Could severe childhood emotional trauma mimic AS/ASD?

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If it that's that case, I guess it might explain, why almost all of my AS symptoms have gone .

Childhood trauma may make you socialy ankward. If you isolate yourself, then your social skills will gradualy decrease as well.

I have thought about this question a lot. I think that the results of childhood trauma could resemble AS in some ways. I think it could result in some of the same social problems such as avoidance of eye contact, general awkwardness, etc. For some people, it might lead to adherence to routines, and maybe other OCD-like traits that are often associated with AS.

However, I think that childhood trauma would be unlikely to result in other things typically associated with AS such as intense & narrow interests, preoccupation with parts of objects, stimming, sensory issues, Auditory Processing Disorder, extreme clumsiness, attention to detail, failure to see the "big picture", difficulty imagining things, "back and white" thinking, etc. People who have been diagnosed with AS have some of these characteristics (although few have all of them).

What symptoms exactly?

I don't think the childhood abuse I suffered can account for my inability to intuitively grasp social expectations.

I think my aspergers contributed to some of the physical and emotional abuse I had, I do suffer from ptsd

It is confusing for me. There are people with AS-ish traits that run in the family....

BUT

I experienced multiple childhood traumas...(have hardly met the child who hasn't)

Perhaps some stuff occurred because I was oblivious to social boundaries and "group-think"...(didn't know how to avoid dangerous situations...but GEE...I was just a little kid..)
Some happend because I was in a dysfunctional environment....and some happened because I was simply a vulnerable little kid.

I had no idea that i was different from other kids really, or what that meant...till the first grade...even though I recall being treated differenty from the other kids as early as pre-school...and this was before the PTSD set in....

Before the PTSD, I was a very intense kid with no sense of boundaries and a bizarre sense of play.
After the PTSD set in, I became this glowering overweight hyper-sensitive creepy depressed kid with disturbing OCD tendancies.
I was affected the most acutely between 3rd(the second time) and 5th grade...(i call that the dark ages) I gradually grew out of it once I hit puberty


The traumas had their way of sorta fragmenting me as a person to some degree..and they had an inevitable effect on my emotional and intellectual development....

But I think i woulda ended up with ASish tendancies regardless.
I have the toe-walking and masculine finger digit ratio....which don't have anything to do with PTSD

A relative of mine has several beliefs about what made me how I am, including:
-ptsd from traumatic childhood (I may well have ptsd-in addition to various issues-though I don't recall anything severe befalling me as a kid)
-how I was nursed & handled as baby (I've read a bit about that subject matter, maybe partly valid but am hardly in position to evaluate my treatment as an infant)
-and astrological bizarreness (which she puts a lot of stock in, but is wholly meaningless to me).
She said I wasn't at all autistic until my parents divorced when I was around age 4. Say what ? Glad I got dx'd before my relative's speculations entered the picture.

I grew up with all this brouhaha about "everything is your parents' fault" being the dominant cultural paradigm, yet that failed to explain me sufficiently. Was relief, as an adult-once I got dx'd-to learn that biology/neurology are responsible (to great extent-am not discounting genetics). Now, here I am again at "it's because of your parents & what they did or didn't do", according to my relative. I don't want to go back to that framework through which to consider my dx-it doesn't align with my understandings of how I am, currently-and her causative factors don't make sense to me (to varying degrees).

So, who knows what's appropriate judgment for any particular individual's circumstances ? Despite their claims to objectivity, measuring instruments & diagnoses are subjective.

PTSD can lead to a persistent sense of alienation from the rest of society, but you're likely to not feel alienated from other people who have experienced similar situations, and talking with them can help you feel human again.

Autism, on the other hand, is isolation from everyone, or at least everyone who is not extremely familiar. Like being surrounded by a fog-covered moat that no one else can see, with everyone else on the other side wondering why you won't join them.

So if you've got both, you're isolated from strangers by autism (they're unreachable), and alienated from friends/family by PTSD (they just don't understand you).

Yes, I think so too. I've felt totally different from other abuse survivors, like we're made of different materials. That's what got me thinking that I probably have something unrelated to PTSD that's more determining than the abuse I suffered.

Interesting thread.

I have both. I have AS but was abused as a child (both physically and sexually) and raped as a young adult and have chronic PTSD as a result. What I discovered through years of therapy is that many of my PTSD symptoms and AS symptoms overlap, so much in fact that there are certain "quirks" in my psyche I'm not sure which disorder to blame on.

I think I'd be much higher functioning if I had someone I could trust - other than economically - in my own family or a friend.
I was on a roll towards uni graduation - leading groups, getting good grades, walking the way back with the occasional classmate. . . some people even seemed to like me if only a bit.

The following 2 years of unemployment destroyed my self esteem as I had means to know that everyone else was doing great. Those were followed by 2 years at poorly payed jobs way below my skill level where severe harassment brought back all my childhood memories and confirmed my worst fears. I still have to deal with at least two bullies as well as slander in my current workplace and I'm constantly pained by the ridiculous drudgery.
I've been finding it very hard to talk to anyone during all these last years
It's not just pain; it's the constant shame of being isolated.

