Autism and PTSD

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link: We Always liked Picasso Anyway

This is from a blog I stumbled on and it describes my feelings of having lived with undiagnosed autism for the first forty years of my life.

The blog is about parenting but the above struck a cord with me. I have always felt like an undesirable. Can anyone else relate?

Yes I can strongly relate.

I'm currently in treatment for PTSD but there were a good chunk of years where I was so afraid of being "helped" and "treated" that I avoided not only therapy but all doctors and hospitals. So all the "help" that was forced on me not only didn't do a damn thing to help me, not only further compounded my trauma, but made it that much harder to even start getting help with all that added harm later on.

And I don't have (nor do I want) a relationship with anyone in my family-of-birth because I refuse to continue playing the sick, dysfunctional role they depend upon me to play for their family dynamic to work. I do speak with my mother every now and then. It costs me very little and means very much to her. But she is clear that I owe her nothing, that she's not entitled to any relationship with me at all, she gave up any claim to that when she had me institutionalized, and that any contact I do grant her is strictly noblesse oblige on my part.

I was misdiagnosed as a child and gave up on medical professionals until I became too depressed to function. I was lucky to get a diagnosis when I did.

My parents loved me on a certain level--but they were, sometimes, embarrassed in my presence. Sometimes, they still are embarrassed.

Tough nuggies on them!

Thank you for this post. I can totally relate as well.
I recently found out that have PTSD with scarce memory of my childhood. It seems that I have being neglected (not financially neglected though). I have been diminished by my parents even into adulthood for never being good enough and many times insulted for 'having a temper' (meltdowns).

I have found that the situation with the parents remain particularly painful when you are always compared to NT siblings.

I am discovering (as a trained First Responder) that I almost certainly had or have PTSD from my teenage years. My immediate family treated me well but I can't say the same about relatives and peers! I still remember like it was yesterday one of the kids saying "why are you still in this class? Don't you know everyone hates you?" and having nothing but a round of cheers go up to the kid who said that. Sums up my childhood: I was sweet, kind and caring and everyone hated my guts for no apparent reason. Apparently my fathers relatives shunned me because my mother got pregnant before marriage (with my brother) and I looked like my mother. Never mind I have my father's personality: just looking like mom was enough to be treated like I had the plague at family gatherings.

People tell me to "just get over it" all the time as if I like being stuck in the past. It's easy to say "be yourself" when you aren't mercilessly teased and bullied just for being yourself.

Hey...that's pretty cool...an Aspie First-Responder!

That's actually a great accomplishment for an Aspie--Aspies tend to have trouble "thinking on their feet," myself included.

Well I am a volunteer AND I work in a team so it's not all up to me.... yet. It's still a struggle (especially using a "caring" voice since I am so blunt and no nonsense) but has been a valuable experience. In a typical Aspie screw up, I once said I would rather deal with a cardiac arrest than a cut on a child's finger: the former is very easy to deal with since we are so well trained for! I hope nobody got the wrong idea that I wanted to see someone have a heart attack but would you expect an Aspie to say anything less

I'm actually planning on taking a course on mental health first aid that dives deeper into this topic. It's great for me since I can sadly relate to panic attacks, anxiety, PTSD and the results of physical and emotional abuse.

Bluntness, with an air of sensitivity, is essential when dealing with "first-responder" type situations.

I can relate to this. I can 5000% relate to this.

This is the dark version of my story. My mother and her mother loved me deeply, freely, and unconditionally. It being 1980-something, they had no clue of what I was and no clue of how to approach, handle, deal with, or help me. I think they knew, on some level, that I was "like Grandpa," but didn't want to accept the possibility because he was so difficult to live with, had such difficulty expressing affection (or anything else positive), and struggled so much in his own life. It would have been too hard for them to look at Their Precious BeeBee and accept that she was going to face the same things.

Notwithstanding, they got it 120% right about 70% of the time. They really, seriously, totally, utterly, and completely botched the other 30%; although it left some scars that I'm stuck with, I try to choose to be grateful and sing the praises of the 70% that they knocked out of the park.

I am told that my maternal grandfather loved me deeply. I believe that. I have some warm memories of time spent with him. One such memory: Once, when I was still very young, I said, "I love you, Pappy," and he replied, in a halting and choked whisper, "Love you too." It happened only once; I was the only person in the family ever to hear those words. Words cannot begin to express how much I have learned to treasure that memory.

My father and his mother loved me deeply, freely, and unconditionally. They also liked, appreciated, and enjoyed who I was for who I was, and made no secret of that fact. They knew, on every level, that I was "like Saint Alan," and they accepted it and embraced it and worked with it based on that experience. Saint Alan had his struggles, but it turned out OK for the most part, so it wasn't really difficult at all to face that. There wasn't anything to FACE.

They got it 97% right, 97% of the time.

That's half the post. I'll finish later.

I've beaten myself into a pulp as a result of my life.......it feels like stale mate for me at the moment

I asked the doctor if I could just see a councillor and he booked me in for blood test and mental health screen and I've completely freaked out.
It's been a year and I have not been back there since.

I can relate but there is a part of me that says I've got it all wrong.

I'm grateful to have a very supporting immediate family, but anyone outside of them has usually treated me like a third wheel and has left me behind. I've reached the point where it's ingrained in me to just act secondary around other people. 1 on 1 anything terrifies me, I'll start having panic attacks or shutdowns.

