As another autistic woman with PTSD that shit is so devastating... and nobody takes it seriously for obvious reasons. Have you found anything that helps you manage it?
Lexapro 5mg/day and reading real books about autism such as this one which allowed me to start seeing the specific mechanics of how my brain worked / why I was so fucked up. I was in therapy for PTSD alone for like a year and a half and it greatly hindered my progress that my autism was not considered as a factor (long story short I lied to everyone and myself about being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome for 9 years including the time I began therapy).
One specific thing it helped me to learn is that the reason autistic people with PTSD have worse symptoms than allistic people with PTSD is that we have very little or no ability to discern ulterior motive. I didn't realize this was true about me for a long time because I thought that being a very very negative person who perceived all people as threats including my loved ones meant that it wasn't. Because autistic people are "flying blind" in regards to the estimation of of others' motives, we essentially have to choose between assuming people are all good or all bad and operate based on that assumption unless we are manually trained on how to identify allistic facial expressions, tones, logic, etc. Which people incorrectly assume is basically impossible since it appears as a sort of innate magic ability in allistic people.
DBT, CBT, and CPT fell flat for me because when those therapies were trying to introduce me to new ways of thinking, they didn't understand that I was missing certain emotional and social abilities which other people had. There were many times in sessions where a therapist thought something would be enough to bring me to a specific conclusion when it wasn't because my brain does not work normally in a way she was totally unprepared for.
For example, when being asked what evidence I had that a certain social interaction meant someone had ill intentions (a very common thought of mine), the therapist didn't understand that it wasn't meaningful to me when she pointed out the lack of evidence because I *never* had *any* evidence of *anyone's* intentions. She had no understanding that I perceived her asking me not to automatically perceive all people as threats as a request for me to automatically perceive all people as harmless because I literally had no other options to choose from as an untreated autist. And that's not a choice because everyone knows by 28 that people aren't harmless. So I would sort of just agree with her conclusion and we'd move on, me not knowing why this information didn't change my worldview at all and feeling like I was "failing therapy", and her not even knowing there was a problem.
vaporwave
izzy806
germansingergirl
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