COMPLEX PTSD AND AUTISM: (HIGH MASKING SERIES)

Okay, I'm here again nerding out more on this topic of trying to understand complex PTSD as it relates and may overlap and potentially confuse a diagnosis, particularly of what would be called high masking, low support needs, level one autism. Now even as I say those words, I am learning within the ASD community there's a wide an understandable gap in agreement about language and terms and so I'm trying to use the things I'm coming across most but as I go through this series I want you to please please please especially keep in mind if you are further along in understanding this topic know that I am still learning and please make space for my increasing developmental knowledge around this issue. I said it in my last video on this topic but I'm going to keep saying it in that because of the significant lack of data informing the DSM-5 which is what we basically have been using for quite some time on this diagnosis which left out populations really mostly other than white males and the way they've discerned what is the appropriate diagnostic criteria it appears that it's very flawed to hold that up as the definitive way to diagnose ASD especially in what it appears to be more high masking or different populations. So that being said I just want to say that I am pulling from autistic voices I'm listening to on YouTube, on TikTok, I'm listening to podcasts, I'm listening to you know as much as I can get my hands on and still manage the rest of my life, I'm looking at research articles, I'm looking at you know all types of resources but it's not the case that you can only pull from the perfect research which by the way doesn't exist so please keep in mind that I try to link things that have researched articles but also I'm going to be using the voices that are often referenced within the autistic community who may or may not be experts in terms of you know doctoral level, master's level, whatever in academia but who are very valuable and very informed and frankly very researched people to listen to. So as we're now going to talk about where is the overlap between autism and complex trauma what I'm finding very quickly is that in many cases it is very hard to tell. Of course there are some dynamics that tend to align more significantly with each of these like you must have had a trauma or relational trauma for CPTSD versus ASD being a neurodevelopmental disorder that you're basically born with, even the word disorder I'm learning not to use, a difference, a neurodivergent or developmental difference. What I'm finding is that complex trauma and autism seem to hold hands and so even as I made this list when I did the overlap and then I created the similarities and differences in many cases when I got to similarities and differences I could actually find overlapping data in certain situations listening to certain voices as well but what I want to understand and this is kind of how I'm trying to approach it using myself is for someone if you you know relate to this somebody who like me has had a lot of sensory issues, social dynamic issues, friendship issues in terms of you know wanting to isolate a lot, struggling with certain dynamics, how would I understand if I was born with let's say ASD versus being born highly sensitive not the HSP profile of autism I just posted but if I was going to make the argument no it's not ASD you just came out of the womb highly sensitive and you had a very invalidating environment how would you try to differentiate that between no you actually were born with some level of being on the spectrum and then of course the inherent trauma of being on the spectrum oftentimes alongside actually complicated relational trauma in your family system how would all of that play out today and at the end of the day I want to say this that labels I think matter and don't matter in some regards I think you know a label gives us validation of like this is the thing I've been struggling with I've discussed this before but really understanding and I still do believe that my mom is absolutely an undiagnosed borderline human who struggles with borderline I should say it doesn't explain everything but it explains a lot and once I got to that understanding and if you just want to call that whatever it is for her it was not an obvious case of trauma it's just not for my father who I think may have also had my non-biological father borderline alongside other difficulties lots of trauma seems very clear and of course that being said I can flip it back and say yes but everyone experiences trauma differently what's traumatic to me may not be traumatic to you especially in terms of complex trauma and relational trauma however when I got that piece of like oh this is why she might be this way help me stop blaming myself and the way I'm approaching this exposure exposing myself I should say around ASD is that if at the end of the day I just land on the word neurodivergent and we know that complex trauma and certain experiences create neurodivergency because they require our brains to function in different ways but learning all of this what it's really doing is a validating the alien status and why does everything bother me so much and why have I set up my life in all these ways now but even more importantly where do I want to go from here because so many things do feel so difficult for my nervous system all of the time and they always have and so how can I use this data one way or the other to shift and that is what I hope you will do okay I know you all hate long intros especially if you're if you're new here but I want really wanted I like to load things up so you understand where to go and by the way for those of you who said you didn't get to the point I not only posted in uh underneath the video but in the video if you don't want the long intro please go to 1525 so just FYI I did do