ASD & PTSD

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Just wondering:
Is it common for people with Aspergers to get PTSD from events that neurotypical people would consider 'everyday events'?
The events I'm talking about are extremely intense social situations that lead to major meltdowns and shutdowns. Is it normal to be experiencing flashbacks, nightmares and avoidance of those places/people years later?

Even if it isn't normal, you're not alone. I have a tendency to avoid people of whom I've had very unpleasant experiences with as well, even after apologies have been said and done.

I don't think the people concerned would even think to apologise because they have no idea how deeply I was affected.

I was not meaning to say that all traumatic encounters I've had ended with an apology (usually on my end) in some form or another. A few of them have, even though the relationship was already dead in the water by that point. Most of them haven't.

Regardless, you're not alone in experiencing this.

I think so. I've seen Karla Fisher talk about this a bit on her FB page, that PTSD is common in autistic people, and that it can be mistaken for other things such as personality disorders.



I've certainly experienced this myself.

I don't know about other people, but I've developed a SEVERE case of social anxiety over the years, due to repeated negative social experiences. Most of those experiences weren't horrific in themselves...but added up, they've got me so anxious and avoidant and full of dread about things most normal people would barely even think about. I've long considered my case of social anxiety to be almost a sort of "social PTSD" with the way it's affected me, making me almost housebound and isolated, even online. (I barely noticed the downward slide into social anxiety that I experienced growing up IRL...but I saw it happening all over again, the second time, after I first came online. I am now painfully anxious both online and off.) Just the mere act of opening and reading an e-mail can almost induce an anxiety attack...never mind replying to the thing. It takes me months to reply to my one online friend--and we've even met in person, twice! I seem to have lost the ability to get used to people.

I wasn't always like that. I was always shy and sensitive, but used to be quite chatty once I warmed to people; they would have to tell me to shut up. I was chatty when I first came online, too--obnoxiously so. I look back on e-mails and journal entries I wrote back then and I sounded like a completely different person. Those days are long, long past...being told to "Shut up" and "Go talk to someone else" and "Write shorter e-mails!" enough times made me withdraw more and more. Nowadays, every time I get feelings of wanting to reach out and connect to other people, the dread consumes my thoughts yet again (intrusive memories), and I remember every single incident of rejection and criticism and ridicule I received in the past, and I avoid even trying. (I can't count how many times I've experienced these feelings just in the few days I've been posting on this forum. It takes all the courage I have to go back and see if anyone has replied to me. Already I'm too afraid to read one thread I replied to.) Just about the only thing I don't have is actual flashbacks. I'm even on SSI for my anxiety, that's how bad it is.

Physically I show signs...always sitting in a part of the room where I can keep a safe eye on things and have easy access to an exit, even in non-anxiety-inducing situations (hypervigilance), always protecting my right side (no clue what's behind that ), shrinking away from people and retreating when I feel overwhelmed, jumping/flinching at unexpected things (exaggerated startle response), utterly freezing and breaking into tears when it gets to be too much. My former psychiatrist even said I acted just like someone with PTSD and asked if anything traumatic had happened in my childhood. I have no memory of any such thing. But I have very clear memory of the past +25 years of social rejections. +25 years of being criticized and turned away by almost every social connection you try to make, IMO, can add up to one big case of trauma.

I even feel alarms going off inside me when dealing with people who have never interacted with me before, just because they remind me too much of people I had bad experiences with in the past...unfortunately, if I choose to ignore the alarms, they usually turn out to be right, and I end up traumatized again.

Now as for why it all affected me so much more badly than anyone else I know? (Nobody else in my entire family is anxious like me.) I've always been incredibly sensitive. I don't know why. I could never figure out why; it's driven me crazy with wondering. Perhaps Asperger's would explain it, but I don't know (not diagnosed, though it was suggested to me). It's like I was born with no immunity to social difficulties. Everything hurts too badly, like I have no skin to protect me.

There's only one way I know to minimize the anxiety, and that's to avoid everything that could hurt me. Basically, I'm avoiding life.

