It's Supernatural

Sid:  My guest Karen Mayer Cunningham, I’m speaking to her at her office in Houston, Texas and we’re talking about her son James who was diagnosed with Autism.  And I understand Karen that there’s different types of Autism but you were explaining his behavior was so bazaar.  How in the world did you cope with it?

Karen:   I didn’t cope well, I coped in all the wrong ways, I coped by over working, not being at home whenever I could, and drinking.  And taking antidepressants, which is a horrible thing a horrible combination, but I did not know how to function.

Sid:  Okay, on yesterday’s broadcast we ended with he was enrolled in Special Ed.

Karen:  Correct, and we were so excited he had just became accepted into this program so August 1997 he goes off on his first little day of Special Ed.  And he has his little backpack and we send him across the street and we’re so excited this is going to be exactly what he needs.  And by October things went terribly wrong at the school.  Most of the other Special Ed kids that he was with had various conditions, diseases or disorders and so their behaviors were different.  James was the only one that was physical, aggressive and explosive at times.  He was working on eating the rubber in the class, chewing on their toys and I think for lack of a better phrase, all the other Special Ed kids were well behaved as it were.  And so in October I’m at my Salon and I get a phone call from my husband that Child Protective Services has just come to our house and they have gone to the school and taken James and checked him all over for bruises and want to ask us a series of questions.  Would right now be a good time or do I need to get my thoughts together?  And so when my husband said this on the phone I didn’t know what to do, a wave of heat came over me, I was angry, I was mad, I was upset, I was scared.  And he hands the phone to the child protective services lady and she begins to ask me a series of very personal abrupt leading questions.  “Do you watch the playboy channel?   Are you intimate in front of your child?  Do you think that this is normal that he eats the sheet rock?  And on and on and on and at the end she says, “Well, your answers match your husband’s answers, we’ll leave you a brochure here today of where you can come and see your child with your attorney if we take him into custody.  What you’ll need to do in the next forty-eight hours is you’ll need to take James to your pediatrician and check him for anal tears and enlarged genitals and the pediatrician must write a blind letter back to the state.  Because their assumption was that any child that acted this out of control must be being sexually abused.  And I was undone, I didn’t know what to do for my child, I was doing everything that I knew to do and here we have another attack, a state agency who had obviously received a report from somebody that thought that this child was being hurt.  We would never hurt our child, and so we had to call the pediatrician the next day and when the pediatrician lady office asked you what are you coming in for, she is expected to hear ear infection, temperature, or something like that.  And when we told her it was just dead silence on the other end of the line.  And so we did take him to the pedestrian and they did write the letter to the state and four months later we got a call on Sunday afternoon that there was no validity to the accusations and that the investigation was closed.  And at this point I don’t think that there’s was much more than I could take.  I just didn’t think that I could withstand this onslaught from people, professionals, my child and I needed to find a way to get some control over this but there was nothing about it that was controlled.

Sid:  So what happened next?

Karen:  What happened next is I thought you know they did the best they could and a few months later low and behold there’s another report to CPS.  We had taken our son to a wonderful hospital called Scott & White on to a neuropediatric specialist who had given us Quinidine is a blood pressure medicine and James took a bottle until he was almost six and then he would take a bottle every night.  And she said, “The Quinidine would reduce his blood pressure so he could relax some and actually go to sleep.”  James slept very little, usually about four hours a night and so we were excited we did not want to give him any psychotic drugs; we wanted to still help him.  We didn’t want to just, you know dope him up.  And so we were willing to that and she said, “That there was also one more thing, that for some kids maybe one in 10,000 if you give him some Prozac it reduces their rage.”  And so we were excited about that when he’s raging there is no way to communicate with him or reason with him.  She said, “But you’ll know the first day you’ll crush it up in his bottle and you’ll know that day if it works or not.”  And so we wrote a letter to the teacher, because at this point we’re writing notes back and forth to the teacher.  And I wrote that James will be taking this medicine; let me know how it goes.  The teacher writes home, “James withdrew and was catatonic all day.”  Well, what she was probably happy about he wasn’t flying around the room and eating the walls.  I wasn’t happy about that and so I wrote back that he would not ever be taking this medicine again.  And that low and behold we were reported to CPS that we were not giving our handicapped child his prescribed medication.  Well, at this point you have stirred up the wrong bear, now I’m mad.  And so CPS called us and she said,” Obviously you have somebody that knows your family and the word she used is trigger happy, but by law we have to follow up on every you know, every complaint.  So I drove down to CPS and I had never been through CPS and you ride up with a security officer, all the doors have to be deadbolts on them.  And I walk into a young ladies room, she must be twenty-two years old, had just finished college and I’m in a pile of tears emotional, crying, holding his folder and I said, “Do you know what autism is?”  And she said, “I think I had a class on it in college one time.”  She gave me more no hope and she said, “We can see that you and your husband are definitely trying to help your son and we have no complaint against you at this time.”  What she did do for me is she directed me to MHMR, Mental Heath Retardation and Any Baby Can in the Social Security Office.  Well, this is something that had never been done for me by the school district.  Why had the school district never offered this services to me, I had no idea.  And so I went to the Administrative Office and told them in my normal way that today would be the last day that any of this happened.  And they transferred him to a different school the next week and he started to really progress and do well in that school in a totally different environment.  But James at that point was going to Any Baby Can would take him for a whole day a month, we got twenty hours straight Respet from the state where a Respet worker would come in and take care him and we could leave.  And we were getting about a $500 a month SSI check at that time in 1997 and he had a state physiatrist and we just started getting some help from the state agencies that nobody had ever told us about.

