AS or PTSD

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You could have both.....I have aspergers and PTSD, but yeah I am not sure how to find out for sure. I have not been officially diagnosed with either yet.

Yeah, maybe I do have both. I think I've always had problems with socializing, but I can't remember my school life in the past well. I'm going to a psychiatrist for the second time this Friday, should I bring this up and my personality disorders with him wen I'm there? Or is PTSD better suited with a therapist? Thanks for your responses.

I am going to counseling for the my PTSD and other issues, but its not really helping any......you may have better luck, especially if your not as burnt out on everything as I am.

One could say that AS/ASD is to be born into a world that induces PTSD by default. PTSD is the result of an overwhelming experience. This results in the brain essentially switching over to survival mode. One becomes hyper vigilant, unable to let go and relax, develops perseverative thinking about past events.
The autistic brain is hyper-connected (fire together, wire together) the normal process of thinning (out of sink, cut the link) is inhibited, in particular with regard to stimuli that evoke a fear response.
In PTSD the brain has done a lot of learning (re-wiring), what differentiates the two in a functional sense could be described as a continuum of how much environmental stress ones given wiring (in the neurological sense) can handle before it goes into overload.
In AS that limit was reached very quickly in comparison to their peers.

I got both from traumatic experiences in the past and sometimes the flashbacks trigger meltdowns as well.

Makes sense to me. I know I have Asperger's and suspect pretty strongly that I have PTSD as well.

PTSD can be gotten over. I had, I think, a terrible case of it as a teenager (due entirely to surviving grade school in a snotty little town). After a few years of peace and quiet, and quite a bit of work with my husband and some friends, I was doing pretty well.

The problem, it seems, is that once you have had it, it does not take much to trigger it again. I was good for years-- and then my husband and I got into a fight that lasted for months, and I spent another two or three years living in survival mode. We were just starting to fix it and then my stepmom had a stroke, my dad died, my in-laws turned on me, my stepmom's sisters decided to run me out of the family, we lost a pregnancy, and the people I asked for help with the resultant depression basically told me that having Asperger's meant I could not have a life and tried to kill me with antipsychotics...

...and now, three years later, I still have only very limited desire to come out of survival mode. I look at interacting with most of society like a combat soldier looks at a firefight-- just try to dodge the bullets and get out alive. I don't, at this juncture, ever expect it to change. I really don't want it to-- if I start trying to "function normally" again, I'm just opening the door to being re-traumatized, and I don't think I can stand to go through it again.

Apathy is a nice protective shell. If all you give a crap about is what you absolutely have to do to get through the day, and you don't really give a crap how it turns out as long as you are still alive and walking free at the end of it, there really isn't a whole heck of a lot that you can be hurt with.