When the Helper Harms: What Autistic, ADHD, and Neurodivergent Scapegoats, Golden Children, and Eldest Children Need to Know About the Officials Claiming to Speak for Them

On institutional trust, conditioned compliance, and why the instinct to pull back is not a flaw, it is intelligence

Photo by Chidy Young on Unsplash

There is a sentence every child in a narcissistic family learns before they can name what it is. It is delivered in many forms through a tone of voice, through a look, through the arrangement of a room after a conflict, through the way a parent says I love you while doing the very thing love would never do. The sentence, in all its forms, says the same thing: Trust me to handle what concerns you. Don’t question. Don’t resist. I know what’s best.

That sentence is not always a lie told by people who know they are lying. Sometimes it is believed by the one who says it. That is part of what makes it so difficult to name, and so difficult to protect against, because the person offering the care genuinely, in some sense, believes they are offering it. The outcome for the child does not change.

This article is for the neurodivergent people in this series, those who are autistic, who have Asperger’s, who live with ADHD, or who have developed conditioned social withdrawal as a survival response to early environments that were unpredictable, dangerous, or chronically invalidating. It is also for those who grew up carrying one of the family roles this series explores: the scapegoat, the golden child, the eldest son, the eldest daughter. And it is specifically for those who find themselves at the intersection of those identities, because that intersection creates a particular kind of vulnerability that is rarely named.

The vulnerable point is this: people who were conditioned, in childhood, to place their survival in the hands of institutional authority who learned to comply, to manage, to perform capability, or need to access care are now living in a political moment where two of the most powerful figures in American disability and education policy are building a record that warrants serious, careful, and unhurried attention.

Àìmọṣẹ́ kọ̀ ọmọ ajá, lọdẹ fi ńrán an níṣẹ́ ikú — the Yoruba are direct about this. Not knowing how to say no is why the dog gets sent on life-threatening errands by the hunter. The proverb is not about the hunter’s cruelty. It is about the dog’s conditioning. A conditioned compliance, repeated across enough years, becomes invisible to the one who carries it. It stops feeling like compliance. It starts feeling like trust.

This article is about learning to tell the difference.

What the Neurodivergent Person in a Narcissistic Family System Learns About Help

Before we name what is happening in the policy landscape, it is worth understanding the terrain it lands on because, for the people this series speaks to, the current moment is not abstract. It lands on a very specific history.

The autistic child in a narcissistic family learns something that is rarely documented in clinical literature: that the people most likely to misidentify, misrepresent, and harm them are also the people positioned as their advocates. They learn this not from a manual but from experience. The parent who describes them to teachers as a problem rather than a person. The family system that uses their neurodivergent traits as the family’s scapegoating material, the explanation for why things go wrong, the thing to be embarrassed about, the difference to be managed or hidden. The institutions that promise support and then condition it on a performance of normalcy that the child cannot sustain without cost.

The child with ADHD in these systems learns that their mind is the reason things fail. They learn this before they can name their neurology, before they have language for executive function or working memory, or the way time moves differently for them. They learn it from the looks, from the report cards, from the way the family narrates them. And they learn, as a consequence, to be deeply dependent on external systems of organization and validation while simultaneously deeply distrustful of them because the external systems have been both the source of their most important accommodations and the source of their most consistent humiliation.

The person who has learned structured social withdrawal, who has learned to move carefully around institutions, to limit exposure, to protect the self through careful management of how much they reveal and to whom, has often learned this because the institutions that claimed to serve them did not. This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition. It is the nervous system doing the job it was given.

What all of these people share, at the intersection of neurodivergence and family role, is a trained relationship with institutional care that is neither simple trust nor simple distrust. It is something more nuanced and more exhausting: the ongoing attempt to figure out who is safe, which helpers actually help, and whether the cost of accessing what is being offered is worth what it will take.

The Record, Without Interpretation

Ejighị akpata atụfuo aba ọgaranya — the Igbo hold this clearly. No one grows wealthy by throwing away what they have acquired. The proverb speaks to money, but it also speaks to the accumulated protections that disability advocates, neurodivergent self-advocates, and parents spent decades building into law. Protections that exist not because institutions gave them freely but because people fought for them against institutional resistance. What took decades to build can be quietly dismantled in a term.

