I can't connect with people

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i cant connect with people
im my own best friend

Hmmm, aren't there quite a few autistic people (though not the majority of autistic people) who experience life much more intensely than most people, though not in the exact same way or for the exact same reasons that you do?

Perhaps some of these people might be able to relate to your experiences somewhat, by analogy at least, if not directly?

In any case, if you need someone to talk to, you're welcome to contact me.

I’ve always thought you were very likeable from your posts! This is likely an Aspie thing(forgive for using an old term) but your cynicism is the opposite of how I usually am & I admire your no holes barred honesty & directness. No-one here makes me laugh like you.

I have little desire to connect with others, but I inadvertently do seem to, without meaning to.

I say, don’t change a thing. Please just BE YOU.

When you say you can't connect with people, do you mean you aren't doing things with them that are commonly thought to give the experience of connection (shared activities of more or less any kind, touch, communication), or that you do those things but they don't make you feel connected?

I think with me I may have some alexithymia going on, because I've quite often done that kind of thing but the emotional effect is very rarely intense at all. Occasionally I've felt it quite strongly, usually when I've been working with somebody on a project of clear mutual interest. That's bad as well as good, because it gives me an idea of what's possible and so although it's encouraging to know it, it also tends to recalibrate my scale and then I judge subsequent, less intense feelings of communication as "OK as far as it went, but nothing like as strong as it could be."

It's an interesting topic, and I hope I'll remember to ponder on it when I do things that should make me feel connected, to see if I can find reasons why sometimes it's intense and mostly it hardly seems to exist for me. Perhaps I'll find I'm not giving it a fair chance, or that the other people aren't, or both.

I am so sorry you lost your sister. That is really tough.
Thank you so much. I will share what this disability is with you guys so that you might be able to understand it. I will respond to some of the posts first and then I will tell you what it is.

Thank you so much Isabella. You and I are like two peas in a pod and I love having you as a friend as well.

Welcome to WP Mrs. K. I was diagnosed at 47 so I understand how it was to live so long without understanding and to finally get the validation one gets with a late diagnosis. I am hoping that we will be able to be a support for you here even if it's difficult in real life. This is a pretty awesome group of people and I have found so much support here over the years. I can't believe that I have been here for almost ten years now. Time sure flies by.

Thank you so much. It is so often a survival game for me. It's very interesting, I have contacted doctors and therapists and suggested to them that they study me but they are not interested. I guess it's their loss because I do make a fascinating case! Once I have responded to people, I will post an explanation of what this is so that you can understand.

You have to do you and if honoring them rather than connecting with them is what works for you than that is totally valid and respectable. A lot of people are not able to be this honest with themselves and I think they get hurt or confused because of that. I really respect your ability to be so self aware and honest about it and everyone should respect what works for you.

I think it's extremely common in Autism that in many ways, we are younger than our chronological ages. I wish that nts would understand and respect that about us. I am the same way and I tend to do better with preteens than with adults. So it makes it very difficult to be able to enjoy interests with other people. I totally feel you in this. I am trying to educate so that nts can hopefully start to understand this age functioning difference and start to be ok with it. I know that they often hold it against me and I am guessing that that happens to a lot of us.

I can totally relate to that.

LeafyGenes, I am going to explain the issue by responding to you. It's so funny, I feel like I am about to do this big reveal!

So this disability does not have a name. The reason that I don't share about it much is that when I do, people don't really understand and they get really confused. Then they end up minimizing it because they are trying to relate to it. And when they minimize it, I am very deeply affected.

So the description of this is that I do not have a protective persona. Everyone develops a protective persona. This is a naturally developing thing in the brain, it is an actual brain function. What it does is that it provides psychological and emotional protection. It's like a shield that protects you against psychological and emotional impact. You can compare it to your epidermal layer and how your skin, or epidermal layer, protects your internal organs and everything else that is under your physical skin. If you did not have physical skin, you would catch every type of infection and your life would be incredibly short. Many of you are old enough to remember David Vetter, the boy in the bubble. He was born with SCID, Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. Because he had no immune system, he had to live his life inside of a sterile plastic bubble. Fortunately, because of him, children who are born with SCID now receive a blood transfusion as soon as they are born and that is what is able to save them and allow them to live normal lives. Unfortunately, David did not survive the bone marrow transplant from his sister.

So, you can all understand how fragile David was because he had no immune system. The lack of an immune system makes it very dangerous for the physical body to live and it makes it practically impossible for the physical body to survive because any little infection or viral issue will attack it at a level that it cannot protect itself at all.

What most people do not realize is that even more rare than SCID, is when someone does not have the brain function that creates the same type of protection but in a psychological and emotional sense. If you are familiar with the expression, "have a thick skin," it is that brain function that enables you to do that. If you are able to blow off something negative or hurtful that someone says or does to you and not let it affect you or not let it bother you, it is that brain function that allows you to do that. Without that brain function, things that people say or do, as well as what you relive in PTSD, will affect you so intensely that you will become suicidal, even if it's just a small thing that everyone else can just blow off and not let it affect them. This is why people cannot survive this. It is believed that if anyone does not have a protective persona, they will either be dead by suicide before they end their teen years, or their minds will experience fatal levels of emotional overload. This is why my doctors and therapists are not able to understand how I am able to survive.

