AS versus PTSD

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'Environmental autism' can be clerly distinguished by its different course. You typically see it when you find a child in a severely deprived setting, such as an orphanage or very neglectful home, but when the kid is put into foster care in a healthy home their autistic symptoms disappear within a few months. (Not that they become normal, instead they start showing behavior more typical of borderline personality or in a few cases psychopathic-like behavior.) In contrast, a child who is actually autistic will act autistic in any setting, though certain settings bring it out more than others.

Personally, as an autistic with PTSD, one of the big things that led me to decide that my PTSD couldn't explain it all was noticing the 'happy' traits I had. The effects of PTSD are pretty much all things that lessen your happiness, while autism has a mix of things that lessen your happiness in certain settings and things that increase your happiness in other settings. For example, do you have certain sensory sensations you enjoy more than most people do? Do you have intense interests that bring you joy?

Also, neurological 'soft signs' suggest a non-psychological cause. Things like significant clumsiness, skill scatter on standardized testing (people with purely psychological issues tend not to show skill scatter but most people with developmental disabilities do), hypotonia, etc.

As you treat the PTSD, you'll find that you get to know the 'real you' better, and it'll become a lot easier to tell whether you're on the spectrum or not. But be aware that if you are autistic and you don't recognize it, that could make treating PTSD more complicated as the therapist may try to find a psychological explanation for something that's actually neurological in nature.