3 ms·
I don't know if this will be helpful to you specifically, or maybe just someone else who reads these comments, but I also thought for years that I was autistic,
by smeej 3y ago
I don't know if this will be helpful to you specifically, or maybe just someone else who reads these comments, but I also thought for years that I was autistic, without having been formally diagnosed. Even my mother thought so when I explained it to her.
Difficulty reading social cues, sensory overwhelm, robotic affect and processing--all totally normal for me.
In my case, I later discovered that early childhood trauma's symptoms can often mimic autism, especially if the perpetrator is the type of gaslighter who denies that they meant what every nonverbal cue suggested they meant.
Even the sensory overwhelm can happen because of trauma, because if you were not safe when your neural pathways were forming, you may have learned to pay keener attention to your environment looking for threats, at the same time that your parasympathetic nervous system never developed the normal ability to down-regulate your stress responses because the threat was never really over.
There's every chance you specifically are an autistic adult who's never been diagnosed, or who just has autism-like traits. I just want to bring it up for anyone for whom it might be helpful.
- Fnoord 3y agoWhy not both?
- smeej 3y agoIt could be both. Thanks for that reminder. In my case, it turned out not to be, as working through the trauma eliminated the symptoms that had previously been interpreted as caused by autism, but it's certainly possible to be both autistic and a trauma survivor.
- wkat4242 3y agoI'm also not diagnosed but I certainly have some traits. Especially Asperger traits. I'm not sure if I have it either. I've asked some professionals and they all tended towards no, though most were a long time ago. Personally I think yes. Someone else said it could be ADHD which I also have some overlap with but also not a strong match. But I'm not going out of my way to label it. I'm clearly not neurotypical but whatever label I put on it doesn't really change that. Learning to live with it does make it a lot more bearable though.
- porknubbins 3y agoI had suspected something like that in myself. I have no trouble reading social cues but am often overly sensitive to them and overreact or freeze up and avoid talking to people or showing emotion out of anxiety, which in some ways is just as bad as being unable to read cues. In my case I think its due to issues with my father who was not abusive but angry and unpredictable, and unable to empathise with or mirror anyone else’s emotional state. This lead to a lot of trust issues with people that probably comes across as autism but is more anxiety and social awkwardness.
- kafkaenjoyer24 3y agoI can relate to this as well. Father figure with narcissistic traits. Everything had to be done his ways and other opinions were never respected. No empathy at all. As a result I think I formed some kind of protection shell. Outwards I appeared indifferent, apathic or stoic while the kernel was very sensitive. In my teens I suspected psychopathic tendencies because of this shell. At other times Aspergers but it didn't fully match. Nowadays I guess I have developed some kind of schizoid personality.
- smeej 3y agoInternal Family Systems therapy has helped me understand and work through this a lot. I have a very robotic "manager" part that spent a lot of time running things for me. It takes input from the nearest authority figure and precisely meets expectations, but doesn't feel, doesn't internalize, doesn't connect. It was protecting a lot of confused, vulnerable little parts that had been kind of pushed out of conscious awareness when I was young, because it sounds like we had similar fathers. I heard this great line that really helped crystalize part of it for me too: When children are dealing with unstable parents, they don't doubt the parent. They doubt themselves. They don't stop loving the parent. They stop loving themselves. It's a process I'm still working through every day, but at least it finally feels like I'm moving forward, not backward or spinning my wheels in place.