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A recent toot around here made me think about #giftedness and #autism. There's a lot of overlap. As there is between autism and #cPTSD.

So it got me wondering how you know that you're autistic and not, say, gifted and traumatized. Or autistic and traumatized, rather than gifted. Or if it matters at all (we're struggling anyways, aren't we?). Could accomodations and support even be that specific?

What's your take on this?

@actuallyautistic

#autism #cptsd #giftedness @ActuallyAutistic group

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Random Weirdo

Found this. Seems like a good resource, but I'm not a paid subscriber, so I can't access the document.

lindseymackereth.substack.com/…

Giftedness, Autism, ADHD, Complex PTSD & Burnout: Significant Trait Overlap

A NEW resource (8-page PDF) to share with your therapist, coach, partner or medical provider to provide context around your complexity
Lindsey Mackereth (Lindsey Mack's Substack)

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Sarah Sammis

In first grade I was assessed for the GATE program which later became the Seminar program in my school district.

Lete me back up. At the time I didn't know what was going on. Adults I didn't know took me out of class and led me to a part of the school off limits to kids. I was given a bunch of logic puzzles to solve.

I thought I was maybe being kidnapped. I thought if I played along and stalled for time I could figure out how to escape or maybe someone would come rescue me.

I was six. I was given no explanation. I didn't know these people.

I passed the tests and got into the advanced program. My mother told me my IQ. These things she bragged about often.

BUT. It was also an assessment for special ed. What Mom didn't tell me until I was 50 was that I was also diagnosed as autistic.

That I didn't learn until my own kid was diagnosed and I told her.

#ActuallyAutistic

#actuallyautistic

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sasutina13a is a-moving-a

@pussreboots I had the IQ test in high school. I was not told what it was and it was a bit scary and stressful as I felt as if I were being pressured to come up with answers. I was never told the results of it.

Curiously, after that, the school basically left me alone and let me do whatever I wanted, so long as I completed the requisites. I had no guidance and almost didn't graduate.

@Sci_Fi_FanGirl @actuallyautistic

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brandon

The accommodations I’ve seen aren’t big asks unless you’re dealing with authoritarians. What sorts of accommodations are we talking about? Being allowed to have quiet time if you need it? Being allowed headphones if you need them? Leniency in arrival/departure times? Allowing sunglasses indoors? Being allowed to go to the toilet if you have to? These all seem like basic decency for anyone, ND or not.

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Susanna the Artist 🌻

@brandon Accommodations like being allowed to go sit in a quiet place alone when overwhelmed so you don’t melt down. Yet I know a school administrator who was upset that an autistic child was allowed to do this because other children weren’t given this “privilege.” Well, other children didn’t need it! Would she rather he melt down? This adult was constantly annoyed that the autistic child wouldn’t fit into her mold of how she thought children should behave.
@brandon

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Jo - pièce de résistance

It’s tough to tell when you’re young if you don’t have many visible issues other than socializing. But my own theory of autism is that it is about priority processing, and how we prioritize and weigh/measure/understand in relation always to a whole. We don’t take ourselves out of the whole…we are VERY inclusive group, we are taken out of the whole by allistics - those that conversely divide up, make hierarchies, and serial process information…

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Jo - pièce de résistance

I got my theory clearer from watching Jill Bolte Taylor’s ted talk My Stroke of Insight, about when she had her left brain shut down from a stroke. Her description of what and how she perceived was so like how I perceive, not physically exactly, but my consciousness. How I saw and understood the world, processed info.
Here’s her Ted Talk. I think we prioritize the right brain pov she describes and Allistics prioritize left.

youtu.be/UyyjU8fzEYU

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Jo - pièce de résistance

she explained and described it better, so it’s worth watching. But it’s like autistic is right brain wholistic parallel processing and Allistic left brain individual serial processing. Left is hierarchies, the I am, self. Order of things. Time.
I think it’s why autistics are often time blind too. We concern ourselves with eternal real. Not social temporal constructs. We have more synesthesia, more likely to be lgbtq. All because we have a whole as our priority in processing.
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sasutina13a is a-moving-a

