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Working out what you need after a life of suppressing

Fast_and_the_curious

Hi everyone, I thought I'd make a thread on how you started to discover what you really needed after getting a diagnosis or realising you are autistic.

For me, I feel like the last 6 weeks since my therapist suggested autism I have been getting "more" autistic and noticing things that I never noticed bothering me before. I have been reassuring myself I'm not crazy, not making it up, but simply allowing myself to really see what bothers me instead of dismissing the cause as ridiculous, because NT's don't seem to be bothered by it. 

Did any of you experience this? How did you deal with it? 

And further, how did you start to identify and address issues? Did you have to practice allowing yourself to stim? Did you start to work on undoing some of the "passing" behaviours you've developed? Or did you keep them? I think a lot of my anxiety issues are from suppressing the urge to do things that help me, or leave situations that stress me, but I'm not sure if I am making things worse by now allowing myself to leave instead of sticking a situation out. 

Discuss! Slight smile

Parents

  • I think personally that as I became more aware of my autism. Things that I have done all of my life that I just thought were odd, were now explained by autism. It had the effect of grouping together a lot of previously fragmented traits and behaviours into one nice neat cognitive schema. I've never tried to hide stimming behaviour, I just didn't realise that that's what I was doing. 

    It's really good that you're trying to see what bothers you rather than dismissing it. A lot of learning how to manage symptoms can be trial and error although there's some good resources out there that can help. I recently realised that the reason why I get completely blinded by the sun, even in winter, is because I'm really sensitive to sunlight, so I'm looking into buying a decent pair of very dark sunglasses. If you can make little changes to reduce stress then it will help.

    I might give a more lengthy answer tomorrow but I'm very tired today!

Reply

  • I think personally that as I became more aware of my autism. Things that I have done all of my life that I just thought were odd, were now explained by autism. It had the effect of grouping together a lot of previously fragmented traits and behaviours into one nice neat cognitive schema. I've never tried to hide stimming behaviour, I just didn't realise that that's what I was doing. 

    It's really good that you're trying to see what bothers you rather than dismissing it. A lot of learning how to manage symptoms can be trial and error although there's some good resources out there that can help. I recently realised that the reason why I get completely blinded by the sun, even in winter, is because I'm really sensitive to sunlight, so I'm looking into buying a decent pair of very dark sunglasses. If you can make little changes to reduce stress then it will help.

    I might give a more lengthy answer tomorrow but I'm very tired today!

Children
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