So I don't know that it can be called PTSD (I'd hate seeming to trivialize the issues of people who really have been diagnosed with PTSD), but it sure feels like it in many ways.

I think it's quite confusing because when you look at articles that list the probable causes of PTSD it mentions such things as physical and sexual abuse, war, torture, natural disasters, life and death situations etc.
There's nothing on there about PTSD caused by distressing social experiences. I don't think it would be taken seriously.

Keep in mind that many of those articles are probably meant for a neurotypical audience. All of us would easily connect PTSD to violent, extreme events; "torture" and "trauma" practically go hand-in-hand, and the author would therefore spend less time elaborating on the subjectivity of the trauma and more on the PTSD itself.

That having been said, you bring up a good point: PTSD from intense social occurrences probably wouldn't be taken seriously, at least not unless you do some explaining. I doubt, however, that it would be completely hand-waved, even if there isn't a great deal of literature about it (perhaps a good subject for a college dissertation?). Similarly, I doubt that it's utterly "not a thing". An example: Doctors and nurses have gotten PTSD because they've accidentally screwed up while on the job - that doesn't necessarily fall into any of the categories you've outlined above (with the possible exception of "life/death").

Agreed, that's one reason I feel dumb even offering my insight in this thread. I'm VERY used to people scoffing at my feelings, no matter how real they feel to me, and that's what I expect would happen if the theory presented in this thread were shown to "normal" people. I can't imagine that most of them would take such claims seriously; I know for a fact my own family and former therapists wouldn't. (There are even people who think PTSD itself is highly exaggerated.)

The nearest specific comparison I can think of is psychological torture or emotional abuse. These are recognized things. But they only seem to be recognized in their most extreme contexts. People who develop social anxiety disorder (rather than being born with it)--and perhaps Aspies as well?--know very well how the endless stream of negative experience after negative experience can wear them down emotionally to the point where they even begin to doubt their own perception of things. That sounds like a form of psychological torture or emotional abuse to me--unintentional, of course (I doubt most people we have bad interactions with deliberately set out to torture us), and far more subtle and slow to develop into a disorder than true torture or abuse would be, but that might be the very reason why it's so easily missed or brushed off as not serious enough to count as a "true" cause of PTSD.

Psychological torture/emotional abuse is often easy to see and recognize (if you're not on the receiving end of it, that is). Years' worth of negative social interactions, not so much. It's just so gradual. Outsiders just see a negative experience here, a negative experience there, and assume that you have plenty of good experiences in between, and surely you can get over the bad ones in time. They don't see the endless barrage of negative experiences just piling one atop the other while you have no emotional defense like they do to ward it all off. They assume your brain works like theirs, so surely you can just shrug it off and move on. They don't take it seriously.

...

BUT...perhaps this is all just my dumb theory. All I really know is, I used to be a bright, cheery, chatty person who did cry too easily but then was able to move on and try again to share herself with the world...but now, I'm not. I'm skittish, and depressed, and withdrawn, and avoidant, and full of dreadful thoughts and memories. And I didn't go through any significant traumatic event as recognized in the official criteria for PTSD to get this way. I was just an overly sensitive person who went through a lot of negative social experiences.

The psychiatrist did think I fit the profile of PTSD...if I had had the traumatic experience to back it up. Maybe it's just that the type of traumatic experiences some of us go through aren't recognized as such, yet? It wasn't too long ago that the idea of "emotional abuse" was laughed at, too.


(I'm not arguing with you, BTW, only spouting my thoughts. And now I fear I'm blithering. I hate to sound like an argumentative blithering big head. If that's so, feel free to disregard.)

Raleigh, thank you for making this thread. This is an interesting thread.

I told the intake worker that I thought I had PTSD symptoms. She asked what the traumatic event was and I said being undiagnosed and untreated for so long. That was the end that conversation.
They just don't get it - the world is a hostile environment for autistic people. And accommodations are impossible. The nt world isn't designed for me to be successful.

