Does late diagnosis lead to trauma?

Yea, I only got my diagnosis when I was 30, I never had any support from school and I don't have parents. I have severe post traumatic stress disorder from having my home broken into by 12 people as a teenager. I was left with my face swollen and split and my arm broken and I was taken into police custody for GBH and attempted murder just for trying to defend myself. I don't have soft triggers but I have harrowing ones. I can't go out places because I get anxious and distressed and I can't articulate the severity of my problems to my doctor without coming across as threatening and aggressive. Every single day is a waking nightmare and I don't even have the freedom to kill myself.

I'm not sure I'd say trauma but I certainly think it has had an effect. I can identify with most of the bullet points in your post. School was a massive struggle and I strongly believe had I and the school known then my school life could have been made much easier. I think years of being unsuccessful with social situations and relationships and comments from others about my behaviour and what they don't like about have had a huge impact on me, my self esteem and mental health. Had I known earlier than I did then perhaps these things wouldn't have had such a big impact.

I believe it's called the Peter Principle.  People get promoted to the level of their incompetence.

Yes I did my Accountancy qualifications whilst working at the merchant bank - I worked there for 13 years.

The problem was that I became a victim of my own success. If I had remained a bean counter I probably would have coped with that and still be there now. So maybe an childhood diagnosis would have helped

Theres a theory that people in senior jobs are all incompetent because they start at the bottom rung of the career ladder and if successful get promoted to a higher and higher rung until they reach a level where they are no longer  achieving and that's where they stay. (anyone know the name of this theory?)

That does sound interesting. I tried to order the one by Alexis Quinn but either they 'didn't ship out to my country's or they wouldn't,t accept PayPal. 

Though I'm not good at Maths (unless I do nothing much else, than I am strangely enough), I do symphatise with what you're saying. 

Whenever I was doing really well in a job or at university, anxiety would get the better of me and I'd stop and go do something else.

I'm supposed to be not too stupid, but I ended up in call centers with some succesful freelance writing/editing on the side. The anxiety never faded though. I still felt I was going to be caught out and that they'd say I was acting and performing in the worst way possible.

Sometimes being smart gets in the way. 

Had you not gone into merchant banking, you'd have done somwthing else with Maths or numbers (Accountancy?), and you'd still have had that people's issue and get anxiety from that.

I got my diagnosis 3 years ago, aged 56.  I'm not good at maths (thanks to an incident that happened in my first year in primary school, which made me scared of numbers), but I'm good with words.

If I'd been diagnosed earlier, and gotten the appropriate interventions, my life might have been so different.  Instead - in spite of a high IQ and a degree - I've had a life of menial, dead-end jobs and have never earned much above minimum wage.

All the time, I ask myself the questions you're asking yourself. 

What if?  What if?  What if?

It's all an unknown, Piranello.  All we can do is live with what we have, and try to find a way through it.  As Kierkegaard said:  'Life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.'

Concentrate on your strengths.  Utilise them in the best way you possibly can.

Try to forget what you can never now know.

What would I have done differently had I known is a question I've been asking myself.  You can't change what's happened though.

I was diagnosed yesterday aged 53

Being extremely good at maths and coming from an academic family, I went into banking. My career started really well and I rose through the ranks with relative ease becoming the finance manager of a merchant bank. The problem that arose was that the higher I was promoted - the less I was using  my strengths (number crunching) and the more I was having to do things I was very poor at (board meetings, meeting solicitors, being responsible for other peoples mistakes etc)

I pushed myself to the point of destruction and after some sort of meltdown I was forced to leave. I then spent 4 years looking after a my two children aged 6 months and 2 years at the time whilst my wife resumed her career

I then became a postman which I have been doing for the past 20 years. I have struggled with anxiety most of my life which has gradually got worse to the point that I ended up being diagnosed ASD

The question is - would I have taken the route into merchant banking if I had had a diagnosis during my school years? Probably not but would I have ended up in a better place? I don't know 

• Exclusion, exploitation or mistreatment by peers, leading to social phobia and mistrust of others
• Isolation
• Pressure and criticism from parents unaware of child's underlying limitations

These three all characterise the so-called best days of my life. Yeah, school. There was something of a  bullying culture there, being a dreary non-selective comprehensive for all the local yokels for miles around. And I was acting out due to various dysfunction closer to home too. Once being singled out at 15 by the headmaster for not being present when two younger kids from the table I was supposed to be supervising and yelled at in front of the whole school and called 'idiot' "useless' and a complete dead loss and told I would never have that responsibility again still leave an undertaste of deep dark bitter and twistedness towards all authorities, not being that easy to forget either, nor being fired from some lousy weekend job at some crummy sweetshop for 'not being quick enough' are not that easy to forget either. 

