Person who has survived abuse and is pretty sure they’re autistic looking for people with a similar experience

Thank you for sharing your story, it's not an easy thing to do when this kind of trauma is involved. 

I have this experience as well, and am currently seeking diagnosis as 39 year old woman who just put all of this together (the reality of the abuse I remembered as well as the fact that I am on the spectrum- also 90+ percent sure after a lot of research and personal cataloguing of my own behavioural history). My mother, who I highly suspect is also on the spectrum, physically and emotionally abused me and my brother when we were in adolescence. I have been trying to talk to my parents about this for years but my mother completely denies that it happened and my father, who wasn't present for any of the instances of physical abuse, blindly backs her up no matter what I say. My brother has been battling opioid addiction for the past 15 years and has buried the experience completely, along with the self I once knew. But my memories of this are not cloudy and they never have been, so their denial for all these years produced the effect of them gaslighting me.

In the past few years, through the Me Too movement and other larger cultural conversations I came to understand intricately what gaslighting is, its psychological impacts and, most importantly, how it works (I have had little to no access to healthcare and therapy or the dialogue and language surrounding psychiatry and psychology for most of my life having been brought up working class and ostensibly luddite with back to-the-land parents who have some relatively destructive utopian- aka repressive- worldviews). This helped me to understand why I was feeling so uncertain about my own memories, and like I was the aggressor in the situation for bringing it up at all.

I now see how my mother's own shame and lack of information around her own experience or tools to deal with it (she has struggled with her mental health her entire adult life and only recently started telling me about the abuse in her own family, how risky her life choices became once she left home in her early 20s, and the multiple sexual assaults in her past) informed her actions, and have perhaps made it feel impossible for her to admit to having done these things without psychologically tearing herself apart. I am in therapy myself to unpack and process this trauma, and am working with my therapist to come up with strategies to:

• establish workable boundaries between myself and my parents so that we can remain in communication while I am going through this
• move towards a better understanding of how the trauma I experienced is tied to my Asperger's so that I can halt or reroute the torturous fixation loops I find myself in when I am alone now that these memories are fully activated in my psyche (before bed is the worst time for me, and insomnia started interfering with my ability to function and hold a job)
  • memories of trauma are stored in the brain in such a way that, when recalled, you live through the experience again, you don't just remember the information like you do going to a friend's birthday party when you were a kid, you feel it fully. 
• eventually get into group/family therapy with my parents to talk about these things in a safe space for all of us, with an "objective" third party present 

I am at the beginning of this as well, but as a result of the pandemic things have been accelerated and I've made some strides... after a nervous breakdown that forced me to stop everything else in my life and deal with it. I highly recommend NOT letting it go until you get to that point if possible, a number of relationships along with my professional reputation (I had been very high functioning) have been damaged in the process because I was not able to be intentional about it- I was forced to operate in crisis mode and ALL of the signs of Asperger's that I had been masking in order to get to the level of functionality and social passability I was at came out at once. It's been rough and, to be frank, I barely made it through. 

Substance abuse also became a real, consequential issue for the first time in my life once I realized the validity of my abuse. I had experimented with drugs when I was in high school and in my early 20s, but had been pretty mellow in my consumption since. I slowly began to realize (it creeps up on you) how much I had been consuming just to make it through family gatherings, how difficult it was for me to go even a day without sedating myself, and how often I was prioritizing intoxication over real connection with friends because I could pass as drunk like everyone else instead of the raw psychological and emotional mess that I was. Eventually that didn't work, it became obvious that something else was going on anyways and my friends (who I am grateful for) stopped enabling this behaviour. 

It's been a blessing and a curse, but ultimately going through all of this really difficult work will lead to a better life for me and the ability to actually HAVE intimate relationships with other people without the constant fear that once they find out who I actually am and what I need in terms of communication it will end, or that I will eventually and inevitably become the abuser.     

For me, the trauma I carry is deeply entangled with my understanding of myself as someone on the spectrum. It's going to be a long road to sorting it all out but I'm already starting to feel like a more whole version of the person I have been able to be thus far because I'm starting to be honest with myself about these things in a non-destructive way.

A very good friend told me recently, after I had been beating myself up in conversation with her about all of this, to start from the point of being kind to myself. I've been keeping that in mind (though I still beat myself up here and there out of habit) with each decision I make in this process and it has helped immensely. We are taught through abuse to abuse ourselves into being a better version of ourselves, but abuse just replicates itself. Kindness opens up other possibilities.

