Autistic trauma and the experience of always being wrong
All paths lead from, and to, trauma
I’m so mindful of how prevalent the word trauma has become in everyday rhetoric. My reluctance to play a part in its overuse has led me to hesitate in arriving at fully formed thoughts on my experience of Autistic trauma. So, despite being fortunate enough to have received treatment for complex-PTSD via the NHS here in the UK (EMDR, if you’re interested), I still feel nervous about claiming yet another label, yet another diagnosis, for myself.
So I’ve taken some time to reflect and explore the notion of big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ trauma, tried to increase my understanding of how trauma might manifest on a physical level and done some reading around epigenetics and the idea of intergenerational trauma. I’ve also looked at some of the more critical perspectives on what trauma is and/or isn’t and how it has become so ‘popular’.
I’ve questioned my resistance to writing on this topic and have identified that I hesitate in claiming my feelings of being traumatised, because I don’t want to detract from others’ suffering. Yet, from all that I’ve read and reflected on, I’m nudging myself closer to feeling worthy enough to take up space in the wider trauma narrative.
I’ve also been struck by the way in which trauma seems to permeate every aspect of a person’s life and pay itself forward into future experiences. This is so depressingly familiar to me and perhaps explains this sense I have that all paths in my life seem to lead from, and to, trauma.
The journey leading up to writing this piece and the mental gymnastics it’s taken me to get to this place of knowing also, ironically, signals how embedded the fawning trauma response has become in how I show up in this world. This response which, for me, most often results in fear and panic arising from interaction with others, has resulted in a lifetime of chronic people-pleasing. But it also turns up more subtly in my internal world where I feel I have no right to occupy space, instead deferring to others’ experiences and feelings as more valid than my own.
So in using these words to fill your screen I hope I’ll add some useful insights into how being Autistic…no an undiagnosed Autistic person, is a traumatic experience in and of itself.
Always wrong, all of the time
When someone embarks on their (often virtual) journey of exploring whether they’re Autistic, one of the oft repeated questions they’re likely to come across is: ‘have you ever felt like an alien?’. This is not a question which forms part of any formal diagnostic process, but I was struck by how many people in the Autistic community use this as a yardstick for their neurodivergent identity. But I never felt like an alien (though may have had an extra-terrestrial fueled special interest back in the 90s) so this question, and my very literal interpretation of it, only served to further ‘other’ me. If I have never embodied this alienness, then I must not be Autistic.
And yet my mind, and Google searches, would always lead me back to Autism.
Following my formal diagnosis* in 2022, and accompanied by a high-degree of continuing imposter syndrome, I started to unpack my lack of ‘alien positionality’. It wasn’t that I didn’t grow up feeling separate, outside or beyond. Instead I realise, I just felt plain ‘wrong’.
Reading the list above out loud, the word ‘wrong’ loses all meaning. Yet on an embodied level my ‘wrongness’ is the only thing I have ever known to be true and consistent. I have somehow been wrong in everything I’ve done and the way in which I’ve shown up in the world.
I didn’t arrive at this conclusion on my own. No, this sense of wrongness was evidenced in the words that were used to describe me as a child: difficult; dramatic; weird; stubborn; overly sensitive; too much. And these words were always accompanied by disdain and demands. I ‘just’ needed to try harder, to be less annoying, to be more patient, to control my temper, to stop overreacting, to stop imagining problems no one else experienced. Or simply to ‘cop on’, as us Irish colloquially put it.
As with many Autistic people, these experiences in interaction with others are life-wide and lifelong — from well-meaning family and friends, to teachers, therapists, colleagues…gosh even people in the street who used to stop to tell me to ‘smile, it can’t all be that bad’. There has never been a moments respite from my seemingly innate wrongness.
Each incident on its own was slight. Add them all up and you’ve got a suffocating pattern that points towards you as the common denominator in your own suffering.
But I learn quickly. I learnt that I must be wrong, I must always be wrong, if this is what others are communicating to me so consistently in every area of my life. Then I learnt that if I rush to apologise and promise to do better, the fallout from my inadvertent indiscretion is more manageable. I did this even when I didn’t understand what had happened or what part I had played. I even started to do this before there was evidence that a conflict was arising. The word ‘sorry’ comes as naturally to me as breathing.
And then I extended this learning to notice the patterns in my ways of being that people found most unpalatable and resolved to change, to actually anticipate when and where my ‘wrongness’ was most likely to occur.
I learnt not to mention my irritating sensory sensitivities. I learnt not to ask too many annoying questions. I learnt to swallow my tiresome emotional reactions. I learnt to ignore my inconvenient physical sensations. Over time I learnt to be palatable and to move through the world so lightly that my footsteps made no sound.
The weight of misperception
Yet, being perceived so negatively, so consistently in childhood has the effect of making the things people say about you true. Peoples’ words and reactions cling to you, infiltrating every fibre of your being.
Eventually other peoples’ conceptions of you become your anchor because they are so weighty and steadfast. Tied to these ideas of who you must be, you forget who you actually are. You absorb the identity that others’ perceptions project on to you and you lose yourself in the process. Every encounter is yet another reminder that you just don’t quite get things, until you become so attuned to everyone else’s expectations of what is ‘right’ and ‘normal’ that you mask your own identity into oblivion. Is it any wonder so many Autistic people end up traumatised?
I emphasise earlier that I believe my trauma has come about from being an undiagnosed Autistic person and on this I can only hypothesise. But I can’t shake the feeling that if I’d had the language and framework to understand my experiences from a much younger age, I might have felt empowered to lean into my differences. To advocate for myself, to push back against neuronormativity, to learn to love the things that set me apart. I would have known that my supposed ‘wrongness’ was actually a neurobiological, naturally occurring variation. I still would have encountered people who didn’t understand, or who didn’t care to understand. But I would have had the privilege of self-knowledge. This is why I will always advocate for people to have the opportunity to explore diagnosis (in whatever form that comes) from an early age. Autism is not simply a ‘label’, it’s a living, breathing, vital and valid way of existing in the world.
Now I know I am not wrong.
I am Autistic.
*a note on diagnosis: I have received a medical diagnosis of Autism, but fully believe self-diagnosis is valid for a multitude of reasons. I would also argue that our language needs to evolve beyond the medical model, to account for Autism as a culture and an expression of identity. In this way ‘self-identification’ can elevate us and our experiences beyond the flawed diagnostic mechanisms that currently form the ‘gold standard’ of the pathological paradigm.
