It’s Not Just the Needle: Autism, Circumcision, and the Infant’s Experience of Violation.

In many alternative health circles, the phrase “vaccines cause autism” has become a rallying cry. And for good reason — countless parents have watched their child change dramatically following routine injections. The timeline alone has raised questions that deserve answers.

But as someone who works through the lens of German New Medicine (GNM), I want to offer a deeper question — one that goes beyond toxins and ingredients and into the subjective experience of the child.

What if autism isn’t just about what’s injected? What if it’s about what’s experienced? What if the shock of being restrained, overwhelmed, and violated is what leaves the deepest imprint?

This is the angle almost no one is talking about. And it’s the same one we’re avoiding in the conversation about circumcision.

The Overlooked Trauma

The First Biological Law shows us that every adaptation (so-called disease) begins with a conflict shock — an unexpected, isolating, acute event that starts a biological program as the body adapts for its best chance of survival.

For many children, this first shock occurs at birth. A hospital birth presents multiple situations in which an infant may experience an event that meets these criteria — sudden, overwhelming, and experienced alone.

Being separated from the mother immediately after birth, handled by unfamiliar people, exposed to bright lights, loud voices, strong smells, or abrupt temperature changes can overwhelm an infant’s nervous system. Interventions such as forceps, vacuum extraction, emergency caesarean, or being physically stuck in the birth canal can create intense pressure and panic. The baby may instinctively want to move forward or escape — and cannot.

In these moments, the infant has no frame of reference and no capacity to understand what is happening. The experience is registered purely through sensation and survival instinct — distress, helplessness, and a profound loss of safety. This is how a biological adaptation begins: the body responding intelligently to an experience it perceives as overwhelming and impossible to manage alone.

In this context, intention is not the defining factor. I am not questioning the goodwill of medical staff, nor denying that medical intervention can sometimes be necessary. What I am speaking to is the subjective experience of the infant — an experience that is too often overlooked or dismissed.

Well-meaning parents and practitioners frequently act from fear: fear of risk, fear of uncertainty, fear of what might go wrong if nature is trusted. Within a medical model that views the body as fragile and in need of constant management, this fear can set off a cascade of interventions during birth. These interventions, while intended to protect, can inadvertently create the very conditions in which biological conflicts arise.

If this first experience remains unresolved — if the infant does not return to a deep sense of safety — later medical interventions can compound the imprint. Being restrained for injections or medical procedures, including circumcision, can echo the original experience: I can’t move. I can’t escape. My boundaries are not respected.

When a second conflict registers in the opposite hemishere of the brain, we enter what is known as a constellation. In simple terms, the adaptation shifts from being expressed primarily at an organ level to being expressed through perception and behaviour. This shift is protective — it reduces ongoing strain on the body while helping the child cope in an environment that still feels unsafe.

As the adaptation moves into behaviour, in this case it manifests as a withdrawal from a world that is perceived as dangerous. When safety cannot be restored externally, the psyche finds internal ways to reduce exposure, limit overwhelm, and regain a sense of control.

For some children, this looks like social withdrawal or retreat into an inner world. For others, it may appear as reduced speech or complete mutism — a way of limiting interaction when communication itself feels unsafe. Repetitive movements, motor tics, or compulsive behaviours can provide predictability and regulation in an unpredictable world. Aggression, when it appears, is often a protective response — an attempt to create distance or defend boundaries after they have already been crossed.

These expressions are not uniform, because no two psyches interpret experience in the same way. Autism, mutism, motor patterns, compulsions, or heightened reactivity are all individualised responses — each reflecting how a particular child made sense of, and adapted to, their early conflict experiences.

It is also worth asking why autism is diagnosed so much more frequently in boys. While there are many proposed explanations, one factor rarely discussed is the difference in early bodily experiences between male and female infants. In cultures where routine circumcision is practised, boys are uniquely exposed to an additional early experience of restraint, pain, and boundary violation. From a biological perspective, this matters — not as a single cause, but as part of a cumulative landscape of early stress. When layered onto birth trauma and later medical restraint, this additional experience may increase the likelihood that a child adapts through withdrawal, altered perception, or behavioural strategies that later fall under the autism label.

These expressions are often explained within alternative health circles as signs of toxin exposure or toxin elimination — the idea that autistic behaviours are the body “purging” heavy metals or vaccine ingredients. While toxins can certainly add physiological stress to an already burdened system, this explanation alone does not account for the patterned, meaningful, and consistent nature of these behaviours. Elimination processes follow biological detox pathways; they do not reliably produce highly specific changes in perception, social engagement, movement, communication, or self-regulation.

From a biological perspective, these behaviours make far more sense when understood as adaptive responses to perceived danger, rather than as by-products of toxin clearance. They are regulated, purposeful, and often calming to the individual — which is not how the body behaves during toxic overload. In this lens, toxins may act as additional stressors, but they are not the primary driver.

The child’s nervous system and psyche — shaped by lived experience — remain the central organising force behind what we later label as autism.

Closing

If we truly want to understand childhood illness and developmental differences, we must be willing to look beyond ingredients, diagnoses, and labels, and turn our attention to experience. The infant’s nervous system does not interpret intention, statistics, or reassurance — it responds to what is felt in the body in moments of overwhelm, restraint, separation, and loss of safety.

At the heart of this shift is how we understand life itself. When the body is viewed through a mechanical lens, it appears fragile, prone to failure, and in constant need of correction. But when we begin to see the body — and nature — through a biological lens, something profound changes. Biology is not random or faulty; it is responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Symptoms are not breakdowns, but signals. Behaviour is not malfunction, but meaning.

This perspective does not ask us to reject medicine outright, nor to vilify parents or practitioners who act with care and concern. It asks something far more subtle and far more challenging: that we question a model built on fear and mistrust of nature, and consider how often protection is pursued at the cost of safety.

When we centre the lived experience of the child, a different story emerges. One in which autism is not a defect to be fixed, but a meaningful adaptation. One in which behaviour is not pathology, but communication. And one in which healing begins not with fighting the body, but with restoring safety, trust, and connection.

Perhaps the most important shift we can make is not in what we do to children, but in how we see them. When we recognise that their bodies and behaviours have always been acting in service of survival, compassion replaces fear — and a far more humane conversation becomes possible.