
• 33:12
  Speaker A: That's the next title of your next book and I want to support it in every way I can.
• 33:15
  Speaker B: Yeah, Right hemisphere gifted, like, come on, like, like, I'm sorry, that's part of the great learning of being a parent. When my son, you know, I'm, you know, he can tell his own story. But I will just briefly say he had a rough time because he didn't learn to read until he was 10. And he thought differently and he saw things differently. And I was always like super, you know, I got all the A's and I knew how to do academics. I knew how to, you know, I knew how to go to tier one institutions. I knew how to and play that. I knew how to take IQ tests, I knew how to do that. And I panicked when I got it that he was not like me in this way. He did not like school for one, that was a shocker. And then two, like, he didn't, like he was really, really smart. But they weren't Picking up his kind of intelligence. Not for a while, not until later. And so I had to learn inside of me that I had all these judgments that were based on, well, you know, if you're good, obviously you'll do these. Like, this is what a good person does. Like, right. They do well in school and da, da, da. It was so judgmental. And I had no idea I had those judgments.
• 34:27
  Speaker A: The systems of conditioning that I have and I'm still. It's a practice. Learning to unbecome, tethered to and to realize all the bottlenecks that I had placed on myself without even consciously choosing them as a mother has been the toughest of work yet the most satisfying as a human. And exactly what you said about your son. My two speakers, they experience so differently. I mean, Millie would likely thrive if I were in full tech va. She's like, checking. My son is like, get me out of here. Get nature. Get me in sensory room in front of this fellow community, sir. And I'm going to look so clearly and go, I already knew. Next question. And he does every, every communicate. And I'm sobbing here. I'm so sorry that your brilliance just now begins. I know you know all about one of the better.
• 35:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, but, you know, it takes time and they understand, but it's the growth they understand too. Yeah, exactly. Because that's a right hemisphere gift. That's right.
• 35:44
  Speaker A: Me and I go, baby boy. Oh my gosh. And he's like, yep, yeah, that's right.
• 35:49
  Speaker B: Hemispheric. The growth is phenomenal. And it's freeing because what you get to let go of is this perfect picture. You don't realize how much pressure there is on the perfect picture when you're in that system until you break out of the picture. That happened to me with my divorce too. When I got divorced, I'm like, well, okay, I don't have. No longer perfect.
• 36:11
  Speaker A: No, no longer perfect. Like I get to. I mean, I'm. I'm divorced as well. I mean, I get to choose. Like I can. I can put all this scaffolding aside and build what. It feels intuitive to myself.
• 36:23
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 36:24
  Speaker A: And I can still thrive and live and breathe and be happy. And I mean, all these things that obviously were germinating below the surface of my heart and body for years. I only think that understanding those systems of conditioning are really only the past few years of my life. And I. And I almost wonder if I only had had my one daughter speaker and not my son, had I been kind of into this work to degree that Which I have. Hey, obviously it's, it's a lot more difficult day to day, but at the same time I know that it pushed me in a way that I would have probably chosen had I only had one loud speaker.
• 37:02
  Speaker B: Well, I think so. I think so. And I think it pushes you towards authenticity partly because the insides of you are seen all the time.
• 37:12
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
• 37:14
  Speaker B: Again, good luck with secrets. So it's like.
• 37:18
  Speaker A: Well, I, I have a offline. I will share with you something that my, my non speaking daughter said upon coming off the a few days that I didn't see her when she was with her dad. And the first thing she said just blew my mind. And it wasn't even a dirty secret. It was just something that I had just learned from my mother. I thought, Mills, if you, Millie Mills, if you ever have me questioning you, please just remind me of this moment. She just said something really quick on her talker and then walked right into the living room. And I thought, she knows. Yeah, it doesn't even matter.
• 37:52
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. Because they. Because if you have the big picture and you have compassion and you understand human relationships, you are aware that everyone is flawed, including yourself. But I think one of the things the right hemisphere doesn't do a good job of is helping you stay in your body and get down to the practical things that are going on around you.
