The Trauma of Social Rejection for Autistic People
There is a lot of talk about trauma and psychology these days. Increased awareness of family dynamics is changing parenting styles and the way new generations define what is acceptable versus what is not. New attention is being given to how childhood interpersonal dynamics shape our adult personality.
But there is a form of trauma or emotional wound that is strangely overlooked in this new wave of awareness: social rejection. Social rejection is the experience of being rejected by peers or the community.
Research shows that even a tiny social rejection by strangers “trigger[s] the same neural circuits that process physical injury and translate it into the experience we call pain.” In other words, being socially rejected is literally painful for us humans. This is true for any human, including autistic people. In fact, autistic people tend to have a heightened sensitivity to stimuli in general, making the pain of social rejection a potential earthquake for the autistic mind. Unfortunately, social rejection is something that autistic people often know all too well.
“I Am Not a Person Like Everyone Else” —The Othering of Autistic People
Imagine this scenario: you grow up in a small community. The classic community where everyone knows everyone. Everyone gets a greeting when they meet someone in the street, but when you walk by and say hello, they act like you are not there at all. You don’t get an acknowledgment of your presence. You start feeling invisible. When you try to join a group of people for a chat, they all laugh at you or give you weird looks that make you feel unwelcome. You start getting attacked with insults when you walk by — as if your very existence was an insult to them. When you cry, they laugh louder. They hate you for existing. You are the only one who is treated like this, and you don’t know why.
Everyone in the community knows about this; it happens in broad daylight, but everyone seems to find it perfectly normal, so no one takes your defense. Because there is something specifically about you that seems to make you…a separate case. You become aware that other people don’t see you as a human-like them — they see you as something else. You are not allowed to take part like everyone else, you are only allowed to watch from far. Now you know that no matter what event is happening, you are not invited. You are Other. Group laughter becomes just a cruel reminder that you may be the butt of the joke. You go for walks by yourself, feeling like all eyes are on you. No matter what they all share, you can’t even have a taste of it. You are not human —you are on your own, and the world belongs to someone else.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is the experience of countless autistic people in their communities— what’s worse, countless autistic children and young teens who see the world turning against them, getting singled out for who they are without even knowing why.
Social rejection, bullying, exclusion: things that autistic people are familiar with. While we are described as lacking empathy and social skills, what many of us encounter early in our lives is rather being denied empathy and social participation by others. In this way, our personal and social development is disrupted even more — how can you improve your social skills if you are never even given a chance to be in the conversation in the first place? The dehumanization of autistic people is normalized, and the cruelty that we encounter is a consequence of that.
Social rejection leaves wounds that hardly ever heal. Our community collectively carries the weight of anti-autistic stigma, as if we had been marked at a young age: different. Unwelcome. Many autistic people get caught up in cycles of social isolation, not knowing how to reach out, crushed by the shame of previous rejections, and feeling misunderstood and alone. This is not an effect of autism itself but a social dynamic that does nothing but compound the difficulties we are born with.
Some autistic people have less-than-average social needs and may not suffer from the lack of social connection too much. Other autistic people — including myself — are hypersensitive to it and find it completely excruciating, and they end up developing all sorts of ways to cope with the pain of craving connection but facing rejection everywhere they go.
The Day The World Broke
In my case, what I developed is a dissociative disorder. As a child, I had coped with an abusive family by telling myself that my “real” place was in the outer world. So when the community came to unanimously confirm that I, in fact, did not belong there either, I ended up on my own, with the forest near my house as my only companion. I thought: “My family is right then, it’s me. I’m wrong, and there is no place for me. I shouldn’t exist.” The pain of such a feeling of complete outsiderness was indescribable, and my sensitive brain could not take it. I had reached capacity. I felt like reality itself broke in front of me. A big crack appeared in the very fabric of things, separating me from everyone else — I was in the wrong world, and I was alone in it. It was a watershed moment for my psyche — after that, memories started to get fuzzy, and I started living life on autopilot, feeling like my chance to exist as who I really am had been lost forever on the day my own community had expelled me from itself.
In my teens and young adulthood, I carried the legacy of early social rejection with me like a big secret: “I am different. I am not a person like everyone else. Something’s wrong with me, and I have to hide who I really am.” I would have not been able to articulate this at the time, but this deep shame for my “difference” directed my life for years — I felt that no one understood my plight. I could not find accounts of similar experiences anywhere, and that made me feel apart from everyone: family, society, humanity. None of the pre-established life paths seemed to work for me. I felt like a species of my own, carrying my own personal curse, and no matter where I went, I felt completely homeless. After years of repeated rejection, any hint of my “difference” added to the feeling like a snowball. Even when I was appreciated and loved, or when I was having fun with friends like any person my age, it was still right there, below the surface. It took me until my mid-twenties to get used to the feeling of being treated like a regular human being or to the idea that I could be genuinely invited anywhere by new friends. I still get surprised when someone seems to like me as a person – I automatically believe that they secretly think of me as less-than, or they will, once they get to know me better.
The Right to Be a Person
It is strange to write about a story that I didn’t share for so long, but I do it because the opposite of shame is sharing, and there is still not enough representation of the autistic experience in the world. Autistic people have a right to exist in the community — not outside of it. We have a right to personhood — the respect that is due to a person for being such — and not having to live closeted, isolated lives. We are just people, like everyone else. Our difference is part of the world.
Social rejection is a consequence of stigma that is faced not only by autistic people but also by many minorities. The only immigrant kid in a white community, the only albino kid in a Black one, the only disabled kid, the only queer kid, the only poor kid, the only…how many “onlys” before we build a society that does not exclude anyone? How much more exclusion do minorities have to face before respect stops being distributed according to what “kind” of human we are?
The particular case of autistic people is the fact that social trauma adds to what is already a social disability, creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the psyche that experiences both at the same time. The trauma of social rejection is not to be taken lightly. Speaking from my own experience, abuse from my own family hurt, but to be rejected by a whole society for who you are? That hurt a million times more. We all hold the right to be human.
As social rejection is collective trauma, it requires collective repairing: to paraphrase a famous saying, it takes a village to repair what another village did…nothing but being welcome, accepted, and loved by a group of people can repair the trauma of social rejection. Ultimately, it is true: rejection is redirection. It can be very hard for autistic people to “find their tribe” and find their way back to their authentic selves, but not impossible. As society keeps growing, even in these troubled times, our community is creating the space we need to thrive as our authentic selves in this world.
– I am always happy to learn from other people’s experiences. Leave a comment if you like!
