Do autistic traits get worse into adulthood?

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In my experience, autistic traits get worse with worse digestive health.

Over time, I experienced symptoms getting stronger and stronger until they were really bad for a handful of years.

Eventually I figured out the digestive root cause & how to treat it.

Treated it and now my symptoms are minimal and I'm living a second life for it.

So, yes, over time symptoms may get worse into adulthood until you decide for yourself to be open to exploring treating yourself neurologically via treating your digestive system.

Stress, illness, abusive alcoholic mother and parents' acrimonious divorce all made not only my mental illnesses worse, but definitely my autism is worse. (I don't live with my parents anymore - I live alone thankfully)

I can barely leave the house on my own and I rely quite a lot on support workers. My sensory issues are severe and the very few social skills I ever learnt are gone.

I am withdrawn most of the time. When I was a child I was more outgoing apparently.

I was violent and aggressive as a child. I am on four different medications now which all sedate me so I am sedated enough not to freak out constantly, but if it weren't for these meds, I would be back in the secure unit by now. I still get violent if people touch me and I've done stuff like scream and punch the walls really hard at uni when I've been stressed out. I need a full-time support worker at uni.

So yes autistic traits can get worse in my experience.

My impression is this:

When I was very young, the symptoms were very strong, particularly the oppressive impact of sensory issues. I think this is directly related to development. Going through puberty somehow made it easier to compensate for and control those things.

Being weird and having trouble communicating is another story--that doesn't change but I became steadily more aware of it as I got older. I didn't really know it when I was very young, except for having trouble at school or the playground or at other kids birthday parties. from age 8 on it was very, very clear to me that I was not like most people.

I had trouble in college and trouble getting into adult life and work, sort floundering through my 20s and finally, with a big push from my wife who I was afraid of losing, getting employed.

As I near 50, I feel that some things are getting worse. I seem to be a bit more vulnerable to sensory issues again, particularly tinnitus. Maybe that is getting worse, but I think I just have lost a bit of the extra mental energy needed to suppress awareness of it. Likewise, the light bothers me more than it used to and in ways that I haven't experienced much since I was a child. I think these are normal symptoms of aging, overlaid on autistic traits.

So I think things were bad when I was kid, got better when I was a young man, and are now getting a bit worse. It makes me think I really need to find the best ways of dealing with it now, in order to mitigate the inevitable geriatric deficits to come.

My Aspie husband agrees with this. It's all about learning work arounds. The crap that was hard is still hard, and he has much less patience.

Yup!