• 38:19
  Speaker A: Yes. Meaning and measurement are constantly like this.
• 38:23
  Speaker B: Or where, where are you relative to the people around you? Like you're very aware of the people around you, but where, like could you draw a map of where you are relative to those people? Like that's why I'm really excited about. Is it okay to start talking about some of the work I plan to do?
• 38:36
  Speaker A: I would love to. That's what I was going to delve right into that.
• 38:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. So. So because of the telepathy tapes, Kai Dickens found me and introduced because I work with extraordinary thinking found me and introduced me to Maria Welch who's a teacher in the Chicago area and then also to Natalia Meehan who's a teacher in Connecticut. Both work with autistic non speaking individuals. So I've been working with them. And then Jeff Tarrant, Ph.D. out in Oregon who has also been working with non speaking individuals. And then also Damon Abraham who is a PhD from University of Denver in Cognitive Affective science and he started being on our team. So we started rolling this team. Then my son joined the team to create stimuli for the non speakers. So anyway, it's kind of a snowball, but the entire team has run out of my nonprofit Tilt, the Institute for Love and time. And for 2026, we have three projects. And I'm excited to. I can give you the link so that people, if they want to donate or if they want to tell someone who has lots of money, sure.
• 39:35
  Speaker A: Yes, that's right.
• 39:37
  Speaker B: So the three projects are one, which is fully. The one I'm about to talk about is fully funded. So if you get excited about it, great. Know that it's going to happen. Um, and then take your money and put it somewhere else. You know, the other two projects. So the first project is a new curriculum for non speakers. It'll be called the bridge curriculum, and you can sign up to learn about it@bridgetothriving.org and it's being created by Maria Welch and Natalia Meehan. And they're working together to put a bunch of courses on a course platform, an online course platform that will both help people learn how to use a letter board, et cetera. All the usual spelling partner communication regulation partner stuff. Not to the extent where you can go bill yourself out as a communication regulation partner, but to the extent, like if you're a parent or someone, you can help your child and learn to spell with your child, that kind of thing. So, you know, so you can know the basics. But they're expanding the curriculum to include the fact that we know that many non speakers are telepathic and have other abilities like precognition, the ability to see future events, the ability to talk to spirits of people who have passed. So instead of sort of saying, oh, these are over here, it's using those as evidence of right hemisphere giftedness. And then it says, how can we help people with who have these gifts, anchor themselves in their bodies? Right. One. So that what got me thinking about that is one, I was imagining one task on the curriculum. I have to talk to Maria and Natalia about this. But one task on the curriculum could be, you know, asking a non speaker to respond on a letterboard about, please explain the relationship right now between where your body is in the room and the body of your spelling partner. Because if you ask them where you are, they'll say, oh, I'm in 1933 and I'm talking to, you know, Albert Einstein.
• 41:32
  Speaker A: Right, right, right.
• 41:34
  Speaker B: So not where your consciousness is. Vogue. Like, notice where your body is and what is the relationship?
• 41:39
  Speaker A: Right.
• 41:40
  Speaker B: And differentiating the consciousness from the body, because they don't do that much when you say you. They're thinking of their consciousness. So which is why I think they have no problem talking to dead people because they're just talking to consciousness. Doesn't matter where it is relative to its body.
• 41:54
  Speaker A: Right.
• 41:55
  Speaker B: So I think that would be a really good exercise to ask your non speaker. So right now what's the, you know, how is your body arranged in the room relative to the rest of the room, relative to the speller relative to the table, the spelling partner relative to the table. So anyway, that I just got excited about.
• 42:11
  Speaker A: I wonder if I. I'm thinking about if I asked that to my daughter specifically. I think she would do. I wonder and I get. As her mother, I think I would know best or potentially have a hypothesis she'd like put her glasses down. Like you're really going to ask me that? That has nothing to do with me being here right now.