Sid:   Oh, it’s nice that you’re getting help but you’re living a nightmare.

Karen:  We’re living a nightmare.  We’re getting this help but his behavior doesn’t change.  It’s palpable during the week because he gets up and goes off to school and just for a few hours he’s awake at home.  But the weekends were a nightmare, he has no structure, we’re at home, people don’t have structure at home, they just life their lives and he is out of control.  We have a new baby in the house, Page and he’s eating all of her toys, all of her pacifiers and we’re just undone, we have no marriage, we have no communication, it’s just a war zone and he is progressively getting bigger every day.  He’s a big kid and it’s getting worse and worse and we’re coming to a point that we realize that yes we have all these great programs in place.  Yes the state of Texas has given us every possible bit of help that they can.  But pretty soon we’re not going to keep him, pretty soon we’re going to have to put him in an institution; we cannot physically control him.  We cannot gage when his behavior begins or ends, at this point we’re not going anywhere.  Literally our school is across the street, he goes to school and he comes home; we don’t go out to eat we don’t go to a restaurant; we don’t take him to the grocery store; we keep him at home; we are all in prisoned by his condition.

Sid:  Okay, by 1999 Karen, you begin attending a Spirit Filled Bible study, you become Spirit filled and you find out about a deliverance team called “Gospel Revelation Ministries.”  Tell me about that.

Karen: Oh, it was just amazing and in January of ’99 this lady that was one of my clients invited me to her Bible study.  And I was raised in church, I grew up Southern Baptist, had never not gone to church because my relationship with God was sort of fear based.  I thought that God was sort of waiting for you to mess up so He could bonk you on the head and I thought we had to act right, be in good with God.  And since most of my life I didn’t act right, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t in good with God.  And so I started attending this Bible study and they were speaking in tongues; they were raising their hands and worshiping the Lord and there was just this freedom there and it was true.  It was new to me I had never seen it but it was truth and I wanted that, I wanted to have freedom; I wanted to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  And she did a Bible study for us which was amazing and she very quickly told me that there was a deliverance team out of Plano that came to Austin for about six weeks jaunts and they would just see families back to back that had any issues that needed intensive prayer.  I didn’t know what it was but I just figured that I definitely needed it.  I knew that I had a life time of baggage and if I could just reconcile all of my past then, then then I would be able to raise this handicapped child.  Yeah, that’s what God wants me to do; He wants me to be this great handicapped child advocate.  So I signed up for personnel ministry and I met the team March 29, 1999 and their first opening was July of ’99 so I went through personnel ministry.  I thought that it would take ten or fifteen minutes, it took about eight hours.  They teach that adults have little resistance that owns their own behaviors and what becomes roots and strongholds in their lives.  But we went through, I went through deliverance and the team prayed and that all those that were attacking me that held on to me were strongholds and would have to go in Jesus name to the dry places.  And I felt like I could do this and at the very end of the ministry, Sheila Ramsey whose the head of the team, she put her arm on my arm and patted me and she said “I believe that the Lord is saying that we can take James through deliverance for autism.  And bless her heart; I am sure I went “Ah.”

Sid Roth: I’ll tell you what, we’re out of time right now but Mishpochah a miracle happens, her son gets totally healed, I mean totally healed.  … Whatever impossible and it was an impossible situation, whatever impossible situation you’re facing there’s hope for you.