Like my (now long-deceased) father, I've been a chronic worrier and negative thinker almost my entire life. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I cannot recall much of my half-century-plus life, and little that was positive; I was/am busy spending my ‘present’ anxious about my future and depressed over my past. For me, that includes a fear of how badly I will emotionally deal with the negative or horrible event—which usually doesn’t occur—and especially if I’ll also conclude that I’m at fault.
It would be appropriate to have stated on my grave/urn marker someday that, ‘He spent his life worrying sick about things that never happened.’
I find that this curse essentially prevents me from meeting and befriending a special significant other. Most notably, I’ll start talking to a woman I find attractive but then mentally freeze up with anticipations of, among other disasters, a potential relationship’s inevitable failure, right up to signing divorce papers a few years later.
In summation: It would therefore be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all—to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose—so that all of the suffering will not have been in vain.
Awareness is key to prevention, if not also healing.
While I don’t know the precise/entire cause-and-effect of my chronic anxiety and clinical depression, my daily cerebral turmoil mostly consists of a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, with the ACE trauma in large part the result of my ASD and high sensitivity. I self-deprecatingly refer to it as my perfect storm of train wrecks.
Coexistent conditions, such as mine, likely amplify the turmoil usually suffered by people living with less complicated conditions. ACE abuse thus trauma, for example, is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge that consequential fact in a meaningfully constructive way? It could be very helpful to have books written about such or similar coexistent cerebrally-based conditions.
As it currently is, The Autistic Brain fails to mention the real potential for additional challenges created by an autism spectrum disorder coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or adverse childhood experience trauma. The book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, on adverse childhood experience trauma, fails to mention high sensitivity or ASD. And The Highly Sensitive Man has no mention of ASD or ACE trauma.
I've read much of the book WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing, by Dr. Bruce D. Perry (M.D., Ph.D.) and Oprah Winfrey. It is exceptionally enlightening, although I've thus far not come across any mention of the complications caused by coexistent conditions.
Dr. Joseph Burgo’s book SHAME: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem — about the various forms and degrees of shame, including the emotionally and mentally crippling “core shame” life curse — is quite revelatory. He writes:
“When brain development goes awry, the baby senses on the deepest level of his being that something is terribly wrong — with his world and with himself. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein has described it, ‘These damaged children seem to sense that there is something neurodevelopmentally wrong with them, and they feel a deep sense of shame about themselves as a result.’
“Throughout my work I have referred to this experience as ‘core shame.’ It is both intense and global. Under conditions that depart widely from the norm, shame also becomes structural, an integral part of developing child’s felt self. Rather than feeling beautiful and worthy of love, these children come to feel defective, ugly, broken, and unlovable.”
While my father had (as do I) an ASD about which he wasn't formally aware, my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown or postpartum depression around the time I was born. It likely would have meant a lack of such crucial shared joyful interactions. It may also be relevant that Dad used guilt punishment instead of physical blows as an effective means of chastising me (e.g. "See what you did!").
A core shame diagnosis would help explain why, among its other debilitating traits, I’ve always felt oddly uncomfortable sharing my accomplishments with others, including those closest to me. And maybe explain my otherwise inexplicable almost-painful inability to accept compliments, which I had always simply attributed to a ridiculous degree of modesty.
It would also help explain why I have consistently felt unlovable.
Largely due to ASD traits that rubbed against the grain of social normality thus were clearly unappreciated by others, my unlikability was for me confirmed. My avoidance of social interaction and even simple smiles at seemingly-interested females was undoubtedly misperceived as snobbery. The bitter irony was that I was actually feeling the opposite of conceit or even healthy self-image/-esteem.