@BernieDoesIt Was that hypothesis ever actually proven? I am left-handed, forced to write right-handed. Eventually discovered that I am both-handed, and can do certain things much better with left hand, and some other things better with right hand. I am rather sceptical about the hemisphere swap thing.
@VulcanTourist @JoBlakely @Sci_Fi_FanGirl @actuallyautistic
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VulcanTourist

@sasutina13 @BernieDoesIt @JoBlakely
Even for left-handers (not punished), there is a division of labor between the two hands. I worked out that, for me, tasks demanding precision and control ususally get relegated to the left hand and arm, and the right performs those demanding strength. My right arm was literally stronger than my left.

Perversely, I use a mouse right-handed, which breaks my theory.

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VulcanTourist

The mouse feels unnatural in my left hand. I use a spoon in my left, but there were some days when I'd wake up and couldn't remember which hand should grab the spoon and the spoon felt equally at home in either hand. There's been no such days, no such ambiguity, with the mouse. My right hemisphere ceded that task to the left without me having any volition in it.
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@VulcanTourist @sasutina13 @JoBlakely I used left handed mouse all the way until I got to college and had to use machines you couldn't switch to the other side, and after that I was used enough to using my right hand that I never bothered to swap it once I had my own. But using a mouse left-handed still doesn't feel wrong to me in the way that using most things right handed does.
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sasutina13a is a-moving-a

@VulcanTourist Lately left-handed mouses, when you can find them, are nothing more than the most basic, with only two or three buttons, if even that, and made so poorly that they do not last long. The one left-handed bluetooth mouse with more than three buttons failed within a year. Can't get a new one.

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Bernie Merrily Does It

@VulcanTourist @sasutina13 @JoBlakely I remember holding the mouse in my left hand with my finger on the wrong button so that I could set up a new computer because they never thought to let you swap the mouse before forcing you to use it.
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@sasutina13 @VulcanTourist @JoBlakely Well, the whole "this hemisphere always does this, the other hemisphere always does this" was always an oversimplification, but there are strong patterns overall in righties. The most common pattern in lefties is a mirror image of the righty, and the second most common is the same as the righties, but people who are significantly different from either pattern are more common.
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VulcanTourist

I never joined a "lefties club" to learn what other lefties were like. 🙂 I started a freethought group to learn what defined other atheists and agnostics, joined Mensa for a time to learn what made other 98th-Percentilers tick, but never explored the world of lefties. For that I'd probably want to move to India, since they had a higher prevalence of it than anywhere else.
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@VulcanTourist @sasutina13 @JoBlakely Kind of a strange thing to have a club about. You get together and complain that it's terrible that certain models of scissors hurt to use and that we're slightly more likely to get in a car accident and then what? Stare at each other?
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VulcanTourist

@BernieDoesIt @sasutina13 @JoBlakely
I met a few interesting people in those few years, but I met far more interesting people in college. Mere intelligence is not a guarantee of a person being interesting. It should be but isn't.
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@sasutina13 @VulcanTourist @JoBlakely I've never seen any research on ambidextrous people, probably because they're rare and ppl like binaries.

There's something called cross-dominant, where for different body parts the side that is dominant is different. It's been way too many years since I read the numbers, but that's super common.

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Bernie Merrily Does It

@sasutina13 @VulcanTourist @JoBlakely But if for different tasks using your hands some are easier on one side and some the other you might be more or less ambidextrous and just have more practice doing that task on that side.
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VulcanTourist

@sasutina13 @BernieDoesIt @JoBlakely
I've tried to thwart it while driving by forcing myself to use my left arm on the steering wheel more. I haven't had enough self-awareness to try to force that in other contexts. (Yes, I use one arm primarily for driving with the other on standby, especially on long drives. Sue me!)
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@sasutina13 @VulcanTourist @JoBlakely It's extremely common to hold large things in your non-dominant arm so that you can open doors and such with your other. In fact, I vaguely remember having to stand in a busy place and count the number of people using each arm to hold things as part of a psychology class assignment.
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Jo - pièce de résistance

…I think our intense receiving sensitivity/ability overwhelms us as children until we can process info better. I think we tend to manage that info either as monotropism (intense focus) or ADHD (tangents everywhere it’s all connected!)
I think giftedness is a potential component or outcome of autistic focus, attention, diligence. But I think it’s different.

