‘Let Me Be Me’ Shows Kyle Westphal’s Journey From Isolated Autistic Youth To Fashion Designer: “A Very Robust And Beautiful Story”
deadline.comAt age 29, Kyle Westphal is an emerging fashion designer with a degree in design from Drexel University, a vast knowledge of fashion history, and work that has been featured on Refinery 29 and Instyle.com.But there was a time when his parents couldn’t imagine such a bright future for him, back when Kyle was a child of six first diagnosed with autism.
At that time, as revealed in the documentary Let Me Be Me, Jenifer and Jeff Westphal struggled with how best to support Kyle, who had gone from being an outgoing toddler to a hypersensitive young boy.“They feared they might never develop a real connection to their child,” notes a description of the film, directed by Dan Crane and Katie Taber. “Withdrawn and constantly wrapping himself in fabric and blankets, Kyle was retreating from the world around him.”In the 1990s when Kyle was growing up, relatively little was understood about autism or the optimal ways to help children on the spectrum.
Most therapies centered on behavior modification which, in essence, attempted to force autistic kids to conform to societal expectations of how they should act.As the film explains, a turning point came for the Westphals when they learned about Son-Rise, a program with a novel approach to treating autism.“We ran into the program by accident,” Jenifer Westphal says. “I met a woman with a child who was diagnosed as autistic… That’s when I started to connect the dots.
When she talked about her child’s behaviors, really, I would say, ‘Wow, Kyle does that!’ And that’s kind of how this whole thing came to fruition.”Son-Rise is “different than — even opposite to — almost everything you’ve been told to do to help your child,” the program’s website says. “Our program shows how joining children in
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