that okay let's get into the overlap I'm going to assume that you already understand the core features of autism versus complex trauma and you're arriving here with some understanding but if you don't know what those things are please feel free to visit my videos on complex trauma and I would say I don't necessarily have any specialty videos just defining autism so I would encourage you to do some other research there and now maybe come back to that but at the heart we're talking about how our bodies are going to be responding to the environment and I'm really talking about hypervigilance social dynamics empathy emotions self-emotion regulation issues how you sort of manage everything in your internal and external world especially around like I've talked about things like toxic hypervigilance tendencies to isolate raging anxiety which are often very common can be common in both of those disorders but not necessarily all right so the overlap is here number one feeling different feeling like an alien like no one gets you so both trauma and autism can do that number two easily being dysregulated whether you show it or not overwhelmed and triggered so it's like your nervous system your responsiveness to things can be very intense and remember if you are highly masking you might have already learned that you can't have that meltdown show that dysregulation at work let's say but when you get in your car or maybe you have a meltdown in your car you cry or when you get home you become numb and you shut down or your whole weekend is numbed out as a response so it doesn't have to necessarily be mirrored in that moment number three trying to find or using some form of self-soothing behaviors often using the word stimming we often use the word stimming in autism but the idea is that stimming for those with autism may be pleasurable it may help regulate the responses to things the world emotions senses and then it serves a purpose for the person with autism and I think the same thing can be true as I've researched in different forms for those who have complex trauma it's a way to find a way to soothe the self if you think about attachment and a child who didn't get let's say any kind of real regulatory behavior from a parent to self-soothe that child might engage in all types of self-regulatory soothing behaviors number four a tendency to want control to prefer predictability which then increases a sense of internal safety so like being prepared and knowing what to expect let's say going into a social event would be just forget about the social thing to a new event in both cases it would ideally help prepare the person inside and out to kind of have an idea about what's happening so being startled by what happens being surprised unprepared feeling unsafe as a result would be an issue so it'd be preferable to kind of have that predictability number five engaging in restricted or avoidant behaviors as a way of managing what might be the dysregulation that's coming in as input number six hypervigilance so for more for those with CPTSD there could be especially as it relates to the actual trauma some types of environmental triggers but there can also be this internal hypervigilant forecasting and really what we're talking about in in both cases in different ways is an overly reactive nervous system now obviously how it originates let's say in a purely ASD dynamic versus you had a situation you experienced trauma it might be more i think with complex trauma the triggers might be may or may not be more specific but i would argue that if the human being in your life like a parent is the person who caused the trauma that often gets layered out to like all humans are traumatic and then maybe the parent has ASD right so like there's all these layers but the point is your nervous system is overly reactive in both cases number seven having obsessive thoughts or behaviors very common in both can be number eight concentration focus attention issues and having either hyper focus or hypo focus where it's like either way there's a role that attention can play or not play in helping you manage the way your your mind and body are responding to the to the situations number nine dissociation and derealization are common in both ASD and CPTSD both of them can have profiles of being hyper empathic so it used to be suggested or believed that those with autism do not have empathy or lack empathy and that is actually not true i'm going to make a whole video on the double empathy problem which i think i referenced in my last video on hs on the hsp profile of autism but that like most things in life and in human beings there's a spectrum there for those on the spectrum of how they might experience and reflect and show up at empathy and it might not look the way neurotypicals engage in it so but being hyper empathic can be one of those dynamics the next one is fawning and i came across this in dr devon price's book on unmasking autism talking about for high masking individuals how engaging and fawning behavior is a self-preservation and regulatory way of engaging in the world so learning to read others rotate around them find a way especially if you were aware enough to know that a meltdown wasn't going to be socially acceptable especially as you got older that learning to kind of rotate around others and get your needs met by being less of a threat to the threat which could be kids at school parents things like that that fawning is a survival tactic and complex trauma and really in a different version but kind of the same way in autism now i would say the next one is a trauma response of freezing so collapsing and shutting down for different reasons though that is really our nervous system but in both cases we can see freezing and collapsing number 13 intimacy issues and so i think for different reasons those can show up i think at the heart of complex trauma is