Here is what the record shows.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the official most broadly positioned as the voice on health and neurodevelopmental conditions for this administration, has a documented history of promoting the claim that vaccines cause autism, a claim reviewed and rejected by upward of 25 large peer-reviewed studies worldwide. What matters to this article is not primarily the scientific controversy, though that matters. What matters is the language used to describe autistic people when making that case. Kennedy has publicly described children with autism as people who will “never pay taxes, never hold a job, never play baseball, never write a poem, never go on a date.” He ordered the CDC’s own website altered to remove language that vaccines do not cause autism, replacing decades of scientific consensus with the phrase “not an evidence-based claim,” a move his own developmental disability staff at the CDC were not consulted about and were not given input on.

This is not a language that sees neurodivergence as a difference. It is a language that sees it as a catastrophe. And the official who uses this language holds authority over which research gets funded, who sits on advisory committees, and how the federal government talks about and allocates resources for autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions.

On the education side, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has overseen the dismantling of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, the federal office responsible for ensuring that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which serves approximately 8.4 million students, is being enforced by states. In October 2025, reduction-in-force notices went out across the department; at one point, only three staffers remained employed in OSERS. The Office for Civil Rights, which investigates disability discrimination cases in schools, had roughly half its lawyers and civil rights staff removed, and resolved zero restraint and seclusion cases in 2025, one disability harassment case, and only 40 cases related to the right to a free appropriate public education out of 1,887 that were pending. In 2017, a comparable period, OCR reached resolution agreements in roughly ten times as many disability discrimination cases. McMahon has also consistently signaled her intention to move special education programs out of the Education Department, which has the expertise, institutional knowledge, and established relationships to administer them and into HHS. Disability advocates, parents, and former senior federal officials have widely opposed this, arguing it would undermine fifty years of progress in making sure the rights of children with disabilities are met. The reassurance offered has been consistent: students will still get “the same treatment, the same funding.” The actions have told a different story.

These are not interpretations. They are documented, reported facts drawn from congressional hearings, court filings, federal office records, and the statements of the officials themselves.

Why This Lands Differently for Scapegoats

The scapegoat survivor’s relationship with institutional authority is specific. They grew up in a family system that used external language to justify internal violence that framed the scapegoat’s difficulties as evidence of their inherent deficiency rather than as responses to the environment they were in. The scapegoat, who was also neurodivergent, grew up in a particularly complicated bind: their traits were real, their difficulties were real, and yet those real difficulties were weaponized. The family pointed to them not to provide support but to provide an explanation. You are why things are hard. You are the problem.

When an official uses language like “will never pay taxes, never hold a job, never write a poem” to describe the people they are supposedly advocating for, the scapegoat survivor with autism recognizes something. Not necessarily consciously. But in the body. In the familiar contraction of being described by someone with power in terms that reduce rather than illuminate. In the old sensation of being named from the outside by someone who has not asked what it is like to be you from the inside.

The scapegoat’s danger in this political moment is the same as their danger in the family of origin: the tendency to normalize the diminishing language because diminishment has been the environment for so long. The tendency to say, well, they don’t mean it the way it sounds, or maybe they’re right, and I’m just too sensitive. The scapegoat carries an enormous capacity to absorb others’ negative projections and calls it self-awareness. That capacity can be turned against them.

What the scapegoat survivor with neurodivergent traits needs in this moment is not fear. It is the same thing they needed in the family and could rarely access: accurate information, held steadily, without self-doubt injected into the middle of it. The record is what it is. The language is what it says. Trusting your read of that is not paranoia. It is the pattern recognition your nervous system has been developing for your entire life.

Why This Lands Differently for Golden Children

The golden child’s conditioning is nearly the inverse of the scapegoat’s, but it arrives at a similarly exposed place by a different route.

The golden child was recruited by the family system to perform the capability to be the one who succeeds, who represents the family well, who demonstrates that things are functioning even when they are not. For the golden child with autism or ADHD, this often meant learning to mask extensively to perform neurotypically as a condition of access to the love and status that was being offered. The golden child learned to read the environment, to adjust, to produce the version of themselves that would be received well. They were often very good at it. And the cost of that performance was rarely acknowledged.

This produces an adult who has a complicated relationship with institutional promises. On one hand, they are skilled at identifying what the institution wants from them and producing it. On the other hand, they are often genuinely uncertain about whether the care being offered is real or transactional because, in their family of origin, care was always transactional. It was always conditional on continued performance.

