Is trauma the main 'cause' of autism?

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I am not sure I understand your question. Are you saying that trauma can amplify autistic traits?
Or is it like this : If there had not been so much childhood trauma, then maybe coping with Autism could have been better, since energy can be directed towards developing skills to cope under normal situations rather than to deal with stress?

I have thought about with respect to myself. There was considerable childhood trauma in my case. Well not from parents but other people staying with us. But my parents were quite accommodating considering the circumstances. But I do have sensory issues and tics/stimming right from childhood. I do remember this vividly because of some incidents. Sometimes I do wonder if my social anxiety was more because of the circumstances in my house. Also I wonder if I could have picked up more social skills, if some people who lived with us were not so f***ed up.

Anyway please answer my questions w.r.t the OP.

I grew up in the best possible environment for an autistic child, total BAP household with BAP parents and BAP grandparents, also BAP relatives on both sides of family, autistic behaviors considered normal, no pressure to communicate or socialize, as restricted and repetitive as I wanted to be. I dont' think that I had trauma during my childhood, when I had severe autistic traits. Because I had a good environment and BAP people to raise me and make the right rational decisions for me, I was able to become very high-functioning with moderate autistic traits and no psychiatric disorders.

I'm glad that that's the case for at least some people. I have to say, I got lucky too, having those first eight years of my life pretty much free of any kind of abuse. You survive a lot better if, in your early years, you get the chance to learn about who you are. Sure my mom was in denial, but at least she truly loved me and never mistreated me. That's more than a lot of kids get.

I think that some autism therapies cause stress and trauma for the autistic child. The most obvious source is the therapist and the environment of the therapy. I don't think that most autistic children want to spend lots of time like 40 hours a week with various therapists in overloading environments doing mostly meaningless activities that they don't understand. These are all sources of stress for the autistic children. I would probably withdraw from such things. That or act out, alternately. I know that I am not cut out to so much hoooman interaction in the outside world. I have to carefully control how much of these things I get even now. My brain tends to shut down from these things. My brain shutting down prevents me from learning things. As a child, I could not have learned much if my brain had been fried most of the time. I think that my autistic traits might have become more severe, or my cognitive development would have been hampered, and I would not have become very high-functioning.

Very, merry, berry good points!

Your theory does not describe me.

I had the same type of childhood as you described, did had less social pressures as I aged, and became "more autistic" despite it.

No, autism cannot be caused by trauma. However someone may experience trauma and develop autistic like symptoms, such as childhood PTSD. This would not be autism though. It would be PTSD with autistic like symptoms such as stemming, meltdowns, and sometimes poor social skills.
PTSD often mimics other disorders.

I can't really see how you can really tease the trauma apart from the autism like that. The only way I wouldn't have had so much stress as a kid would be if I lived in some sort of optimal environment for someone like me (which doesn't exist), but if I had, I wouldn't have needed to adapt to anything and would have stayed the same as I started, which was already weird. As it was, I did experience a lot of stress, and it gave me new symptoms (similar to PTSD) but that wouldn't have happened if I were normal.
So... yes and no?

Though I have to note I don't consider my childhood in any way traumatic. I just had no special accommodations, and it would have been a lot easier at this point if I'd had them.

Wow, thanks for all your replies. I don't feel entirely understood though, which I believe to be mostly caused by different word interpretations. E.g. 'trauma' can be interpreted in a physical, psychological, psychoanalytical, colloquial etc. way and the meaning would even shift in various contexts and situations. Similarly, 'autism' can be interpreted in different ways, describing either just a medical diagnosis or just a person or a certain type of mindset and live experiences or all together.
Also there is the problem of tracing back cause and effect, which was also pointed out. This causes causality loops, to the point where you can't tell cause and effect apart with any certainty. E.g. because you experience too much stress, you will adapt less, but because you adapt less you experience more stress.

First let me tell you that I was thinking much further back in terms of causality, than probably any of you can even remember from their own life. Imagine a neurotypical infant being exposed to a 120dB ringing alarm-bell all day. He wouldn't hear the conversations around him, he would be on alert and under stress 24/7, eventually not learn language and express a lot of stress symptoms such as crying or most certainly later repetitive, aggressive or self-injurious behaviors. This is an analogy for autistic perception, just that the perception is internally different in autistic people rather than externally different (the bell). Of course the differences in perception are more complicated, it is the brain not 'filtering' as much rather than volume sensitivity and plain perception isn't the only difficulty. But I hope you get the idea.