often a lack of trust in humans and i could see how although i'm still you know this is a newer area for me but if the way people have responded to you hasn't felt safe or hasn't felt validating on the autism side or maybe you have sensory triggers around smells i think i mean this to me is a huge piece of physical intimacy i'm wondering about that i really want to explore is if you have a lot of triggers around smells and touch and light and fabric and all of those things and you think about the complicated nature of humans interacting in an intimate way there are potentially a lot of triggers at least that's something i'm understanding more and more about and i really would like to go into depth on that one and make a video about that and i would i will be doing that in the future the next one is an increased risk of victimization which makes sense there's a lack of maybe awareness or there's a vulnerability inherently built into both complex trauma oftentimes those who are traumatized in childhood find themselves you know reenacting and being repeatedly traumatized and then i i'm learning in autism as a result of certain maybe differences or or you know lack of understanding certain things or being very naive and very trusting one of the characteristics i've come across is people saying i was so naive and i have said that so many times like i think i'm a relatively smart person but when it comes to sort of really close people in my life i always assume the best i never assume the worst in times when i should have or when i should have been more suspicious i would write it off as oh i want to respect boundaries my kids were not my older boys we were laughing about i mean it's funny now it wasn't funny when they were you know maybe doing things in high school but i was like i said it last week and i was like i feel like i was so naive and they were like yeah you were and that doesn't mean i wasn't paying attention to things but i just don't assume bad things and i don't if you have autism if you found that to be true but it seems like being naive and i've i've seen it even term in terms of like being childish but not in like acting like a child just like seeing the world through that lens but i don't know how you feel about that so please share if you want to number 15 heightened sensitivities to sensory input so that kind of really goes along with hypervigilance but just the idea that when you've had a repetitively traumatic childhood you learn to make meaning of things to pay attention to things to you know to focus on the sensory things like what's the sound of the parents voice what mood are they in what kind of facial expressions do they have have they been drinking or not like all kinds of things and so there's like a tenderness around that now you're living in fight or flight so you're like there's like a tenderness around everything coming at you and that is would be the heart i believe in many cases for those who the next one is increased risk of substance use and self-wounding i'm not going to go into that but that makes a lot of sense for different reasons executive function issues around planning and organization or hyper planning you know there can be a very a wide spectrum there but i think anytime you've had some kind of difficulty with the way your brain functions depending upon your own capacities trauma and trauma with autism autism it can affect the way that you you're the way this you know your frontal lobe deals with the world not to mention actual differences in frontal lobe and executive functioning in terms of the brain and lastly sleep issues so i'm learning that's very common with those with asd to have sleep issues in terms of the quality of sleep how they sleep and that can also be true for trauma although it can be similar but related if we're talking about like you know nightmares or flashbacks or insomnia or afraid to go to sleep or actually many people will stay up late at night because they feel the safest when everyone is asleep and that can hijack your sleep so i would say separate but related sleep hygiene issues could be helpful there okay what are the differences so when we're talking about autism initially it was believed that there there would have to be special interests and it seems to be a common thing but what i've heard is that not everyone has special interests maybe your special interests are people are psychology and it's your job so if you if you weren't like learning about that you might not see that as a special interest um so in complex trauma you might have a special interest too but it doesn't seem to be an inherent part of it and maybe it's the way the interest is played out is in self-protective behaviors or maybe it's learning how to you know self-defense something like that but in the case of autism it has the special interests seem to have a positive impact on autism where i would say that's sort of like not necessarily related to complex trauma it's possible but it's not one of the criteria right the sensory profile for those with asd their baseline sensitivities are going to be generally higher i think that the sensory processing as i'm learning is is actually in many cases a much larger piece or as large as social differences not deficits but differences for people that that baseline kind of being that nervous system that responsiveness that there's just we're taking in when we have autism like everything at once and that there's a a natural overwhelm to that the next thing is that a person may or may not with autism display social differences not necessarily deficits although i do think it obviously would depend on how where you are in terms of the levels and how those might impact your ability but what i'm also hearing is that you you know either have autism or you don't and that the argument is that it's impactful no matter whether you could show it or not it's