Easy paragraph on how trauma mimics autism

Psychology & Sexuality
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Trauma-related disorders, particularly from early developmental trauma, severe neglect, or disrupted attachment, can mimic autism through social withdrawal and avoidance of eye contact (defensive protection rather than social processing difficulties), communication delays and difficulties (from lack of language exposure or trauma’s impact on brain development), emotional dysregulation and meltdowns (from emotional dysregulation rather than sensory overload), repetitive self-soothing behaviors (anxiety management rather than stimming), sensory sensitivities (hypervigilance rather than sensory processing differences), and rigid need for routine (anxiety-driven safety-seeking rather than cognitive processing style).

Severe early deprivation can create “quasi-autistic” patterns that can be genuinely difficult to distinguish. The critical distinctions are that trauma-related difficulties typically improve significantly in safe, nurturing environments and with adequate psychological treatment, show more variability across contexts (worse with triggers), are tied to identifiable adverse experiences rather than present from earliest infancy, and lack the restricted interests and genuine social communication processing deficits of autism.

Now I am interested in what is meant be “severe early deprivation.” I think it is likely that this is the greatest cause of declining mental health in our society. And, I think it’s likely that the deprivation is a downstream result of “bad” mothers who became “bad” due to the decline of love in our culture, which are mainly due to white guilt, sucky culture of meanness, etc.

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Autism is an undomesticated temperament.

Trauma is social regression, so you start acting like a caveman. Traumatic atavism represents behaviors that were not flattened by civilizing pressures.

That’s why you have behaviors like kleptomania: it’s good to steal things before you flee.

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I think this is what is called the “refrigerator mom theory of autism” which was debunked in various ways such as by genetics and by cross-cultural studies. However, there is a link between trauma and autism, mostly because autistic individuals start life with rapid neurom growth and significantly less synaptic pruning which leads to less fear extinction on average (things that are scary are seared into the body/core/subconscious for much longer periods of time).

I’ve heard of this be called the ‘intense world theory of autism’ in this guy’s neocities site (it’s not written by a tranny despite the colors and you can change the theme) with a lot of information about it.

However, if I were to critique it, I believe he should have mentioned the link between trauma and dissociation because while a lot of autistic people have a separation between what they feel and show, sometimes they may very well believe they feel nothing at all due to being so hurt that they go numb or even don’t fully integrate as one central core identity and have different containers/parts to survive dismal circumstances. I plan to elaborate more on this some time later in a separate thread.

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I think the link is that autistic people are hypersensitive and their behavior makes them more susceptible to abuse. So they’re more vulnerable to abuse and it happens more often.

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I’ve actually been thinking a lot about how autism seems to be the base of any personality disorder. For example, narcissists and psychopaths all seem to be autistic. Sam Vaknin has talked about the associations

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I think that autism is caveman psychology, and cluster B is a set of defense mechanisms that keep people from abandoning you.

When people lived in small tribes, abandonment meant death. So people would shift from being prosocial to antisocial so as to control the group. It was like a hostage situation. And what you find is that people who are actually in hostage situations develop Stockholm Syndrome.

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The problem with any discussion of autism is that there are “autistic” people and then there are real autistic people.

I’d bet $2000 that all of the studies of autism that you are looking at are studying real autistic people, not “autistic” people.

Remember, real autistic people are people who scream intense lines from a movie over and over and over and over again in the barbershop. I’ve witnessed literally this.

Fake “autistic” people are people who can’t seem to figure out how to integrate socially.

The majority opinion of mid-IQ psych major bitches as well as mid-IQ alt-right genetic determinists is that there is an “autism spectrum,” and that the “autistic” people are just on a spectrum with the real autistic people because they share some behavioral properties.

This kind of cognition deserves severe criticism.

After all, whether we speak of autism, bipolar, depression, or any other psych problem, it’s not hard to think of 5 different causes that each pass a test of “sounds pretty reasonable and has decent evidence when studied.”

Indeed, psych gets a lot of criticism. This is why many scientists in the hard sciences don’t consider psychology a “real science,” and why psychologists have so much disagreement, and why everyone treats social sciences with a grain of salt.

Real autism is shown to be derived from severely deleterious mutations. To prove that everyone with sucky social behaviors is “on-the-spectrum,” we should demand that researchers do some genetic studies, where they set a threshold for the number of these known mutations that cause real autism, and we get a count of how many more of these mutations the “on-the-spectrum” people have than the normal person.

I tend to doubt that studies like this have been done, but in general, genetic studies of mental health conditions show that genetics appears to explain rather little of the variation (see Sasha Gusev on the topic). This is not the case for other non-mental traits, such as height, blood type, eye color, etc.

So, with this general fact in mind, my default hypothesis is that “autistic” people don’t have a much higher amount of real autism genetics than the real autists.

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Being a soft science makes official psychology barely distinguishable from pop psychology. Hard sciences are ultimately better and the only real appeal of soft sciences is that it can fill in the gaps of information that is yet to be explain with hard science. It’s what we can answer today instead of later even if that said answer is faulty.

The severity of autism seems largely a scale of impulse. ( Level 3: I’m frustrated and must scream therefore I will scream. Level 1: I’m frustrated and must scream but I will not.) The internal state and feelings remain the same but the expression changes. Autistic people are very sensitive too. When an allistic person is frustrated it’s like they were poked; when an autistic person is frustrated it’s like they were just stabbed but both have the same expectation as the allistic to hold it in. Both would benefit from less triggering surroundings. Not to mention how much hyposensitive autistics are recognizably divergent but lack the screaming due to a lack of salience. I do think anyone who appreciates an “autistic” should learn to appreciate the real autistic too, because when the cracks in their mask finally slip; you will be in for a rude awakening. Granted the fact that meltdowns are delayed in some of them is endearing. I’m certainly guilty of favoring those with impulse control but I think it’s more complex than that too.