This kind of extreme stress exposure is what I mean by trauma. Not head injury or social/physical child abuse, simply, a situation that creates an emotional urgency and simultaneously impossibility to deal with it in a healthy way, meaning by means that don't (negatively) impact mechanisms to deal with other situations. Similarly described by Freud: "An event in the subject's life, defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization" (probably the only time Freud ever made sense ). Very simplified: If you can't turn the alarm bell off, and can't change your emotional response to it, you have to become deaf in order to sleep and not get a heart-attack or whatever, but then you won't hear language, won't learn, etc. This is just one demonstrative example of what could happen. Similarly, internal emotional processes could be affected, rather than simple-to-understand external perception.

And this very early on differences in cognition, which influence later life, were really what I was targeting at with my question. Our world is designed for NTs, people who all have roughly the same type of thinking, the same type of perception and the same type of emotional responses. But what if there is just a different type of person who doesn't share all that?

Just to express it simplified: If an NT-human would grow up on an alien world, where everything was 10 times faster, 10 times louder, 10 times brighter, 10 times more frequent and all facial expressions were non-human, etc, etc. Would he turn out to develop to be autistic (meaning by medical symptoms), the same way autistics do in a world that doesn't respect how they think and perceive? Are almost all symptoms of autism rather a developmental deficit caused by constant traumatic experiences from day zero, which arise not from easy to grasp single events or experiences later in life, but from a plain difference in perception and processing, which is just more sensitive and fragile to our current social and cultural conventions than what we usually expect. Can that be considered a cognitive deficit at all?

And it is very very important to know, if that is the case, because what our social and cultural conventions are and how much we adhere to them is entirely variable. It is not a result of unchangeable circumstances (like having a cognitive deficit and inevitably having to work around it by acquiring additional skills, or there would be no improvement). The same way normal people don't turn their TVs up to full volume all the time and won't buy kitchen tools and washing machines that are as loud as jackhammers, you can minimize noise in your environment. The same way NT people don't have a nice meeting between friends at home with 100 drunk people in a two-room flat, you can change social events. The same way NT people don't shake their children, you can touch your children less if it troubles them. Etc., etc. Schools could be different too, but thats a longer shot. The real target is parenting and the environment at home in my opinion. That's were change could really happen instantly and effectively, without difficulties or delay.

Also, there are genetic tests, sufficient enough to treat children precautiously differently from birth. You don't have to wait for symptoms to surface in order to make an appropriate decision.

Well, you can't separate trauma from autism if both already occurred. And you can't know how you would have developed or if you would have acquired more skills early on which would have made you less weird.


I agree with both, but what I really wanted to emphasize is that the latter is a lot more crucial in my opinion. Also concerning word definitions, if you understand autism as a list of symptoms (i.e. a diagnosis) and being and thinking differently as a separate thing, then I would like to rephrase your statement as: "If there had not been so much childhood trauma by thinking and perceiving differently than the others, then maybe coping with your environment would have been better, such that you had possibly not expressed sufficient autism symptoms to diagnose you in the first place, since mental energy can be directed towards developing skills to cope under normal situations rather than to deal with stress?"

Also, a lot of autism symptoms are just extreme stress symptoms. Compare what happens in psychological burnout or what symptoms abused children or animals have. The overlap is huge. I seriously doubt you could tell apart any AS person if they had a psychological burnout or not, because in my opinion, it is inherent to autism. In psychological burnout, isolation from social contact is a strategy of maximizing personal resources (in order to work more), the same with neglecting other personal needs like eating and sleeping besides the social contact. In burnout, people max out their resources for work, in autism adult people max out their resources to deal with the misfit conditions in their environment. Social isolation and self-neglect also happens by physical abuse. Just look up the overlap. If you really read into it, you will see the pattern to it and if you imagine someone was forced from birth to deal with the world in the same fashion, you can about imagine what developmental deficits that might leave behind.


The way I wanted to put it, its not about 'friendliness' of the environment, but about appropriateness, individual respect for being different, not on a level of acceptance but on a level of not actually mistreating you if you account for the cognitive differences. And that you 'are autistic' (in the sense of being different as a person) doesn't necessarily mean that you are diagnosable with autism, meaning that you are dysfunctional because of it. Also the question is, what brings you on 'the border of diagnosis' in the first place. Currently, all we know scientifically about that is that there are some genes related to autism, and of course cases of brain damage (which I won't argue about at all, since I see this as something entirely different), but absolutely nothing about what causes the degree of dysfunction.

Of course, if the damage is already done, e.g. you are 5 and you could have a friendly environment the next years or an ignorant one, I agree with your statement. But I want to emphasize my point, that you still can't know how you would have turned out to be if you grew up in a different environment where your experiences were less traumatic (in the sense I pointed out).

What about severely autistic three-year-olds who do develop well over time, including coping with alien world as they grow up into high-functioning adolescents or adults? Was the severe autism in early childhood caused by environmental trauma during infancy? Was there permanent damage done from the stress of the trauma? Does the damage prevent development in a high-functioning direction? What if development did occur in that direction?