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Random Weirdo

@AnAutieAtUni
Yeah, I'm having similar thoughts. I check many boxes on the gifted checklist, but I guess this is more likely related to autism. And accomodations for autistic people would help me much more than a gifted diagnosis. I don't see the benefit. Still... somehow it feel relevant to understand and differentiate all the contributing factors 🤔
@JB 🐎

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Jules

I'm autistic and was labeled "gifted" as a child. I don't have PTSD, as far as I know.

I don't have early childhood trauma, and my differences were notable then.

I process information in a non-typical way (strong visual, weak auditory recall, attention to detail).

I like sameness and ritual.

It fits with autism. The "giftedness" is just a number, like my height, that I believe has near zero relevance for my way of being.

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Jules

yes, but formally, it's having an IQ above 130 (two standard deviations above the mean).

I'm vary of these checklists, actually, because these are very common things, both in "gifted" kids and those with average or below average IQ - and conversely, there are many "gifted" kids that are socially competent and defer to authority. These things are so non-specific they feel meaningless.

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Janus

@quidcumque It's a take I can agree with. I've been labeled as "gifted" as well (without a number attached), and for a while I tried to use that as my explaination for me feeling to be different. At some point I came together with other "gifted" kids and - well, I was still different. It's only when I learned about autism that it all started to make sense. Then I started to consciously recognize who "my" people were (unconsciously they were the ones I always befriended), and most of them didn't fall into the "gifted" category but all of them showed clear signs of autism or ADHD.
@Jules
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V'ger

I kind of came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter to me. The needs for all of those symptoms are very similar (I am AuDHD with PTSD and Depression). The diagnoses just gave me a little bit more understanding of why I am how I am (and in the case of AuDHD some medical/legal advantages).

I had the PTSD and depression diagnoses before I got the AuDHD diagnose. And I'm not really doing anything different now, I'm just focusing on all the stuff I've learnt during my therapy sessions and adapt them a bit to my AuDHD.

I also suspect that I am gifted (the diagnosing AuDHD doctor gave a little hint). I haven't tested and it's not really important for me to know. Might go down that rabbithole some day, but it doesn't really matter to me regarding how to take care of myself.

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Random Weirdo

@fabienmarry

I agree that nearly all autistic people have been bullied at some point. But they aren't automatically traumatized. If they have an otherwise healthy, stable and supportive environment, they can be fine. This is not to minimize bullying. Any bullying is bad and will cause harm. This is just to emphasize the fact that people can experience similar things, but won't be affected similarly. Early childhood trauma can cause similar symptoms as autism.

@roknrol @actuallyautistic

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Random Weirdo

@BernieDoesIt @fabienmarry I personally feel a difference in the trauma related to my autism, which rather causes a general feeling of alienation and the need to mask, and the childhood trauma + attachment disruption, which involves triggers, affects self worth, and freeze/dissociation patterns. But that's maybe just me.
@Fabien @Bernie Merrily Does It
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@fabienmarry I can barely remember my childhood trauma, and for most of my life it really felt like it happened to someone else even though I knew it didn't, so there's definitely some strong dissociation there, but the rest of the day seemed normal.

On the other hand, the random social punishment for thinking while autistic led to me feeling like nothing was real. That's still dissociation, but a very different kind. I feel it's what gave me my self-worth challenges as well.

@Fabien
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Bernie Merrily Does It

@fabienmarry My body tells me both were traumatic, but that the second kind was so much more traumatic. I don't even remember the last time I had a flashback about the first kind. I can't say that about the second.

But it's so strange because I knew that the conventional trauma was traumatic, but at the time I didn't think the autistic invalidation was all that bad. Yet in hindsight I was terrified every minute.