When an official says to parents of neurodivergent children that “regardless of which department these programs are located, they will still get the same treatment, the same funding,” while the enforcement infrastructure is being gutted and the staff who administered those protections have been fired or placed on administrative leave at taxpayer expense, the golden child’s nervous system should register the familiar structure of this. The reassurance is the surface. The action is the content. The golden child who has done the work knows how to read the difference between what someone says they are doing for you and what they are actually doing.

That skill that hard-won, costly, carefully developed ability to read beneath the surface is exactly what this moment calls for.

Why This Lands Differently for Eldest Sons

The eldest son carries the weight of compliance as identity. He is the one who was trained to be responsible, to manage the family’s public face, to not make waves, to absorb the demands of the system without complaint. For the eldest son with neurodivergent traits, this often meant becoming an expert at functioning under conditions that were not designed for his nervous system because the family needed him to function, because the alternative was becoming the scapegoat. After all, the cost of being labeled difficult was one he had watched others pay and did not want to pay himself.

This produces an adult who often defaults to trusting institutional systems even when his own body is telling him something is wrong. He has been trained to override the signal. To complete the task. To hold the weight. And he will do this in relation to policy, too, will accept the reassurances at face value, will not ask the questions, will assume that the people in power know things he does not, will manage his own concern internally without naming it aloud.

The eldest son’s specific work in this moment is learning that the institutional compliance that kept him functional in a family system that could not hold his full self is not a value to carry into every context. There are moments when the responsible, genuinely elder thing is to look at the record clearly, to name what it shows, and to choose accordingly. That is not rebellion. That is discernment. And the eldest son in a family where those were conflated has been waiting a long time to learn the difference.

Why This Lands Differently for Eldest Daughters

The eldest daughter in these systems was the family’s emotional infrastructure, the one who tracked everyone’s well-being, managed the invisible labor, and made herself available as a resource before she was ever resourced herself. For the eldest daughter with autism or ADHD, this labor was often carried out at a particularly high cost, because she was doing the relational work of the family while simultaneously managing a nervous system that the family had never been equipped to understand or support.

The eldest daughter’s danger in this political moment is the tendency to over-extend her advocacy on behalf of others while managing her own exposure to the same policies. She may fight hard for the rights of children with disabilities in her community, in her school system, at school board meetings, and quietly not advocate for herself, because self-advocacy is the pattern she never got to practice. The protection of IDEA, of civil rights enforcement, of special education oversight matters to her children, to her community, to the students she works with. It also matters to her. She is allowed to hold both of those truths at the same time.

What Structural Distance Actually Looks Like

The call to “slowly stay away” from the promises and the framing of these officials is not a call to disengage entirely from the systems those officials control. Neurodivergent people who need IEPs, access to services, civil rights enforcement, or research funding cannot simply opt out of the federal landscape that governs those resources. The practical relationship has to continue.

What structural distance means, in this context, is something more interior and more strategic. It means not placing emotional trust where the record does not warrant it. It means reading the actions rather than the assurances. It means building knowledge of the specific advocacy organizations, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, state-level disability rights organizations, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, that are doing the documented, granular work of tracking and contesting these policy shifts, because those organizations are where accountability is actually being held.

It means, for the person who grew up in a narcissistic family system, practicing the same discernment there that the series has been building toward all along: the ability to look at a person or an institution that is speaking on your behalf and ask with genuine openness, without fear of what the answer might be, what does the record actually show?

Ìgbà ìpọ́njú là ńm’ọ̀rẹ́; ọjọ́ tó bá burú la ńm’ẹni tó fẹ́’ni — in tough times, the Yoruba say, is when you find out who truly cares about you. Not in the statement of intent. In the action under pressure. In what is protected when protection becomes costly.

The record shows what it shows. The people who know how to read beneath the surface of an institutional promise, who learned that skill the hard way, are exactly the people equipped to read this one.

A Note Before You Go

This article is not a directive. You are not being told what to think about these officials, what political conclusions to draw, or what actions to take. The people in this series have been told what to think their entire lives, and the work of the series is to create conditions for something different for each person to sit with what they actually see, and to trust that seeing.

What this article offers is the information and the framing to see clearly. What you do with it is yours.

If something here landed, if you recognized the structure, if your nervous system registered something familiar, that recognition is worth staying with. Not to amplify into anxiety. Not to perform outrage. Just to notice. You have been reading beneath surfaces since before you had words for it. That skill is not a wound. It is what kept you alive. And in this moment, it may be exactly what is needed.