impactful and then i've heard parents express in certain postings about they have children who have really high needs and that they feel like there's a big difference and that that's not being respected that's why i was going back to the language it's very hard to please everyone especially i'm learning in a community with like really a lot of really thoughtful people who have thought these things through and um don't necessarily all agree and so it's like hard to know you know what to say or do so i'm just trying to be in the most respectful way give you the language that i am learning and we can all help each other in there okay so difference in reading neurotypical cues that would be more under autism where your brain is neurodivergent so how do you try to read and make sense of the neurotypical version of the world and that that would be inherently different and i forgot to mention this going back we're going back with the idea of empathy so initially it was thought that there you know like i said there was not an empathy or there was a lack of empathy for those with autism and that's not true so the social differences and the triggers could be as regard to empathy and how we engage those could all be different i'm not going to go down that road because it's a whole other video but that's the bottom line and then lastly the idea of repetitive behaviors and self-soothing using routines and routine and certain behaviors that would be more common and more predictably associated with an autistic profile now let's talk about the similarities so for those this is kind of going back to that overlapping dynamic where there can be social difficulties for different reasons as i've talked about with if you have a very heightened active nervous system as a result of needing to really overread your caregivers and then you have an inner critic and an outer critic you know all of that can be hovering over you in social situations and be very uncomfortable and then inherently there can be this different language being spoken with neurotypicals and neurodiverse individuals and their own tolerance for engaging socially so that can those can both happen for similar and different reasons number two i would say flashbacks are inherently a complex trauma thing as we think about diagnostic criteria an emotional flashback like a return state regressive state to childhood but i don't see how in autism you couldn't also have if you have also have complex trauma emotional flashbacks especially to triggers not just around your own experience but to things that inherently created this alien feeling for you where you weren't seen and heard the way that you needed to be so you could have a you know you could feel shame you could feel triggered i don't see how you couldn't self-blame and that i think that can often overlap for different reasons based on your interactions with other people and your history a shift in how you experience emotion so ideally in complex trauma there would be a shift but if you're born with autism of course that that that shift in how you experience emotion may be inherently part of who you are and then i can see how it might be shaped by whether or not you received the support that you needed and deserved and then avoidance for different reasons avoidance of people of experiences of whatever based on the the related reason so obviously there could be an intolerance inside for certain things from a sort of nervous system perspective with autism and one that maybe you weren't born with but developed as a result of complex trauma so those are the places where i think we find the similarities and differences and overlap and as you can see there are some things that feel they would inherently be more related to autism versus complex trauma and then there are some a lot of places where it just kind of like gets it can get overlapped and really nuanced and really difficult to decide well what is the ideology of this where does this come from and given the fact that childhood and trauma and our brains you know it's such in our environments are all just at all times impacting each other i think it can get difficult so i'm curious to see and hear what you feel i think what this is really doing is validating how incredibly difficult it may be if you're not really aware and understanding and really educating yourself around autism that you could easily as a clinician or individual self-diagnose and really relate to the qualities of complex trauma but perhaps because of the lack of training on our end and even the way that it is still stigmatized and stereotyped about what autism looks like especially not talking about you know these populations and different ways of presenting like highly masking females people of color that you could really miss out and it could affect treatment it could affect of course why is this not working for me it might help with the trauma but not be dealing with the underlying parts of it that are related to autism and so it's all it's doing in some ways it's making me more aware and also making it the picture more cloudy in some ways if that makes sense but in a good way so thank you so much for being here i really appreciate the way you all are talking to each other in the comments it's just been incredible and beautiful and really quickly just wanted to share this and say thank you so much youtube sent this to me for finally getting to a hundred thousand followers i appreciate you so so much i really do i love i love being here and i i don't take your time for granted and i know that some videos i've made are better than others i hope to continue to grow and learn and make that your make your time worthy here where you feel informed but really like loved and seen and validated and heard that is really my goal and understood so thank you so much for being here please stay safe and well and i'll see you soon