Imposter Syndrome

I am an adult with ASD. When I was 13 I was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and Tourettes Plus, then hospitalised and faced with many different diagnoses, medications and also at once point forced into care when a doc decided I was just a bad child and everything was behaviour issues. That was pretty traumatic. In recent years I had a really bad nervous breakdown trying to live independently with no support, assuming that whatever diagnoses I had were all wrong, and that I was in fact fine. Going back to the psych was 'well of course, you have ASD. You need ASD support', which for me was a huge relief and took a lot of grief and guilt away from the traumas I had experienced as a child going through the system. I really agree with the diagnosis, it explains a lot about me and also about my childhood. I went through, and still occasionally experience a period of 'imposter syndrome' but I have since made a lot of progress and learned a lot more about my behaviours, my limits, things I struggle to understand and things I am sensitive to.

More recently I have had problems with my partner and with my family because of my meltdowns, anxiety, and problems understanding things. I decided it would be a good idea to see a specialist (there are no specialists in my local area that I can see for support, and no Autism-specific interventions/therapies I can access). At over £100 per session it is not cheap but I thought it would be good to have the advice of a specialist and maybe some recommendations on what therapies or interventions I should try to access in the future.   

We talked about how my meltdowns manifest, triggers, and the positive active and calming ways of dealing with things and redirecting focus. I was given some breathing, presence and calming exercises to practise when I recognise stress and tension building up.

When we were talking about those high stress, pre meltdown moments the doctor saying ‘whether you are autistic or not, these things happen, and the thing is with you you go into this deep internal monologue, and you have to stop that’ seemed to trigger a complete downward spiral.

It made me feel like all the times the doctors said it was just me and my bad behaviour and that if I just learned my way out of it I would be normal again. Those times where I felt like it's just that I wasn't working hard enough and I could just be normal and fine if I tried. It all kind of came rushing back to me. Like deep down maybe I am not Autistic, these are all just learned behaviours to keep me safe from having to come to terms with the fact that I am so bad and broken. That if I just work really hard and learn other mechanisms, I would be normal. Which means a lot more work than accepting I am just Autistic, but having to accept that I am inherently broken and starting from scratch once again to unlearn all the learned behaviours, and learn to be a normal functioning person. What if I am in denial that I am just really an inherently bad, broken person and it will be a long road to being really truthfully normal and functional. Maybe accepting I am Autistic is just the easy way out, and that is my problem, that I just always took the easy way out and never faced up to things, and everything would get better if I just faced up to the fact that I am really some screwed up psychopath that should probably be locked up away from everybody.

Can anybody offer any advice? Has anybody experienced similar doubts or thoughts?

Parents
  • The doctor may have just meant that everyone gets stressed at times, not that you have no worse problems than an average person. In any case, you said you were diagnosed at with ASD at 13, so why worry about what this doctor said?

Reply
  • The doctor may have just meant that everyone gets stressed at times, not that you have no worse problems than an average person. In any case, you said you were diagnosed at with ASD at 13, so why worry about what this doctor said?

Children
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