Chapter 2: Reflecting on My Autistic Self
Trauma, regression, trauma, masking, rinse, repeat…
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What we came to call regression, it is about survival, masking, is about belonging, the dynamics upon which our conscious and unconscious minds evolved and endure.
I think the most challenging parts of my journey to getting diagnosed has by far been to get my conscious mind to know how to listen to my unconscious.
Because if we think about it, we are raised to know how to train our unconscious mind to listen to our conscious one, at least in surroundings and circumstances urging us so.
But what we find sometimes, our conscious minds are urged to pay attention to our unconscious ones, and I argue that this is why nurture plays such a critical role in our development as humans.
Reflecting on the Past!
Why we organize into tribes, why we prioritize family, why we devise hierarchy, all those social dynamics aiming to find balance in reciprocated empathy, assuring mutual growth and survival as a collective.
That we are wired to want to leverage our capacity for reciprocated empathy, which I argue, was meant to urge us to reflect on what our unconscious minds project, along with what our conscious minds attend to and express.
If we think about it, the unconscious aspects of nurture, those are easier to get lost from generation to the next. That by the time we develop our conscious mind, there was already ample nurture of our unconscious minds. And when you think about neurodivergence, you are likely to wonder how those early months must seem.
When an infant senses what others cannot, or when they cannot sense what others can, the overload in conflicted feedback that they somehow have to process and understand on their own to progress.
Then comes more questions, about the development of our conscious mind, if they are prematurely urged, if that can even be, or if their development is also a matter of ebb and flow. That some, like myself, will come to read, while consciously not realizing for many years that they are struggling to read like the rest.
That they will make it through their early development, and even through years of college, before they or others will consciously realize what was always there, what they we urged to somehow look like they did not suffer, the endless trauma coming at them, what they endured, all, very real.
That when they do, they become almost detached from that conscious self as they unmask one they realize was never detached from what they struggled with and unconsciously endured.
That in the same way, we can consider that by the time we develop our understanding of our sense of self, that it could be one we had abstracted relative to progressions of our unconscious capacities, or, that it could be one of more that we come to abstract, in progression or regression.
When a child is challenged to challenge their unconscious capacities, to mask what they can sense, to misinterpret what they feel, to reject their own pain…
To evolve in order to not endure conscious and unconscious anguish, from what they predict and pattern, and what the positive and negative reinforcements urge them to yearn or heed.
Now we can circle back to considering the critical role of nurture in the development of neurodivergents and neurotypicals. That our society seeded generation after generation, what it takes to develop the neurotypical conscious minds. That the unconscious aspects, the ones coupled to our own neurological reality, they got lost between the generations.
And so today, you find a society where neurotypicals and neurodivergents alike are masking to narcissistic extremes. That they must become narcissistic to their own unconscious suffering and trauma, forging them to expect the same from those around them, until they are parents, and the cycle repeats.
When we are threatened, we try to protect ourselves, that dynamic is as primitive as neurology itself, that you will forget about your ego, when it is not expressed from our conscious minds, when it is about survival, when it is projected from the unconscious, instead.
That is where we can start to make sense of regressions, ones observed by parents, and ones observed from our own conscious progression. But instead, we can think in terms of those being unconscious progressions, and what we need and try to find is their conscious counterparts.
When our reality falters to offer us empathy and understanding, and where masking or unmasking are the only choices to survive certain defeat.
And we can ponder at the endless possible factors that affect when we are making those choices, consciously and unconsciously. But I’d like to argue that at the end of the day, that it will ultimately be a done deal, when our unconscious mind vetos for our own survival. That our behaviour would gradually appear more autistic. That others would paint us regressing. And that, even if for a while, our own conscious minds could do the same.
When our own conscious minds falter to offer us empathy and understanding, and where unmasking was the only choice for our unconscious minds to survive certain defeat.
Reflecting on the Present!
This is where my journey of my late ASD diagnosis finally kicked in. That I was becoming more and more autistic to my doctors for the first time at 34, when I was already seeking psychiatric care since I was 18.
That it took 2 years from my provisional diagnosis, to work through the floodgates of repressed and misconstrued memories, defragmenting and rehabilitating, myself, my reality, the chunk of world to fit and belong.
But this journey only starts here, because at 37, with a medically recognized diagnosis, the report of which is all but finalized, and yet that unconscious progression that got me here is still going full-steam.
