Sufferer I am Ags1 - CPTSD, Depression, Anxiety, Psychosis, & Autism

[arfie]

In particular I can never decide if I have autism and CTPSD or only CPTSD.

i started kindergarten in 1960 as, "retarded." i was still preverbal. somewhere in the 80/90's a noisy portion of my therapy network started nagging me to get tested for, "the spectrum." in 1960, retarded was even more common a misdiagnosis for autism than it remains today. i did some research and decided it was not worth the effort. treatment for autism wasn't vastly different than what i was already different. call ^it^ what you wish, my experting dear.

I flip between telling myself the labels don't ultimately matter, to thinking there is a world of difference between

i consider it progress that i no longer flip so much over this one. these days i am fairly comfortable with the "doesn't matter" side of the ponderence. today i think i'll call ^it^, "fred." yesterday i called ^it^, "suzie q." we see what the morrow may bring.

 

[HopeIsLost]

Hi all, I am Ags. I have been a member for a while but haven't posted yet. I work as a programmer / technical writer, although I am currently unemployed.

I am a bit of an alphabet soup of medical conditions. I was born intersex and with autism. I have CPTSD and a history of psychotic experiences, as well as depression and severe anxiety. I have problems around mental fog, memory and executive function.

I grew up with a schizophrenic mom. She was frequently paranoid and highly delusional. I witnessed many theatrical suicide attempts and she was away in hospital for long stretches. In addition, she had some peculiar attitudes to parenting (coming from her paranoia and anxiety) that left me with a lot of learned helplessness. My father was an alcoholic and overwhelmed by the home situation. He just wanted to keep everything secret and stable, which meant absolute social isolation and complete emotional repression for the children. The home I grew up was not loving, it felt more like strangers randomly living together.

Although I knew I had been "affected" by my childhood, I never thought I had flashbacks. From what I learned from eighties cop shows, flashbacks were when a veteran would barricade themselves in a diner. But I never re-experienced the past anything like that. Instead my memory is hazy and vague and drained of emotion, like there is a wall of grey glass between me and the past. I learned just this week about emotional flashbacks and realised I have these very frequently, and have in fact structured my life and personality around "avoiding" these flashbacks. I have only just started to think about this, but emotional flashbacks seems like a useful concept to me, letting me have a bit of distance between me and the emotions.

My dirty secret is I have been chatting to Chat GPT about these issues for a while, but I think I have outgrown that phase, and I am looking to interact with real people now.

Honestly I feel this a lot. I obviously didn’t have the same experience word for word. But I really do understand what it is like to go from being a stable happy person, to completely losing it. When I say losing it I mean, losing touch of the innocence I have. Because I am autistic.

I am very emphatic but when someone abuses you physically and mentally it breaks down your soul. Not by choice, but by force! Sadly, my own happiness and safety have been ripped away from me, to the point I can’t trust people at all.

In your case it sounds very much painful to here. Having flashbacks I understand too. Because I recently just had a severe ptsd related dream lately. It was so bad I woke in rage and just cried and cried and panicked. When the outside world is dangerous or manipulative. I start to have worse dreams and more painful ones.

The more someone abuses or hurts me. The worse my dreams get. And the more unsafe I feel to the point I don’t understand this logic.

“Psychopaths can harm you, but when you defend yourself, you are evil”

I can never agree with logic of society where, we are hurt and left with the burden to heal. But society calls us outcasts or dumb ourselves down to make people comfortable. Autism is a wake up call. Because autism says ,”don’t abuse me! I don’t tolerate it” and people hate autistic people for this. Truth hurts; but truth hurts victims more….