Thank you for sharing your story, it's not an easy thing to do when this kind of trauma is involved. 

I have this experience as well, and am currently seeking diagnosis as 39 year old woman who just put all of this together (the reality of the abuse I remembered as well as the fact that I am on the spectrum- also 90+ percent sure after a lot of research and personal cataloguing of my own behavioural history). My mother, who I highly suspect is also on the spectrum, physically and emotionally abused me and my brother when we were in adolescence. I have been trying to talk to my parents about this for years but my mother completely denies that it happened and my father, who wasn't present for any of the instances of physical abuse, blindly backs her up no matter what I say. My brother has been battling opioid addiction for the past 15 years and has buried the experience completely, along with the self I once knew. But my memories of this are not cloudy and they never have been, so their denial for all these years produced the effect of them gaslighting me.

In the past few years, through the Me Too movement and other larger cultural conversations I came to understand intricately what gaslighting is, its psychological impacts and, most importantly, how it works (I have had little to no access to healthcare and therapy or the dialogue and language surrounding psychiatry and psychology for most of my life having been brought up working class and ostensibly luddite with back to-the-land parents who have some relatively destructive utopian- aka repressive- worldviews). This helped me to understand why I was feeling so uncertain about my own memories, and like I was the aggressor in the situation for bringing it up at all.

I now see how my mother's own shame and lack of information around her own experience or tools to deal with it (she has struggled with her mental health her entire adult life and only recently started telling me about the abuse in her own family, how risky her life choices became once she left home in her early 20s, and the multiple sexual assaults in her past) informed her actions, and have perhaps made it feel impossible for her to admit to having done these things without psychologically tearing herself apart. I am in therapy myself to unpack and process this trauma, and am working with my therapist to come up with strategies to:

• establish workable boundaries between myself and my parents so that we can remain in communication while I am going through this
• move towards a better understanding of how the trauma I experienced is tied to my Asperger's so that I can halt or reroute the torturous fixation loops I find myself in when I am alone now that these memories are fully activated in my psyche (before bed is the worst time for me, and insomnia started interfering with my ability to function and hold a job)
  • memories of trauma are stored in the brain in such a way that, when recalled, you live through the experience again, you don't just remember the information like you do going to a friend's birthday party when you were a kid, you feel it fully. 
• eventually get into group/family therapy with my parents to talk about these things in a safe space for all of us, with an "objective" third party present 

I am at the beginning of this as well, but as a result of the pandemic things have been accelerated and I've made some strides... after a nervous breakdown that forced me to stop everything else in my life and deal with it. I highly recommend NOT letting it go until you get to that point if possible, a number of relationships along with my professional reputation (I had been very high functioning) have been damaged in the process because I was not able to be intentional about it- I was forced to operate in crisis mode and ALL of the signs of Asperger's that I had been masking in order to get to the level of functionality and social passability I was at came out at once. It's been rough and, to be frank, I barely made it through. 

Substance abuse also became a real, consequential issue for the first time in my life once I realized the validity of my abuse. I had experimented with drugs when I was in high school and in my early 20s, but had been pretty mellow in my consumption since. I slowly began to realize (it creeps up on you) how much I had been consuming just to make it through family gatherings, how difficult it was for me to go even a day without sedating myself, and how often I was prioritizing intoxication over real connection with friends because I could pass as drunk like everyone else instead of the raw psychological and emotional mess that I was. Eventually that didn't work, it became obvious that something else was going on anyways and my friends (who I am grateful for) stopped enabling this behaviour. 

It's been a blessing and a curse, but ultimately going through all of this really difficult work will lead to a better life for me and the ability to actually HAVE intimate relationships with other people without the constant fear that once they find out who I actually am and what I need in terms of communication it will end, or that I will eventually and inevitably become the abuser.     

For me, the trauma I carry is deeply entangled with my understanding of myself as someone on the spectrum. It's going to be a long road to sorting it all out but I'm already starting to feel like a more whole version of the person I have been able to be thus far because I'm starting to be honest with myself about these things in a non-destructive way.

A very good friend told me recently, after I had been beating myself up in conversation with her about all of this, to start from the point of being kind to myself. I've been keeping that in mind (though I still beat myself up here and there out of habit) with each decision I make in this process and it has helped immensely. We are taught through abuse to abuse ourselves into being a better version of ourselves, but abuse just replicates itself. Kindness opens up other possibilities.