@Fabien
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Martin Vuillème (he/him)

From what I understand autistic and gifted will, on average, display more marked and distinctive traits/bhv, as typically measured with assessment scales. Trauma will bend the picture to an extent. That said, an individual will rarely be average, results fluctuate, subjectivity remains, and thresholds/scales are arbitrary.

I suspect you'd need to treat the trauma to search for a baseline. My take is to look at options for the differential Dx and take ideas that make sense to you

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Random Weirdo

@MartinVuilleme True. Assessment scales will never take into account the whole picture. And if a diagnosis makes sense, depends on what you want to achieve/get. Treating underlying trauma to establish a baseline sounds very plausible. However, if diagnosticians focus exclusively on the trauma aspects, their treatments might not meet the autistic person's needs, as they can differ from a NT's.
@Martin Vuillème (he/him)
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PatternChaser

For me, the #giftedness #savant thing is not good. It focusses on things that are pretty rare, thus obscuring what is commonplace.

ND people come in all shapes and sizes, and some of us are lucky enough to be gifted, just as others are not so lucky.

All of us are ND. That's what we *share*, and that's what I prefer to focus on. 👍 😀

#giftedness #savant

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Petherfile

@PatternChaser to me I think why can't it be both?

We can appreciate and value everyone just because they are their own unique self, whatever that is.

We can also focus a career on things an individual is good at. Develop great ability in selected areas. I suggest this from both an internal and external perspective: developing ones self and encouraging others (but not where it is unwanted).

I don't see those things being at odds with each other. Current societal systems may currently be greatly diminishing the former and putting undue pressure on the latter.

@PatternChaser

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Zumbador

@Tooden I think it may help to distinguish between clinical terms and terms that are used more broadly in every day language. Autism can be used both ways, but a lot of the time it's used in relation to the traits defined in the DSM5 - you can be officially diagnosed as autistic by a qualified psychiatrist.

You can also use "autistic" to mean whatever you mean when you self realise as autistic, or to be an insult, etc. So autistic has both a formal, clinical meaning, and a more general meaning.

Gifted, on the other hand, is not a clinical term. You can't be diagnosed as gifted as there is no generally accepted official definition or official list of traits. It's like "neurodivergent" - we all use it to mean different things.

@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷

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haui

The interesting question for me (as a gifted, traumatized, autistic person - also probably in the savant part of the spectrum) is "why?"

Why do we need these distinctions and why do some of us cling to them?

Imo, we use them to shield ourselves from harm (i.e. Ableism). It is the primary function in capitalism to optimize the workforce. "Disable" those who are different. Make them less likely to reproduce.

If you might feel "fascism" looming in that sentence. That is intended.

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VulcanTourist

@Susan60
It was a thing in the Sixties here. I was judged gifted by teachers (and everyone) no later than the fourth grade. I didn't skip grades, but by eighth grade I'd been placed in the school's "gifted" program. I found it boring, however, and chose to opt out.

Every adult who encountered me from a young age knew they were in the presence of advanced intelligence. They couldn't see the balls and chains retarding it. I was literally gifted and retarded.

@Looking for explanations…

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Looking for explanations…

@VulcanTourist
Some teachers feel intimidated by a gifted student. I always felt privileged to be able to facilitate their learning. And I would usually find an appropriate time to tell them that they would probably exceed my understanding & skill in that area, if they hadn’t already done so.
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Looking for explanations…

@VulcanTourist
I taught humanities, and geography is one area where humanities meets science. Occasionally a budding scientist would floor me with their understanding of the technology involved in the development of sustainable alternatives, when studying liveability.
@VulcanTourist

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VulcanTourist

@Susan60
I was lucky to have considerate empathetic teachers. I actually have a memory (!) of Mrs. Keller once telling me, "don't let the other kids get to you, they're just jealous". I appreciated the sentiment, but found no solution in her words. I had very thin skin.
@Looking for explanations…

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🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳

@Zumbador @Tooden
Mensa is just a club for making rich people who are smarter than average feel supirior to smarter people who don't have a small fortune to spend on joining a club.
They say a lot of bollocks just to make themselves seem more significant.
@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @Zumbador

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hauch

My apparently unpopular opinion about "giftedness" is, that it can be considered its own category of neurodivergence, its own spectrum, but because most people are so primed by ableism, they have a reflexive aversion against the concept.