• 42:28
  Speaker B: But you can explain like. So that's the thing is that if you explain like your brain has these two hemispheres, you are gifted in this area. This is the area that needs development. These areas need to talk to each other. You're not going to lose your gift in this. So what we see as non speakers get older and spell more and attend school, et cetera is they don't lose their giftedness but they can express it better.
• 42:52
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 42:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 42:53
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 42:53
  Speaker B: And they can do more analytical tests.
• 42:56
  Speaker A: To make this more to elevate this from a macro level. If there's anyone listening that has. This is all very new to them. I think about. I was speaking to a trauma therapist and she said so many trauma survivors are very anticipatory, have anticipatory sadness. They don't want to lose the skills that. That their trauma taught them.
• 43:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 43:15
  Speaker A: And so I think that's very similar to what you're saying is that they don't lose their skills of their right at all sphere. It's just a growth in their left to have their more of a. Of speaking to each other and understanding that.
• 43:26
  Speaker B: Yes. And we have evidence of that. Like we've seen that in the clinic. And then also the second study that we're doing is probably going to confirm that. But the second study is about neurofeedback and neural stimulation using transcranial direct current stimulation, which is a really safe like 9 volt battery or less form of stimulation that Jeff Tarrant on our team is leading that project as the principal investigator and he thinks he has protocols. I like I notice I'm playing with the light here.
• 43:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, I would little stripes.
• 43:57
  Speaker B: But he thinks he wants to test two protocols. One that he thinks will help with OCD looping because non Speakers can have these motor loops that get in the way of spelling and two, a protocol that might help them with mood and communication ability so they could spell even better.
• 44:14
  Speaker A: Amazing.
• 44:14
  Speaker B: And so we have a protocol to test both of those. That whole study needs to be funded. I think it'll be amazing. But what we've seen so far from people who have non speakers who have used the transcranial direct current stimulation TDCS is a lot easier to say is that they haven't lost their ability at all. In fact, some of the most gifted non speakers psychically have also gained some speech and gained some capacities so capacities on the left hemisphere. It's not like you have to give that up. I agree that that parallel to the trauma, you get to own everything that is in your life, all of the that are in you and you get to grow and change and develop in ways that you want to grow and change and develop. And that's part of school. So I think sometimes when we talk about how amazing non speakers are, we forget that they have to grow up and go to school and learn too.
• 45:08
  Speaker A: I was actually talking to another mother about that who said how do you know that Millie and Mac are in the right place now? And I've had, you know, the pandemic was during Millie transitioning out of like the preschool, kindergarten, aba so to a more private autism based education. There was a lot of where I didn't even have access to the schools potentially to tour and to understand due to the pandemic. But I feel that now, you know, how do you know? I said I don't. Just like any other parent, I don't, I never am 100% knowledge the right place. But she's alist too and so is her brother and they're part of a family and I wish I could send them both probably to totally different schools. But I have a typical daughter as well. There's only so much that I can do and I feel grounded in knowing that I'm doing the next right thing always for them and for our family too.
• 46:03
  Speaker B: Well, and the anxiety, the how do you know? How do you know? Comes from an anxiety place.
• 46:08
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 46:09
  Speaker B: And it's just the anxiety is if I don't do the right thing, they're going to be damaged. And honestly there's very few things that people can't recover from. I mean, if I ever told you about my childhood, like, I mean you'd be like, wow, so you can recover from that. And then I told you about my mom's childhood.
• 46:25
  Speaker A: I was speaking to Another scientist recently who said, we forget a lot of systems have to fail before something becomes a disorder.
• 46:34
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
• 46:35
  Speaker A: We are a really tough species.
• 46:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, we are very tough. Yeah.
• 46:39
  Speaker A: I will tell you another funny story. Like a pediatrician told my friend when she had a newborn who was petrified, riddled with anxiety over the baby falling. And this pediatrician said, do you know how hard it is to kill one of these things? It's really hard. We are such tough mammals. Look, we are tough, man. We come out, we are malleable and tough, and it takes a lot so we can do all of this. Like you said, these children, they are learning and developing too. And it's not going to be that one choice of the schooling or the, or the therapy or the, the food. It's not going to be one thing.
