Separating autism and trauma

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Hi GiantHockeyFan,

I speak as somebody who was excluded by my own family, at best, and cast down upon, at worst.

What does realistic mean to you? I can understand how a realist attitude could be construed as "defeatist" by people who have not experienced that kind of social pain. Labeling somebody as a defeatist is another type of bullying. I would call your attitude "safety-seeking," which makes sense from what you have described about your past experience. I don't agree that it will last forever, either, if you continue protecting yourself.

I would ask myself those questions:

Which ASD symptoms did you have before the trauma? What was your coping system?

And after the trauma? Some symptoms can become more blatant, due to a trauma because your coping system is affected.

Thanks for the reply. Realistic to me means realizing that my extended (NOT immediate) family will never like me, they never have and it's pointless to waste time on them trying to show them my any positive qualities. I will focus on two of them: K and S. K is a late 20s woman who used to be almost best friends with me as a child. We lost contact for a few years and when we reconnected at my grandparent's house (I was staying there, she was living there) I went over to hug her and tell me how nice it was to see her with a big smile. She turned away and said 'yup' and I never saw her for 10 more years. Did I mention we were staying in the same tiny apartment for a week?

S is only one month younger than me. He is married to a seemingly nice wife and 2 young children. In THEORY, we should be best friends: we have similar interests, look like twins and he seems to have strong family values. No matter how nice I am to that family, I always get an ice cold reception. The final straw was when he visited my hometown for work. He was literally working on the SAME STREET I lived on and never even stopped in to say hello. I cried myself to sleep as a child because I could not get him to stop treating me like I had leprosy.

Making things more bizarre, someone bullied me on FB and he jumped to my defense, saying what a great person I was and to stop listening to bullies. I thought "great!" and later tried to befriend him. Same ice cold response. The family came to visit my city, I offered to provide accommodations and/or supper and was told 'we will just get a hotel' and I never once heard from him.

That's not even better into my Aunts and Uncles who were even worse. I just had to resign myself to the fact THEY are the ones that are messed up but being bullied in school by half the class makes it difficult to accept I am not at fault. When I hear BS like 'everyone has family issues' 'everyone gets bullied' I just want to scream! That's like saying I know what death row is like since I was sent to my room for an hour as a child. Few people know what it feels like to have to sit on the floor of the bus because nobody wants to risk being targeted by a bully.

Last edited by GiantHockeyFan on 20 Feb 2016, 9:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

If a clinician tries to tell me I don't have Aspergers, I jus have trauma, PTSD, etc I would point out that I remember pre-school vividly. This isn't a case of mis-remembering: I actually looked at old videos, photos and revisited the site and it was exactly as I remembered it (other than the teacher's wacky 80s hairdo ). It was obvious something was off about me: I simply could not relate or connect to any other students: they seemed almost like background characters in a movie. I usually did my own thing whenever I could. Still, I was always treated with respect by everyone and I was happy. Honest to goodness happy! Grade 1 was when it start to go downhill because I was told what to learn, what to do and nobody else seemed to have problem with this. Things didn't really get bad we moved from my hometown at age 9 and got REALLY bad at around 12.

So, yes the ASD symptoms were always there and that's why I was bullied starting in grade 1. Luckily I had a great principal but people have targeted me from as early as I can remember, likely due to marching to my own drum. The symptoms got much worse as the bullying increased. I still suffer the effects of it today as some days I believe everyone on earth is conspiring to make my life miserable and knows all my secrets. Hard to shake that feeling based on what happened to me!

We need to talk.
o, I don't know what it's like to sit on the floor of a bus but I do know what it's like to hide in a bathroom stall only to have the door kicked in by another student.
I think that kind of fear, that would drive someone to cower in fear (as I am doing at this very moment in my car) is the result of school bullies and also the deep, cataclysmic sense that there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I'm not usually one for song lyrics, but this always seemed close to right:

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be

Doesn't work for me because my trauma started when I was 1. (Sexual abuse by foster siblings.)

What I've done is to research both extensively. If a symptom shows up only in one list and not the other, I know what caused it. (For example, research hasn't found a link between abuse and asexuality, even though one is often assumed, but autistic women have a high rate of asexuality. Conversely, the 'floaty feeling' I sometimes have, I described on many autistic forums and very few people seemed to have any idea what I was talking about, but I finally came across a description of dissociation that described it perfectly - still have no idea why poetry triggers it, though.)

If I can't find any data, or it's a feature seen in both conditions, I take a look at how it feels to me. For example, when I have a meltdown, I feel unloved and unloveable and desperately need to be reassured that I am in fact loved, overlaid on top of whatever actually caused the meltdown. Whereas the autistic kids I worked with usually either were indifferent to or rejected by attempts to comfort them, and only calmed down once whatever set them off was fixed in some way. (Eg returned to the routine, removed them from an overloading situation, got going instead of sitting around waiting, and so forth.) So I think my meltdowns are more due to trauma than to autism.

Executive dysfunction is another shared feature. But when I think about how it feels being disorganized, it's either completely non-emotional (poor sense of time, for example - time just has no meaning to me), or it's linked with a positive emotion (eg distracted by an intense interest, or can't throw stuff away because I love it too much). The consequences of EF can be linked with negative emotions, but the symptoms themself doesn't seem linked to negative emotion. This is very different from my brother, who has depression - when he's having EF issues, he's usually feeling exhausted or paralyzed by hopelessness. Plus, my EF is also intricately linked with my creative talents, since I get creative impulses and then throw myself into the creative endeavor completely as a result. So I don't think trauma caused by EF - I think it's just how my brain is wired.

Of course, the only way I'll ever know for sure which of my traits are due to autism versus trauma is if I clone myself, and my clone grows up without trauma. (My autism is confirmed to be genetic.)