I sort of hinted at this in my last post about how I've been framing conversations about masking with my autistic clients, but I kind of wanted to be more explicit about it here. I don't think what I'm about to say is exactly new or controversial to people, but maybe the way I lay it out will be helpful to someone.
A lot of what the mental health community and society at large sees as inherently autistic traits/symptoms has a fairly substantial overlap with trauma symptoms. The immediate disclaimer here is that I am in no way saying that this overlap makes those experiences NOT AUTISTIC, but rather, I'm saying that we likely have very little clinical understanding of what autistic symptoms and traits look like when they are not layered with trauma.
Trauma creates, removes, exaggerates, and minimizes. Or in the clinical language, there is a spectrum of positive (experiences added) symptoms and negatives (experiences removed) symptoms that come with trauma, in a variety of intensities. Finding a healthy baseline not influenced by trauma means finding someone who received support, accommodation, respect, and autonomy related to their unique existance thoroughly enough that they were able to be resilient against rare times when someone did not provide those things.
One of the clearest examples I can think of for how this comes into play for autistic people is with sensory distress. When there are sensory inputs in our lives that cause us clear pain, discomfort, distress, or other harm, ideally we would be able to find a way to move away from that input as quickly as possible in order to terminate the distress. However the vast majority of us have grown up being aware, for any number of reasons, that this is "not an option" and so instead we have developed strategies to endure intense physical and psychological distress. However, that distress rarely lessens with time. More often than not, it increases. Dissociation, maladaptive daydreaming, alienated interoception, and other psychologically distancing coping strategies become the primary way we avoid feeling that intense distress while we "endure" what causes it. This is an identical process to how such coping strategies develop in trauma cases. When there is intense psychological or physical distress that cannot be escaped but must simply be endured, the body-mind will self-alienate in order to survive. Same mechanism, different neurological origin, at least on the most technical basis.
There's a lot of places where we see this happen, this idea of the same mechanism occuring but under different parameters than it might for a neurotypical. The important thing to pay attention to about examples like the above is that there are some parts of it that are shared (the mechanism by which body-mind alienating symptoms develop and self-reinforce) and other parts that are at least somewhat unique to autism (sensory distress is not absent in neurotypical trauma cases but it tends to take on a different form/origin, and can often be reduced over time where autistic sensory distress rarely can). In the example I used it's fairly clear where the line is between trauma and neurotype. But in many other examples of "how autism presents" this is very much less obvious.
It's s a lot harder to tell for example where the line between trauma and neurotype falls for something like social anxiety. Social anxiety is a really clear part of autistic presentation. It's heavily featured in clinical conversations. But many autistic people I spoke to were not anxious until they became aware that there was something "wrong" with their behavior according to their peers and mentors. There has been some shift to the language of social deficits or difficulties instead, but this becomes highly contextual. We do not have social deficits or difficulties with each other at nearly the same rates as we do with neurotypicals. So if it's not inherently anxiety (because it often does not develop until later in life and sometimes does not develop at all), and it's not deficits or difficulties because we have no statistically significant interpersonal challenges with each other, than what is it?
This is where theory of mind comes in. The older, more controversial take is that autistic people lack ToM entirely. I'm going to be controversial myself and call that complete and utter bullshit. If anything, given how absolutely constant the psychological demand is on autistic people to make themselves capable of functioning within a neurotypical framework, we have a much stronger grasp of theory of mind than NTs. Realistically though, I suspect that theory of mind is something that everyone struggles with across neurotypes. I posit that within our given neurotype human beings are more or less able to understand and intuit how and why people think and do things. But once you encounter someone of a different neurotype than you, all bets are off. I have often described this as speaking to each other across languages. It's technically possible for two people to have a conversation where one of them is exclusively speaking Portuguese and the other is exclusively speaking Korean, but there's going to be detail and context that likely gets lost along the way, and miscommunication/mistranslation is far more likely to occur. Sometimes two people are trying to communicate across Portuguese and Spanish and it's way more consistently feasible, but then someone gets a little too comfortable and a small miscommunication gets blown waaaaay out of proportion.*
*Something I think is cool about this particular linguistic framework of cross-nuerotype interpersonal activity is that it creates the space for the idea of "learning to speak Autistic" or "learning to speak Allistic" in the same way that one learns to speak French or Japanese or Urdu. When we KNOW that we're speaking a new form of communication there's often a lot more room for compassion/assuming good faith when wires get crossed. I think that if we encourage the framework of cross-nuerotype interpersonal activity as a matter of learning new communication methodologies/types, we could potentially create a major shift towards destigmatization and inclusivity, as well as begin the work of strengthening cross-nuerotype theory of mind accessibility. If different nuerotypes have their own cultures within cultures, than learning how to engage with that culture openly and honestly becomes something that can be done through exposure, practice, and opening of the mind/deconstruction of rigid frameworks rather than a pathology that must be clinically taught how to interact with. If you don't need a professional to teach you how to appropriately interact with an autistic person than the barrier to entry of "being respectful/compassionate" is much more accessible to most, which makes socio-cultural changes easier to disseminate over widespread communities and groups.
My theory for the mechanism of social conflict/challenge that autistic people experience is essentially as follows:
Imagine that on the school yard playground all the children are assumed to be speaking Spanish, but some of the children are actually speaking Portuguese. None of the teachers speak Portuguese, only Spanish, and when something gets miscommunicated due to a language barrier, the teachers tell the Portuguese-speaking children that they are at fault because they said something hurtful in Spanish. The child insists they were speaking Portuguese and what they said was in no way hurtful, but the teacher tells them they're either lying or need to learn better manners because what they said was definitely Spanish and definitely hurtful. The child again repeats that they were speaking Portuguese and asks if they can be taught Spanish so that this can be avoided in future. The adult tells them thay they're speaking Spanish right now so that is unnecessary. This happens over and over again. Eventually the Portuguese speaking child starts to believe the adults because everyone else says the same thing. They continue speaking Portuguese to Spanish speakers and doing their best. They may even pick up some amount of Spanish along the way in order to do a better job communicating and expressing their needs. But sometimes they still get it wrong, and they can't predict when because they still don't really know how to speak Spanish effectively and no one around them seems to understand (or maybe even believe in) Portuguese. To the child, this environment becomes no different than an emotionally abusive home environment where an adult punishes unpredictably and routinely denies reality. They become more and more anxious about interacting with others as they struggle to develop a system of predicting the unpredictable. "Social anxiety" becomes a leading aspect of their presentation.
So here again we see that divide between the neurotype-specific origin of an autistic experience and the mechanism by which that experience is converted into a "common autistic presentation".
I spend a lot of time with my clients trying to figure out what their autism looks like for them when trauma is healed out of the equation. What is the difference for them between autistic and traumatized autistic? I often wonder what the diagnostic criteria would look like for ASD if we were able to effectively delineate between autism and autistic trauma. There are places where I feel like I know, spots where I have theories, and others where I honestly doubt I'll ever have a real concept of what it could look like. Part of this is that autistic people are, like neurotypical people, not a monolith. We are as diverse in our cognitive constellations as they are. It's impossible to say "this is what makes an autistic and anything different is Not Us" because brains just don't work like that. I mean sure there are trends and statistical likelihoods, but realistically, neurodiversity is truly infinite, and that means within shared experiences too.
I like thinking about this stuff though. It helps me to feel like maybe someday me and someone else can have a comprehensive and fulfilling conversation in unbroken Autistic without being afraid someone will get upset and tell us to stop.