I don't think I PTSD because I don't have nightmares. Also there isn't any single event that changed me; name any random year since about 1984 and I'm being isolated, hated, laughed at, beaten, insulted, spit at, called names, etc. . .
I'm more surprised I'm not howling and biting random people down on the street.

I think sometimes it can because AS is considered a "developmental disability" meaning you don't develop the same way as the neurotypicals (as a little aside here I refuse to think it's always a "delay", it's just *different*)--and kids who are seriously traumatized don't develop the same way as non-traumatized people either.

I think that the difference is that with AS, you develop differently because that's just the wonderful way your brain is, but with trauma, it's because you had to learn and understand things differently from other non-traumatized neurotypicals to protect yourself of because your world as you grew up wasn't "typical" in any way. It may just be that the way a traumatized person's brain develops (the things they learn about the world, about other people and about what helps them cope with change and stress etc.) can make their behavior and thinking looks like AS.

For example, if you're really traumatized you may not get other people and all the social rules because nobody ever modelled the social rules for you or taught you the specifics of the whole reciprocity thing by just acting it out, and/or you can't trust anybody enough to pick it up "naturally". With AS, it's more just that your brain understands rules differently, no matter how well modelled the social rules are!

Also, with traumatized kids, they often can't deal with change--they've had too much of it, they have very little security or control and change represents that lack of security or control, they associate change with trauma etc. Whereas with AS, it seems to be more of the way a person's brain is naturally organized combined with totally natural (as opposed to learned through emotional or physical pain or fear) hypersensitivity to stimuli and novelty.

This is all just proposition and probably waaaaay too generalized to be particularly accurate, but it's my guess about it. It's really tricky because there are so many things that affect the way a person is and who they are. When doctors and social workers first started throwing around ideas about my "developmental delay" (in a serious way....it was an ongoing process) they figured that it was just because I had been abused. However, one of the many reasons that my mum was abusive was that she couldn't understand my weird AS behavior, and after a lot of therapy for trauma the only thing that changed was that I felt better about myself and wasn't angry all the time. AS symptoms and ADHD stuff remains. I'm still hypersensitive to lights and sound and touch, I still have those weird myoclonic jerks when people touch my head, I still have to develop literal, rational ways of codifying social rules (and still say what I mean when I shouldn't...by accident), still misread people, still fight to understand things like "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush", still get wiggy about change etc. etc. etc. The list goes on forever. And actually, as far as ADHD goes, I've become MORE hyperactive after dealing with my trauma, not less, probably because I'm less inhibited and emotionally "shut-down" and afraid. Maybe the researchers are wrong and trauma permanently changes your brain and your development, or maybe it's just more complicated than "You either have AS/ADHD or you have trauma".

Whisperer, I can relate because I went through all that too after I finished uni. Then one day there was a miracle, I got a dream job, it practically fell in my lap, and things have been much, much easier and nicer since then.

NoOnesBoy, I agree with your views. Therapy, if anything, made my symptoms more visible, because I accepted myself better and was more spontaneous as a result. I learned to accept myself, which did nothing to improve my social intuition blindness.

I guess that emotional trauma could minic AS in some ways, such as avoiding eye contact and dislike of physical contact with others.
There is far more to AS than just that, so I don't think emotional trauma could make people display things such as auditory prosessing disorder, sensory issues and communication problems...all common with AS/ASD.

This is somewhat of a difficult question, partly because those who have been abused as children have probably not been studied for preexisting ASDs. Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate mentioned that most studies of childhood development evaluate children from stable homes - they don't tend to study marginalized children or children who have been significantly traumatized. This might be due to a couple of reasons. Studies are often voluntary, and abusive parents would probably not volunteer to have their children studied. Also if a study evaluates a child over a period of time, the child would need to have parents stable enough to keep appointments, etc.

It is kind of a catch-22. The mental disorders of the parents definitely contribute to the abuse of their children, but what if the children inherit disorders similar to their parents? It would be very hard to sort out.

I used to think that we are the way we are because of what we experienced in childhood. But for the last four generations that I can trace, the children in my father's family have consistently had significant trauma including my sister and me (our dad couldn't hold a job, we moved between three states for several years and were briefly homeless). I believe that ASDs run in that family and the trauma and behavior are related to our neurological brain development more than to childhood events. The events are a result of adults with ASDs making poor judgments and life decisions that affect their children who inherited ASDs - a repeating cycle. That is how I see it working in my family, but I can't say it is the same for everyone else. However in looking at patterns over a long period of time, if there is a family that through generations has traumatic events and difficulty holding it together, I'd bet that something is going on and it might be inherited Autism Spectrum Disorder.

My sister and I have stopped the cycle in our family branch. Neither of us have children and I don't think either of us plans to.

Z