Because the protective persona does not exist in me, I feel things so intensely that many things that I feel on a regular basis are considered what would be fatal levels of emotional overload for regular people. When I explained some of the things that I go through to the neuropsychologist who diagnosed me with Autism, he is one of my therapists and I have been with him for eight years, his jaw literally dropped. He actually apologized to me because he felt ashamed and embarrassed that he had thought that he could teach me coping skills and strategies. When I shared some of my experiences with him on how deeply and intensely I experience certain things, he told me that he could not even conceptualize what I was saying, and he had no idea how I am able to survive these intensities especially with how frequently they occur. My other therapists that I have, I always have two or three at a time, say the same thing.

But this condition is so rare that few medical professionals or therapists have ever heard of it. The reason I don't really disclose it is that when I do, people tend to not be able to grasp the concept. Paul Macallif, the Autistic Youtuber whose channel is called Asperger's From The Inside, gave a great analogy in one of his videos. He was talking about why everyone is not a little bit Autistic. It's a fantastic video and I encourage all of you to check it out. But in his video, he used as an example, an analogy that I thought would also be very fitting to describe this. He said that oftentimes when you tell someone you are Autistic, they try to relate to your experience, and it just doesn't work. He said, "What if someone had been a soldier at war and had stepped on a mine and gotten his leg blown off and when he shared his story, the person he was sharing it said, 'Oh, I know exactly how you feel. Last week I got a paper cut and it hurt so much that I thought I was going to die.'"

Yeah, OK. You can imagine how the soldier would have felt if someone said that to him. For me it's kind of like that. People are not able to conceive of the intensity of what I go through but because they have no idea what I am talking about, because their brains literally cannot conceptualize it, they try to imagine something that they have experienced in their own lives to try to relate. But it's just not possible. So, it becomes like the person with the paper cut thinking that he has had the same experience as the soldier whose leg was blown off by a landmine on the war front.

To give you an example, I have experienced a few death cycles. Death cycles are a term that one of my Autistic friends coined to explain a phenomenon. During a death cycle, my brain actually, literally went through the entire suicide process automatically because the emotions that I was dealing with, and feeling were so intense. This is a level of suicide where it's not suicidal ideation. You don't decide to kill yourself, nor do you want to. Your brain makes that decision for you without asking you if that is what you want to do. Your brain is literally so overwhelmed that it has decided that the only way to protect your body is to kill it. But for some reason, I survive.

One of the biggest ones of these that I had; I was driving on the highway when it hit. I couldn't stop driving because it was rush hour traffic. My brain went through this event that lasted about three or so hours and I had to keep driving through it. I felt every emotional pain and even physical pain that someone would feel in an actual suicide but for some reason, I managed to survive. These death cycles have happened to me several times. When I described them to my therapists, they all say that people would not have been expected to survive something like that.

I can be having a normal day to day conversation with someone about almost anything at all and they might, even accidentally, say something that is a little offensive or hurtful. Most people, even most Autistic people, would just be able to brush it off. Some people might get upset but it won't kill them. They have the ability to shield or dampen the effect of it. I will become suicidal, or I might cease to be able to function. It might shut my brain down to where I am not able to walk, or I might lose the ability to breathe properly, or I might not be able to keep my balance when I am trying to walk or something like that. My vision can even be affected, I can lose the ability to know how to eat or drink and many other things. And I could lose significant brain function for days at a time and sometimes even for weeks at a time. So, any little thing that is said in a conversation could have a massive effect on me. And this can happen on a near daily basis. So I might have trouble with some sort of functioning in my body for a long time and sometimes I might have several things in my body that are not functioning properly at the same time. Two days ago, I had significant loss of balance for about twenty minutes after one short conversation.

Now I understand that people can't walk on eggshells with me, and I don't expect them to. I am extremely understanding of the fact that people cannot comprehend this at all and that they cannot even conceptualize how this feels. So the coping mechanisms that I have had to develop are also beyond comprehension. My therapists and doctors cannot understand them because of how sophisticated and complex they have to be.

But because I have no protective persona which forces me to experience everything at such a deep level, I am an extremely deep person. I am also an exceptionally analytical person. In fact, I am an analytical Savante. One of the reasons I am so analytical is because I don't have a protective persona. One of the things that enables me to survive not having one, is the ability to be unnaturally self-aware and excessively analytical. Without those two traits, it would be impossible to survive. In order to get through these intense experiences that I feel so frequently, I have to be able to understand them completely and I have to be able to understand my own body and how it is affected. If you can't do that, you can't survive this.

So this is the first problem that people have with me. I am too intense for them. The nature of my very existence and how I function overwhelms them. And I do my very best to try to be sensitive to them and to not overwhelm them but the effort it takes for me to do that all the time takes an enormous amount of energy, and it damages me. It weakens me and that makes me much more susceptible to the things that affect me.

