Feeling Broken

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I feel that my early life experiences, trauma and overlooked autism have left me without trust for others and for society as a whole. I feel like an outsider watching others function successfully. And that I do not have any chances left.

I think my heart is broken because I found out young how society can completely screw you up. Having undiagnosed autism and going through public school, being told by family, doctors and teachers that there is nothing wrong with me was gaslighting.

Now that I have been diagnosed as autistic I think I should feel vindicated, but I just feel disappointed and written off. And a bit angry too. Especially when I see younger autistics getting support that was not available when I was growing up.

I know I am depressed. It is not because of my current situation, which is good, but is because of past pain and unwanted knowledge. I can't work up the heart to engage with life.

Does anyone else feel like this?

Yep...I've felt this way before. And I will continue to feel this way from time to time.

But I feel it's always good to have perspective. Compare your present with your recent past. It's much better than it was, right? You went from a place which had drug people lurking into a nice, present situation.

Yeah, I know.....the same broken record.

But I know of no other solution which has any utility.

I'm sorry you're feeling sad, Ann.

There's lots that's good in you. I can see it in my mind's eye.

Try to think of engaging with life now as building foundation for future, so in a few months or a year or a few years, you may be in a much better situation than now, but only if you engage now.

But if you don't engage now, you may look back in future and think similar thoughts as now when you look back to the past, so engaging now is the best thing to do.

True. The problem is not my circumstances which are not bad. It's within me. It's like my brain is stuck between gears. I want to engage but I can't get my brain going.


Thanks kraftie, I keep going through the motions hoping I'll engage at some point.


This is true. One must keep trying.

In my new roommate situation my cohabitants are much younger than me. Twenty and 26. I'm 45. I kinda like it. I get to be the mature one.

I did my first run as a bus buddy yesterday. Young girl with anxiety. It went well. She even gave me a smile when we got to her destination. It made me feel something; like I can still be useful even if I am damaged.

When you use the word `broken` I know exactly what you mean.

I felt that for years but never had a word for it, then my girlfriend died unexpectedly in 2001 and when I was grieving I felt broken... like damaged goods, never to be `right` again.

How could I ever fit in, get on in the world.
Well ... it`s still really difficult (i`m going through a really rough patch right now) but broken doesn`t mean that it doesn`t work at all. Heart still beating
check this vid and song... I found it really inspirational recently, may give you a boost of strength too.... Good luck
PJ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u-niluB8HI

Exactly.

"Broken" means it can get fixed.

You are doing good now dispite it all. That is a testament to you which is not broken.

Hey Androbot ... your story sounds just like mine ... and I expect it is a common story with that select group of Aspies who were never diagnosed as kids, grew into adulthood and continued to struggle socially and in the workplace ... for me, I struggled until I was diagnosed at the age of 60 ...

for me, the diagnosis was a great relief ... it was the difference between listening to the self-talk in my head telling me I'm no good, worthless and some kind of freak, to the self talk becoming encouraging because I was simply DIFFERENT, but not defective or inferior ... what a relief to find out I'm actually wired a bit differently, and as a result, I have developed senses and intuitive perspectives that NT's cannot understand, because their brains are simply not wired like an Aspie ...

I think we are all capable of entertaining other points of view on any subject ... when it comes to opinions, perspectives, points of view and the like, there are no wrong answers ... wrong answers only occur when we are talking about FACTS ....

in terms of opinion, everyone is right ... opinions are personal but they are not reality ... they are our perception of reality ... and there are no facts to dispute when it comes to opinion, so we all get to be right ....

the good news here is that you can have any opinion you want about your value, self worth, whether you are normal or inferior ... whatever story you choose, you get to be right ...

so why not skip the story all together and stick to the facts ... the story ABOUT the facts is what gets us in trouble ... stick with the facts and we'll make better decisions ... the facts are that (through no choice or fault of our own - and without our permission), we were dealt some interesting genetics that tweaked the wiring in our brain's development and left us with some under-compensations and some over-compensations ...

we are adaptable ... we are all dealing with forces of nature, conditioning, habits and patterns of behavior ... we are animals with instincts that have been passed down to us, largely unchanged for over four million years of evolution ... every other animal on this planet has followed the same script ...

so we are in good company ... we really need to stop thinking that "sameness" in right and "different" is wrong .... we need to cut ourselves a break here ...

look at it from another perspective ... be grateful you do not have genetic tendencies to hurt other people or small animals ... be thankful you are a sensitive human being who wants to fit in with the rest of the world ... while we may be disconnected in our minds from others, we could not be more connected to humanity that has graced this planet for millions upon millions of years ....

we are all part of that longstanding family of evolution .. regardless of our contributions on this planet, our greatest achievement is to be able to say "we were here and we were part of humanity" ....

if I may make a suggestion ... after my diagnosis, I became interested with my family ancestry and genealogy ...as I found the names of my great-great-great-grandparents (born in the mid-late 1700's) it gave me a feeling of belonging that I had never experienced before ... I actually felt the connection that was always missing ... see if it works for you ...

that's the end of my rant, I hope I said something helpful

This is one of the tenets of CBT ... challenge opinions with facts, don't make assumptions, etc. It is a useful tool. Too many times we make false assumptions and act on them, which leads to trouble.

I don't find my connection to humanity all that inspiring. Of all the species on the planet, I'm not sure I would choose human, if I had a choice.

I am familiar with my ancestry as my father was big on passing that information on to me. I've never felt any connection to my ancestors though, they were just people, like any others.

