Published on 12, July, 2020
About 10 years ago, I discovered the trait called Highly Sensitive Person:
Description here: https://hsperson.com/
I took the test back then, and discovered I was Highly Sensitive. Some of the features are:
I bought the Highly Sensitive Person handbook and it was like getting 'the handbook for how I function'. I should read it again tbh.
So recently I was diagnosed as autistic, as you know, and it just occurred to me that these features would fit an autistic person as well. I wondered if I could be HSP *and* autistic. Or maybe I'm one or the other, not both- maybe one has been mistaken for the other? What do you think?
Hi, I had this same thought only a few days ago and the answer that came to me was this - yes, we are highly sensitive beings which has strong similarities/crossovers with autism; however, for me anyway, I see the highly sensitive part of me as directly related to my ‘true self’ and the autism part is more like the physical aspect of me, the part where I’m neurologically wired differently to most people, the part that my highly sensitive self/true self works through. So it is helpful to me to understand myself through the framework of autism when thinking about my physical being, including sensitivity’s to sounds etc and to understand my highly sensitive nature as being my true self which is naturally sensitive to the things of this world because it isn’t of this world, it’s in the world but it’s source is of a higher dimension.
That's interesting. Although all the HSP books I've read say that HSPs are neurologically wired differently too. There must be a crossover.
Special interests can change rapidly or some might last a lifetime and black and white thinking, especially as we get older might not be exclusive and executive functioning is the process that happens when we do something, for example, cleaning the house, if you don’t have good executive functioning you might struggle to clean the house as you might not know where to start or what order to do it in and often, autistic people are said to have impaired executive functioning but on the other hand it is said that if we really want to do something, for example, if it’s related to a special interest, our executive functioning works perfectly.
See this is where I differ. I do not have special interests nor rigid black and white thinking. I have constantly changing interests, I am somewhat black and white in my thinking but not exclusively. I've no idea about executive functioning differences because I don't know what that means.
Yes, definitely a crossover but autism has other things as well such as special interests, rigid black n white thinking, executive functioning differences etc