The other problem is that I experience my emotions and I process my emotions and I relate to others emotionally at a four year old level. And I function socially at a ten year old level. This kind of age functioning is very common in Autism and most of you can relate to that. And most of you can relate to how people treat you because your emotional and social ages are much younger than your chronological or even your intellectual ages. For the most part, nts do not treat us well because of this. So if I were only Autistic, I would be experiencing the issues with the age functioning differences the way that most of you experience them. We have all felt the pain when people reject or bully us for this.

But because I don't have a protective persona, when I get rejected or bullied, there is no psychological shield to protect me from the blow. It would be like being hit or slapped if you no skin to protect your body. The impact of the blow is magnified astronomically and there is nothing I can do about it. It can be so strong that I literally become suicidal and the impact will last the rest of my life. And because I experience and process my emotions as a four year old and because I experience the social components as a ten year old, it is as if these blows were happening to little children. Little kids are not designed to be able to withstand that kind of trauma all the time so the effect on my body, on my neurological, and my psychological, and emotional systems, is huge.

Because I have no protective persona, the trauma is too strong and because without a protective persona, I can experience that level of psychological trauma on a near daily basis. Because it is so frequent and so consistent, my brain does not have the ability to release the trauma. So I have cumulative CPTSD that can increase almost every day and it lasts my entire life. There is no way to heal from it. In order to heal from something like this, you have to be able to rest from it. The trauma itself has to stop. But because the lack of protective persona makes it impossible for the trauma to stop, I never get a break from it, so it is not possible to heal at all. And because my sensory sensitivities are so severe, the constant sensory overload, especially from sounds, makes it impossible for my neurological system to ever relax and recover.

When you think about soldiers healing from war wounds and PTSD from war, they can't begin to heal until they have left the front and are in a safe location away from the fighting. You can't heal while you are under attack. But for me, psychological, emotional, and neurological safety do not exist because I have no protective persona and because my sensory sensitivities are so severe. So I have had to come up with survival mechanisms. My brain has come up with them instinctively and it constantly adapts them as I become more severe and more vulnerable. This has happened because I have a crazy survival instinct and because God has decided that I need to live in order to serve and teach and educate and advocate to help the Autistic and disabled communities as much as I can.

I have plenty of days where I don't know if I will be alive at the end of the day because what I am feeling is so intense but somehow, God gives me the will and the ability to keep going. People ask me if there is medication I can take or therapy that will help. The answer is no. In order for therapy to help you with something, whether it be physical therapy or psychology or any other kind of therapy, the thing you are getting therapy for has to actually exist. The protective persona is an actual brain function. It's actually organic. You can't just therapy yourself into growing one if you don't have one. That would be like asking the soldier who got his leg blown off, or a person who was born without a limb, if he could go to therapy and grow a new one. Now he can get a prosthetic, but it is not physically possible to organically grow a new limb. In the same regard, it is not physically or psychologically possible for me to grow a protective persona. And it's not possible to make a prosthetic for it. There are no medications that can mitigate the effects of this. The only medications I can think of would turn me into an actual vegetable. So, before you guys start suggesting meds, please keep in mind that I have an entire team of doctors and therapists, including neuropsychologists and physical doctors, and regular psychologists, and specialists, and everything else, that have been with me for a very long time. If they haven't been able to think of anything to try as far as meds, I would really appreciate you all not trying to mention any as that will only cause me massive amounts of stress.

But that is it in a nutshell. Of course, I could write a dissertation on all the different ways that not having a protective persona affects me but I just wanted to give you a basic idea. But now you can understand how it is pretty much impossible for people to really connect with me on the deep levels in which I function. That makes my life very lonely, painfully lonely. But I do the best I can to just accept that and to be as close to people as possible.

And to answer your question, Leafy Genes, animals do accept me, and I tend to be very close to animals and to nature.

Honestly, I have a hard time connecting with people especially irl. I'm working on trying to meet new people and stuff.

Thank you for explaining your condition, skibum.
That was very clear and insightful.
I need a while to process it before I can reply, which will likely be on PM.

As you know I experience something very similar.
I've been in crisis recently (actually, always --- just like you.)

I'm not BPD but my brain has never recovered from any trauma or slight.
I have no coping skills or strategies to put trauma behind me.
Every wound (sensory, social, emotional, etc.) has been cumulative all my life.

This seems similar to what you describe.

Here's an article you may find interesting.
My partner and I have been working on these topics for a while now.
I'm sure you know a lot of this.
It doesn't explain everything, especially for us as autistics, but I thought I'd share.

I'll be in touch when I get my wits about me.

Until then,
Sending empathy and love.


https://eggshelltherapy.com/a-split-in-our-personality/

Thank you so much for the article. It's very good. It's interesting though because it doesn't really describe me. The more I read the more it didn't sound like me at all. Some of it in the beginning did but as I continued to read, the behaviors it was describing didn't fit my behaviors. In fact, they didn't really make much sense to me even though I understand why people would do them. But they seem completely foreign like I can't even relate to them at all.

But I believe that many people might struggle with this kind of dissociation. For me it's very different. I would have to take the article piece by piece and write how I experience things differently from what it describes. But I am fascinated to learn more about how it all works for you. I am so grateful to have you as a friend.
much love