On my first day of school (I was only 4 years old), I was ''frightened'', and displayed behaviour that worried the teachers and shocked my parents. I pulled the teacher's hair, wouldn't line up, got under tables, and got on the floor and kicked the other children. This was not who I was, and my parents knew that. I was fine at preschool; my social, emotional and intellectual development was typical like my peers, and I didn't have any issues at all. Then suddenly, six weeks after I finished preschool, I started official school and behaved so shockingly different. At first the teachers thought I was being abused at home, and my parents had to prove that they were not giving me any abuse at all. I knew that myself. Then after enough evidence that my behaviour was not from abuse, they started looking into me psychologically, and then slapped a label on me a few years later, which was AS, although I've never felt the diagnosis actually fitted me.

But lately I've been thinking about the time when I started school, and I wonder if I had some sort of PTSD what was something to do with school, which could be the reason for my behaviour. Before I started school, I had a brother who was at the school I was to go to, and so I was always there with my mum when she picked him up, and sometimes she came into the classroom, so I got plenty of school experience between ages 1 and 4. My brother seemed happy at school too. But I reckon that I experienced something or was told about something to do with school what could have frightened me about school. Something I probably can't remember now, and was too young to explain at the time. Maybe something happened on my school induction day (before the summer) what could have frightened me, perhaps. Maybe I got pushed over by some older children, intentionally or unintentionally, or maybe a grown-up shouted at me for something, or maybe somebody said something scary, like ''once we start school we won't see our mummies and daddies again'', and it could have petrified me, or maybe I saw children lining up and being more under fixed rules which perhaps I wasn't ready for, or anything like that. All that could be scary for a 4-year-old, especially if I have an anxiety disorder, AS or not. Then when September came and I was to start officially, I might have been so frightened, and it could be like a PTSD thing.

I wouldn't think one would get PTSD from intense though normal social situations, but maybe this could be turned around and ask the question is it common to experience PTSD from being ostracized.....and yes, and I think Neurotypical people would be quick to agree it is. And that being ostracized is t a normal social experience.

Plus if you've experienced previous trauma you are vulnerable to things that might have seemed minor if you hadn't already been through so much.

You might be right, it's just, so many of us have experienced both major trauma and what you're calling everyday events, so I think it's hard to tease everything apart.

While I agree being ostracised is traumatic, what about situations where you are forced to participate in activities which are way beyond your comfort zone? What if these activities include physical contact which NT's would find pleasant but people with autism would consider a violation?

Well there is the concept of complex PTSD, it would not be created from a single distressing social experience...but repeated distressing social experiences over and over again I think can constitute a sort of trauma, but also depends on the individual some people seem able to brush these things off...but basically the theory for that is an ongoing negative environment can be traumatic and cause symptoms identical to PTSD...of course some people don't like the idea of including that but if it effects the brain the same way which it does then it only makes sense to also consider that PTSD.

I have experienced both though...the ongoing distressing social interactions and what during the time I figured was a life and death situation...man with a gun in the school, turns out he finally confined himself and some students in a classroom where one of them didn't make it out, but at the time for all I knew this maniac was running around throughout the building looking for a target. So hard to say if that alone caused my PTSD or if it was also the ongoing bullying and ostracism combined, maybe I had PTSD symptoms before that event....but trying to think back is such a blur so no idea.

Interesting thread. I can relate to a lot of what people are saying.

I think one aspect that NT's won't get (that contributes to not getting it) is always dealing with people who can do worse to you than you to them. And, having to 'dance' in some unnatural, exhausting way or suffer consequences -- what happens when being yourself is always costly. Subjectively, dealing with people has always seemed like dealing with an unpredictable animal with very sharp teeth. They demand so much just not to be dicks.

They have social networks and the ability to use them against you. And, not only with neighbors and such, but also socially better with their boss than you, the customer or person at the DMV.

I remember reading somewhere that lacking a feeling of control or options makes PTSD more likely. I.e. a fighter pilot has the control stick in his hand, so he has a sense of control, as opposed to the radar guy in a bomber just has to sit there while bullets rip through the airplane.

Add that all that can even happen in childhood with your own parents/family and I'd be surprised if a person doesn't end up damaged in some way.