My daily cerebral turmoil mostly consists of a formidable combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity. [I self-deprecatingly refer to it as my perfect storm of train wrecks.]
Coexisting with and seriously complicating the above is "core shame". Dr. Joseph Burgo's book [Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem] on the various forms/degrees of shame, including the especially emotionally/mentally crippling life curse known as core shame, was for me quite revelatory.
While my father had an ASD about which he didn't seem formally aware, I believe that my mother had suffered a nervous breakdown and perhaps even postpartum depression during my infancy. If so, it likely would have excluded shared/joyful interaction with me as an infant.
If true, it would help explain why I, among other debilitating traits of core shame, have always felt oddly uncomfortable sharing my accomplishments with others, including those closest to me; and maybe even explain my otherwise inexplicable almost-painful inability to accept compliments. I’d always attributed it to extreme modesty. And the list goes on.
As for my own autism spectrum disorder, due to formal-diagnosis unaffordability it remains ‘undiagnosed’ at age 56, though that means little to me. It’s a condition with which I greatly struggle(d) while unaware until I was a half-century old that its component dysfunctions had formal names.
More importantly, I feel that schoolteachers should receive mandatory ASD training. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated).
If nothing else, the curriculum would offer students an idea/clue as to whether they themselves are emotionally/mentally compatible with the immense responsibility and strains of regular, non-ASD-child parenthood.
It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice.
And how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. Of course, this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately high rate of suicide among ASD people.
In reference to my ASD I’m sometimes told, “But you’re so smart!” To this I immediately agitatedly reply: “But for every ‘gift’ I have, there are a corresponding three or four deficits.” It’s crippling, and on multiple levels.
While low-functioning autism seems to be more recognized and treated, higher-functioning ASD cases are typically left to fend for themselves, except for parents who can finance usually expensive specialized help. … But a physically and mentally sound future should be EVERY child’s fundamental right, especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
Largely as a result, I’ve suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known and enjoyed the euphoric release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC. However, the self-medicating method I utilized during most of my pre-teen years was eating, usually junk food.
My daily lead-ball-and-chain existence consists of a formidable perfect-storm-like combination of ACE trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity.
Thus, it would be very helpful to people like me to have books written about such or similar conditions involving a coexistence of ACE trauma and/or ASD and/or high sensitivity, the latter which seems to have a couple characteristics similar to ASD traits.
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