I think the "ego" part of the Freudian triad is damaged in me. I have no interest in anything; every move I make is motivated by will, not the chance of reward, as I just don't seem to feel anything.

That's true. Thank you.

Yep...there is much which is intact.

And I believe, most of the time, that you have knowledge, in yourself, of what is intact within yourself.

Hey Androbot ...

I am sorry you feel the way you do ... perhaps it would be beneficial to look at how you have constructed your identity ... do you identify with your thoughts, feelings, your past mistakes and accomplishments ???

Do you identify with the "stuff" in your life ???

Do you identify with being an Aspie ???

Can you step outside the "identity box" you have created for yourself and consider your identity has nothing to do with any of the things I listed.

Let me explain why I am asking you to consider these questions .... I had a motorcycle accident about 40 yrs ago.

A car pulled in front of me and I hit it going 45 MPH. When I hit the windshield of the car, I was immediately knocked out.

The moment I hit the windshield I was out of my body and there was nothing left in my experience other than "awareness" ... this "awareness" was not thought ... I was pronounced dead at the scene ... I was revived in the ambulance en route to the hospital .... while I was "out of my body", I did not "experience awareness" ... I WAS AWARENESS .... I was the experience of awareness .... there was no memory of thoughts, of past, of future, of "stuff" to worry about ....

After that accident, the nurses were curious about my out of body experience ... I explained what I experienced ... they had heard similar stories before ... the main thing I took away from the experience was the "BEING AWARENESS" part of the experience ... there is a difference between "experiencing awareness" and "being awareness itself".

from that point, I remembered to identify with the "awareness beyond perception" ... I stopped identifying with the things of this world because we are not of this world ... we are "in it", but not "of it".

I agree with you about choosing to be another animal other than a human being ... "we" are the only form of life on this planet that is not in harmony with nature and "we" are going against the flow of life on this planet ....

so my point about identity is to consider that when you identify with all of the "ideas" about being broken, etc, you are mixing up your identity with a bunch of ideas ... you are not the ideas ... you are "that which observes the ideas" ... you are the awareness "behind" the ideas ... see the difference ???

You are welcome

I feel that way frequently.

People who love me, and people who are paid to care about my mental and emotional well-being, continually tell me that I am not broken, I should like myself, I should not be angry about or continue to carry damage from the way things were in the past, before there was a named condition to diagnose me with and approach as "something wrong" to be "fixed."

I have gotten as far as "should not be angry." I have no reason to be angry. For an undiagnosed autistic, I had a very good childhood. I grew up in a family with autism on both sides, with intelligent, educated, and thoughtful parents (a mother who learned a lot about mental health dealing with the damage from growing up with an undiagnosed autistic father who also had serious issues with OCD resulting from childhood abuse and being pretty severely HFA in a time and place when eugenics was the rule of thumb, a father who did not know it was called 'autism' but knew that he was odd, he had difficulties with executive functions and frustration tolerance, had thoughtfully dealt with those things, knew I was 'like him,' and shared with me his lessons and thought processes so that I might benefit from them also) and grandparents who had already raised autistic children and made a lot of the common mistakes to see the fruit of them and do things differently with me.

I cannot be angry with extended family who, though they did not like me and made assumptions about my intentions based on their lack of information, tolerated me and did their best to treat me kindly. They are not responsible for not having information that was not there to acquire or obtain.

Ditto the parents of friends who considered me "rude," "disrespectful," "willful," et cetera. That was an accurate assessment of my behavior. It is not their fault that they did not realize a neurological defect was driving that behavior. I continue to be grateful for the guidance they gave me (however harsh-- even if it hurt, it taught me how not to act) and for the fact that, despite not liking me, they continued to allow me to spend time with their children and to make me welcome-ish in their homes.

I cannot be angry with people for not seeing a syndrome they had not been educated about back in the '80s, when said diagnosis did not exist to become educated about until 1994, by which point I was 16 years old and had learned, between support from my family, misguided education from friends and acquaintances, and abuse from unkind classmates, to conceal and compensate.

I have managed to transform the anger over things that were not understood into gratitude for the things that were understood, or for the things that were tolerated without understanding. As undiagnosed autistics go, I truly was the luckiest kid in the world.

The rest of it?? I am still sad over deficits that continue to plague me. I am still sad over the way that those deficits hurt people I love, who still believe that I could fix it if I just cared enough to want to. I am still angry that having come so far and worked so hard masks the daily struggles I still face, such that no one sees that I am trying and no one empathizes. I have no hope that any of those things will change (either the deficits, as I have reached and passed my cognitive peak and my ability to compensate will only deteriorate from here on out, or the lack of understanding and empathy).

I do not have the will to end my life. I still enjoy time spent with my children, hobbies, sunshine, flowers, the pleasant interludes between misunderstanding-fueled fights with my spouse, and all the other things suicidal people are given as reasons to continue their existence. In addition, I do not wish my husband and children to carry the burden of finding my body, cleaning up the mess, or carrying on with their lives knowing that I chose to take mine rather than continue to remain on this earth with them.

I do, however, ardently wish that [God] would get off His/Her/Its ineffable dime and translate a heavy smoking habit, poor dietary choices, a prolapsed mitral valve, and a family history of sudden cardiac arrest into my expedient and natural demise as soon as superhumanly possible. I have no hope of change, and no desire to continue to live as a high-functioning autistic woman.