Other half:

I'd like to add, on the subject of my ASD grandfather, that I really don't think he left me with any scars to drag around. Alone among the people on my mom's side of the family, he did me no damage. I can't say the same for his daughters-- I think his obsessive-compulsive issues surrounding "looking normal" and his rabid inner critic took a huge toll on their lives. But he learned; considering the Godawful state his heart and mind had to be in (Grandpa probably had CPTSD, from Hell, in spades-- and when his kids were growing up, CPTSD had him), he did abso-facking-lutely golden by me.

The rest of my mom's side of the family pretty much sneered at, spit on, and rejected me outright. They did the same thing to my grandfather, and to my perfectly NT mother simply because she issued from him, and for that matter to my uber-social perfectly NT grandmother for being Italian.

I hear, through Grandma, that I have a good little handful of ASD cousins on that side. People I've never met, because their parents (younger than my folks, but older than me) fled as far as they could get as soon as they could go and never looked back (although they do call their parents out of filial obligation). I guess these kids would be in their early to mid 20s. Sometimes I think about trying to get in touch with them. I probably never will, but if you're reading this and your parents left the Fairmont, West Virginia area in the late 70s or early 80s and never looked back, drop me a PM.

The rest of my dad's side... Oh, it's complicated. They called me all the names an Aspie can expect to be called and treated me like dirt in the ways that an Aspie can expect to be treated like dirt. At the same time, they tolerated me. And, over the years, I've come to the realization that they treated pretty much everyone like dirt in those ways. There's depression in that bunch, too. And either ADHD or mild bipolar disorder. And multigenerational PTSD stemming from my uncle's two consecutive heavy combat tours in Vietnam that he only got any kind of help in dealing with in the last decade. And all the attendant crap. You know???? So they really weren't good to me. But they really weren't bad to me, either. And although it really hurt, and really left some scars, and I really still have some issues because of it, I really can't hold it against them. They've tried to help clean it up. They're pretty all-right to me now. I kind of actually feel as safe and comfortable around them as, actually, almost anyone I know.

Peers in grade school???? Awful. God-awful. Horrible. Abusive in every single way in the world other than sexually. FOUL. If the school hadn't been pretty small, I probably could have funded my college education with the pennies and nickels they threw at me. And that ain't the worst. I am intimately familiar with phrases like, "Why don't you do the world a favor and go kill yourself?" I can remember some of the teachers laughing along, or hauling me up in front of the classroom to make a public spectacle out of it.

High school???? Honestly those people probably saved my life, taught me a lot of social skills, made learning and growth possible for me, and defused a potential school shooter all in a go. In four short years. How did they do that?? A few of them listened to me and talked with me (Phil, Connie, MJ, Skinner, Jenny, Sunshine-- This one's for you!! ). The rest of them LEFT ME THE HELL ALONE. That simple act provided a safe place to experiment, in the last 3 semesters of high school, with who I was and who I maybe could be and where I might want to go. It wasn't everything I needed-- I really could have used two more years in high school, or at least in the community-- but it was ENOUGH.

I lived. Re-traumatizing stuff happened after that; had it not, I might have made a full recovery. Even with the re-trauma, I'm a PTSD survivor (I don't have a formal Dx of PTSD and I'm not going to get one-- one formal highly stigmatized diagnosis is enough, thanks very much), not a PTSD victim. I still have it, I'm still struggling with it, I do not at this time see any reason that I should believe I will ever fully recover and don't feel that "full recovery" is a healthy or realistic goal. What's the good of investing all that work, when I'd have to keep myself almost cloistered in order to avoid being re-re-traumatized?? I think I'll just stay shattered, thanks, and take the bad days with the good. The important thing, I guess, is that SOMETHING (in no small part, Daddy, Mamaw, and the community I went to high school in) gave me enough wherewithal to bounce back with that I'm not a PTSD suicide statistic. I could have been, but I'm not. Yet, anyway.

I hope this will make sense and I think it really is on topic.

When I was younger and before I was diagnosed or thought of myself as having ASD, I believed what I thought happened that gave me PTSD. I remembered some things I found really overwhelming. As I got older, had kids, work, and got pounded every time (it seems but I'm sure it's not) I don't look typical, I've come to not believe myself and to distrust my memory. There's a lot of pressure about what happens when one slips and people decide "weird". So even though I've always been extremely poor at pretending or imagining things, I often tell myself I'm lying about what I remember. Before I knew I was "weird" the way I do now, I trusted what I thought. Now that I know I need fixing socially and for communicating, now that I know that sometimes, other people might look at me and talk to me, and know, I no longer trust what I think happened is accurate.

Plus, now I am aware that some of the stuff that happened, happened to me because I wasn't and am not normal. Not really anyone else's fault.

The OP seemed to be about the pain of being seen as defective and told to be fixed all the time.

Is there a way that others have found around the pressure to be fixed to appear normal by denying the past? Because that is not working for me, I'm not good at pretending: yet it seems that's what the world demands.

Any ideas anyone has would be great.....

I have been able to deal with my ptsd better after being diagnosed as autistic. Now there is a reason and a framework.

I find it harder now. How do you use the framework to make it easier?