It's like "colorblindness"(broadly, not just applied to "race"), as if we could fight ableism by pretending that people don't have certain traits/abilities in one area and struggles associated with them.

1/

@actuallyautistic

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hauch

Just like many people feel irritated or even attacked if someone mentions to be autistic or having ADHD, it's similar with "giftedness"(or allusions to it).

Many people seem to interpete it as a vague "I'm special/superior in some way/deserve special treatment/".

Even many people in ND communities do the equivalent of "aren't we all a little bit autistic/ADHD", or "why do you need to lable yourself, we're all different" with "giftedness".

2/

@actuallyautistic

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hauch

Autism is still treated like an inherent disability in the medical model, despite in many cases actually only being a disability in the social model.
"Giftedness" is treated like the opposite of a disability in the medical model, but just like autism, it often is a disability in the social model, because just like autistic people, so called "gifted" people live in a world that isn't built for their needs and can therefore be less accessible to them.

3/

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hauch

Just like with autism, I see "giftedness" as still not that well researched and the "official diagnostics" still being very underdeveloped and "NT centric".

I see IQ-Tests like other diagnostic tests and I see people claiming to "have an IQ" in a similar way as people who are early in their autism self discovery journey telling others how high their AQ-Score is.

I also think "self-identifying" as "gifted"(or however you want to call it) is valid.

4/

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hauch

My impression is, that a huge part of struggling to differentiate here comes from the lack of easily accessible and quality controlled recources.

If you want to find out if you're autistic, being confronted with outdated informations and badly informed diagnosticians is probably the norm.
Being "diagnosed" as "gifted" seems to be even further behind, as if autism was diagnosed based on an AQ-Test or other diagnostic test alone.

5/

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hauch

I also thought about how to differentiate them in the past, but I realised, that a large part of why I even feel the need to is explaining/justifying it to others.

I already know that I'm autistic, but what if a badly informed diagnostician with a vague idea of "there being an overlap" just thinks I'm just "gifted and weird"/traumatised (not a pure hypothetical, there are a lot of diagnostic "horror stories" out there)?

6/

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hauch

My impression is, that "the overlap" can in some cases be as superficial as they can be with autism and ADHD, where "problems with eye-contact" are very different, once you actually ask the person.

Finding it uncomfortable and distracting to look someone in the eyes and just drifting off are very different experiences and probably don't even look that similar, if you don't want to describe them in a single short bullet point.

7/

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hauch

I think another "aggravating factor" here can be alexithymia.

For me feeling on edge because an experience is just challenging sensory wise, or because it's similar to a stressfull experience in the past feel very different, but from the experiences I've heard from people with alexithymia, I wouldn't be surprised if they struggle to differentiate here.

8/

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hauch

I also think it can be helpful to compare yourself to groups of people.

Of course there is an overlap between "communities", just like more and more autism realisations/diagnoses "pop up" in ADHD communities, but there are some "rifts" between individual people and sometimes groups, because they get along better with people "more similar to them".

For example some "gifted and ADHD"-people are "painfully allistic" to me.

9/

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hauch

For me this was also a good way to be sure that I'm autistic, not because there is a wide range of "normal" and a small range of "disordered" at the extremes, including "ASD", but because autistic and allistic can be seen as 2 different categories and I fit well in one of them and not the other, no matter what other "traits"/disorders/categories I might otherwise fit, that can or can seem to overlap.

10/10

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Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

@hellomiakoda @duckwhistle @Zumbador @Tooden
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I took the test in ‘17 or something, just to see if the ol’ IQ was enough to explain the disaster of my life, but it didn’t seem a high enough number to explain it all, and sure enough. I didn’t follow up at all, never another word with them.
@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳 @Zumbador @Miakoda

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Looking for explanations…

@haui @BernieDoesIt
Sometimes a child (adults too) will become interested in something because of a teacher. (I majored in history because of my first year history lecturer.) Conversely, a poor teacher (or one having to teach outside of their area of expertise) might fail to engage students.