I don't know about post-traumatic but I do remember feeling that if anyone were ever to have a go at me at work, then I would go completely ballistic - and once did, with unfortunate results, as this one had a florid go at me in return. That did not help with self-esteem and hidden angsts about the possibility of terminal personality defects and the taint of some dark and unnamed insanity making of me unemployable, a social parish of the most intractable dye (well I had to bring in a Poe-esque flourish somewhere). I certainly did not know how to deal with criticism and encountering workplace bullies, sometimes when it was not even paid work, all tha had a horrible feeling of inevitability too. 

Could have been worse though. One old boy from my school I got talking to later on did I suspect experience a worse kind of trauma. There was definitely the odd paedo in the mix too, I'd heard the rumours, and then eventually found out one had been convicted too. 

I just try to avoid triggering situations now. And getting enough sleep. Some language schools now recognise that sleep deprivation is no one's friend and don't put on anything that starts before dawn. Complaints from obstructive and officious security guards at some venues did lead to the dreaded complaints from sub contractors in my shameful history, your honour. 

...so will I! :)

Thanks for the recommendation - I'll look it up

I've been reading a book called "Very late diagnosis of Asperger syndrome" by Philip Wylie which goes into the subject in detail, describing the sort of feelings which can accompany the whole process of self recognition, assessment and diagnosis, the good and the bad. (The author was formally diagnosed at the age of 51.) It's really helping me as I wait for my own assessment, because my feelings are in complete turmoil, but I can see from the book (and posts on this website) that I'm not going mad. Nice to know!

I have had challenging experiences (and still do).. but my limited ability to process them in a better equipped way has led to a degree of trauma. Earlier awareness would have I think led to a greater awareness of my vulnerability and been more cautious in situations where I had a greater degree of agency.

I agree because in the 70s and 80s I would have been disadvantaged had I had a diagnosis back then.

So I'm happy my parents tried to make me more sociable. I was also lucky that I have no issues learning, even though I got physically punished at school from time to time for being unruly. And no, back then that was not allowed anymore either.

I don't think it necessarily has to lead to trauma, but I suspect most people have some degree of trauma.  I wonder how much a childhood diagnosis would have helped me?  I'm not sure how much support is available now, but back in the 70s/80s I would think there was pretty much none.  It's kind-of a senseless question though because obviously you can't go back and change what has happened.

But if a person was lucky enough that they just happened to be born into a suitable environment, and they were brought up as happy and well adjusted Autistic people, and then happened to fall into a niche which suited them, then I don't think they would have to be traumatised.  We probably never hear of those people though because the people who haven't suffered any adversity are unlikely to be looking for anything.

I've only been diagnosed at 44, but can't say I'm traumatised. I probably should be as growing up with a psychiatric mother was a recipe for disaster.

I do have issues with unexpected things happening and thought I was really traumatised by the experiences in childhood. 

Am going to read Martian Tom's link as I do think the two are intertwined.

I think there's something in this.  It's double-edged.  Yes, you get the 'Eureka!' thing of your life making sense at last.  But I had my diagnosis 3 years ago, at age 56, and it's starting to come back at me now in negative ways.  Feeling like my life has been lost in the 'cloud of unknowing', etc.

We have much higher levels of sensitivity to trauma than NTs.  For most people, witnessing something horrific or being under deadly threat can be traumatic.  For us, just the way someone behaves towards us can cause huge problems.  Like my own recent issue, with a colleague at work who 'unfriended' me and 'blocked' me on Facebook simply because she disagreed with some of the things I was posting.  She could have just ignored them.   But no.  And her doing that, to someone else, might just result in them thinking 'S*d you, then.  Be like that.'  And let it go over their head.  With me, I was so upset by it that I ended up going sick from work.  I'm revisited time and time again by an incident that happened at school when I was 5.  It really traumatised me at the time, so I'm hyper-sensitive to criticism if it's not done in a civil way.  If someone shouts at me... then I'm in a mess.

This short article is very good.  I think it sums up very well the points that you are making:

At The Intersection of Autism and Trauma

I can definitely relate to the examples you listed!

The above examples all relate to my own experience. But I'd be interested to hear about the experiences of other late-diagnosed adults. Does any of this chime with you too? What have you done to heal?