• 47:17
  Speaker B: Well, also, you can undo it.
• 47:19
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 47:19
  Speaker B: Like. Like, turns out the school is a bad idea.
• 47:25
  Speaker A: And I, you know, I, as someone who is, I'm Catholic and devouted. Devout, you know, I believe that anxiety is really great. Contemporary atheism and wondering. I really do. It's just like, it's just, it's like any anxiety, it's like I'm giving in to atheism, that obviously there's nothing out there and I'm just going to worry my way into this position or not even atheism.
• 47:49
  Speaker B: And it could also just be low faith. Like I'm giving into that. God's there, but God doesn't really care about me or God doesn't. Right.
• 47:55
  Speaker A: 100%. Who am I to be, you know, to think this is going to work out?
• 47:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And also it's giving and also.
• 48:04
  Speaker A: Right.
• 48:04
  Speaker B: But at the same time, okay, but I, I just, I sort of also have to say if you're anxious, like there's such a thing as anxiety disorders and a lot of people have them and you'll try everything. It doesn't help for someone to say you're just not. You're an atheist or you're not trusting in God because, like, you have this physiological issue. Right. And so it's just everyone's doing the best they can, say the best they can. And that treatment for everything, the, the balm, the medicine for everything is unconditional love. It heals everything.
• 48:33
  Speaker A: It heals everything.
• 48:34
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 48:35
  Speaker A: Like literally everything.
• 48:37
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 48:38
  Speaker A: And we all have it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it, you can't unseal it, you can't untether it from your, your day to day. It is greatest gift. And it comes with a lot of what I think is just this revealing, only pulling back layers of unconscious choices that we don't even realize that we need. And to get. And to sit like this, I think is one of the greatest things of your work is going to. I hope that you say is we're on the cusp of something. This is the next phase. This love revolution.
• 49:14
  Speaker B: And this love. Thank you. This love revolution, if that's the one thing that I give to the world, that is the most important thing, because it comes from the inside out and not like my inside. The inside. We all shared the inside.
• 49:28
  Speaker A: Yes. Well, I'm so thankful for this conversation today, and I will be loading every link and fundraising opportunity for anyone that's listening as well. And I think that you're putting back in a very different way for the mothers and caregivers, parents, family members, clinicians, therapists. What we all do know, but we are so afraid to talk about is that this is unconditional love at a time core, at its very, very core. And leading from that is not wrong. It's never wrong. It's never the wrong choice.
• 50:02
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 50:04
  Speaker A: Would you say anything about this before we end our conversation?
• 50:09
  Speaker B: I just want to say, like, even unconditional love for yourself, I mean, so some people put unconditional love as soon as they realize it's power on their list of things to do, and then they blame themselves for not being able to experience it. And then they go, oh, well, now, you know, it just goes downhill from there. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna start with you. Because the magic of unconditional love is as soon as you accept, it's like walking out into the sun. If you imagine the sun as the universal love shining on you, as soon as you walk into that sun for yourself, all of a sudden you have unconditional love for others, it's the same. It's unconditional. It's not even conditional on whose body it is.
• 50:52
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 50:54
  Speaker B: So.
• 50:54
  Speaker A: And standing in that space is, again, I think, one of the most beautiful points of. Of what your life has given to the world. Dr. Julia Rossberg, thank you for being in. For what you do. All that is to come from this. I'm so excited. I can't wait. I think I would. I forget.
• 51:14
  Speaker B: Okay, cool. Well, thank you. Thank you.
• 51:17
  Speaker A: So I waited for the hardcover and the release, but I can't wait to share it with everyone.
• 51:22
  Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Thanks for doing the work you're doing in the world. It's powerful and super important.
• 51:27
  Speaker A: Thank you. All right, well, until next time on the Instagram podcast, thank you.