When our own conscious minds falter to assert us empathy and understanding, and where sensory hypervigilance, the ensuing overload, the heightened traumatic incidence, the anxiety, and the selectivity in interests, interactions… to survive certain defeat.
This does not have to be only an autism thing. That any human being can exhibit such behavioural changes, responding to ailment that is elusive only to their conscious mind. But an important question to ask at this point, does the reverse also take place once the ailment is seemingly being addressed and attended to.
If we want to consider how our conscious and unconscious minds evolved and endure, then it would seem more than reasonable that this progression will ebb and flow. That each progression starts once we endured and evolved with the one before it, rinse, repeat…
This is where my next chapter in my late diagnosis journey kicks in, with potentially long underlying condition(s), like MCAS, now diagnostically relevant with past and progressively compounding struggles!
And while I am not sure where things will go from here, I am trusting that good will come.
That my mind has evolved and endured, through all those cycles it has persevered. That it survived the fractures of unmasking, the unleashed anguish from repressed and unprocessed traumas encased behind the masking.
So now with everything I know, I have to come back to something that has nagged me since I was a child, which I think has to do with the most crucial question we often find asked…
How come it seems like there are more autistic people today?!
The thing is, there may or may not be more genetic occurrence, and I do not have the science to cut it myself. What we know for sure, there are more people diagnosed, and we climbed from roughly 1 in 200 to 1 in 65 or so.
That society is able to do a better job identifying and diagnosing is well and good, but it is not enough for me to stop wondering if there is more.
I will go out on a limb and say that I think society has eroded too fast with the digital age, and that has created a toxic world, and more so for autistic people.
I really think that ever since I was a child, I needed to ask for time to get things right, and as a geek, I spent most of my time on computers.
Eventually, those who did not take time to get things right are now all employed.
I also think that this applies to everything, not just software, nor printing, the two industries I gravitated to, which I think stems from my own interests in seeing knowledge propagating, to better society.
That every product and service, they all gradually manifested the evidence that shows that no one is giving things time anymore.
That myself and others, on the spectrum or otherwise, we may be seemingly slow, but when folks get the time they need to get it right, that saves us so much more.
In many cases, we are talking about several years lost to misdiagnoses, several years of trauma, lives destroyed, lives lost to unspecified autoimmune and other reactions, and in my own family, that is 19 years in total for myself, and my father’s own still elusive cause of death from 2018.
No one takes the time to ask the questions that should be asked, when patients do not follow the textbooks, when doctors operate with the mindset that there is very little time on their hands best used for the benefit of their living patients… But is that what is really happening here?!
To bring us back to the question about the growing ASD incidence, I really believe that autistic people out in the world today are starting to sense what they may not be consciously ready to perceive. And they are trying for hope, how they are wired to know how to cope, trying at the long game.
When their neurotypical peers are not concerned with any of it, because they cannot sense or perceive, not in the same way, which is okay, but it cannot and is not the only way, that is just insane.
Reflecting on the Possibilities!
It is not by chance that I and many others find sanity and sanctuary putting our lives out in the public domain. That we opt to go with the anxiety that ensues from having expose our reasoning to all kinds of feedback, to figure out how to make our way through.
It takes very little to doubt, much more to doubt doubt itself, which eventually is how we all come to learn to know what is actually real!
Along the way, we hurt a lot, the price we pay. To learn from our collective mistakes. To know better. And to discover the deeper meaning and worth, of life and death, happiness and sadness, of suffering, and, laughter.
A patient tells their doctor,
“I looked online and I think I have Munchausen’s” …The doctor replies,
“no, you look fine to me, just get some rest”…
If we want to be happy, as folks on the spectrum, it will not be in the comfort of some sanctuary we are afforded, with people labouring at our anxiety, mistaking attempts to express deeper insights with mindless obsessions.
If we want to be happy, as human beings, it will be when we give time and thought, that we learn and grow, to be part of the whole, a better society.
If we want to be happy, as a society, we can try to learn from the insights of those who have to work that much harder to consciously align, to what we tend to take for granted, to do away with legacy and delusions of normalcy that only ever seems.
When we truly learn to speak a more inclusive language, and to listen to what our differences have to say, that we diversify and include, not assert and further discriminate with those sharing in differences of our own.
Thank you ❤️