And a lot of students won’t know if they’re interested in something if they’ve never had proper access to that field of learning. If we had enough skilled teachers working in all areas, students would have great opportunities to discover what interests them and what they’re good at.

@haui @Bernie Merrily Does It
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Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

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Name it: pollution/climate collapse
: capitalist 'forever growth"
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they don't see why beating every human in childhood might be a problem, nah, they're fine. That's why the beatings, you see, so that nothing happens and everyone is fine. So on that theory, they also block out all of: psychology
: evolution
.
Just name a reality they do not block out
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Random Weirdo

@punishmenthurts Okay, I think I see your point and agree.

Talked to friend recently. Hadn't seen her in a long time and told her about my trauma therapy. The beatings in childhood came up (my major reason for freeze and dissociation in situations of perceived danger) and she basically said that there wasn't much harm in spanking a child now and then (here in Germany spanking a child is prohibited by law). So yeah, people tend to block out the harm that is done.

@Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

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zygmyd

Oh, just clued in. You would probably look up something like "techniques in autism diagnosis" (no quotes) in a search engine and read some of the articles.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK5736…

mayoclinic.org/diseases-condit…

autism.org.uk/advice-and-guida…

Of additional utility are the large numbers of personal essays about how the assessment procedure can be fairly ridiculous at times, not linked here.

Criteria and tools used in an autism assessment

Information about the diagnostic criteria used for an autism diagnosis and the tools used by the specialist team carrying out the assessment.
www.autism.org.uk

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Murdoc Addams 🧛🏻 🇨🇦

@hellomiakoda @duckwhistle @Zumbador @Tooden
I actually joined as a teen, along with my older brother. We didn't have money either, so I don't know what that's about. Went to a couple of meetings and didn't get the impression of any kind of elitism. Just seemed like people that wanted to share special interests that others didn't (there were dozens of sub-groups called "Special Interest Groups" or SIGs). I even remember an article in their magazine entitled "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" The basic thesis was that our priorities were different. Looking back, I wonder if it might have been related to neurodivergence ("gifted", etc.) before we really understood it. I think it's too bad that I didn't do more with it to get a better impression. It's also possible that it is different now than it was then.
@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳 @Zumbador @Miakoda

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haui

@BernieDoesIt

Which is completely understandable. I would have done a lot better in those classes too, but alas.

Gifted classes are obvious, from my perspective. Of course the smart people need to be especially supported. They will advance the workforce, yada yada.

In an equal society, you dont need different classes. You dont even have different schools. Kids just chose what they are interested in. No need for equal education between all. We have books for this, yet.

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Random Weirdo

@Asbestos
It doesn't actually matter. I just found it interesting and started to think about it. I don't think I'm gifted. Even if I was, it wouldn't help me in any way to get a "diagnosis". I do have my fair share of trauma, which I'm currently working on. This helps me to differentiate between trauma response due to triggering events (freeze, dissociation, shame) and merely overwhelming environments that'll drain me (shutdown, numbness).
@Asbestos

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@hellomiakoda @Zumbador @Tooden
They probably have programs in most countries for recruiting gifted children, but as an adult you have to pay exam fees, and then an annual membership fee to join your national mensa society, and then probably bit more to join the international society 🤷
@Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @Zumbador @Miakoda

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Autumn Kelp

Stuff like autism or giftedness often feels like a matter of a "narrative".

There were times in school where I was considered "oppositional and lazy", other times where I was "gifted".

Asking the obvious questions and being persistent as a 7-year-old hyperactive kid was annoying and a sure sign of my bad upbringing (not literally, I am trying to convey a vibe here).

Asking the obvious questions and being persistent a few years later in a class for gifted kids was a sign of my intellect.

More in general: One could argue that OCD is "being in touch" and "respecting" patterns. Or "problematic" behavior (for whom?).

In a time where doctors didn't wash their hands before treating patients, Semmelweis was a pedantic germophobe who needed therapy.

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Looking for explanations…

@haui @BernieDoesIt
My son took chemistry in high school because his mates did. (Groan!) But it turned out to be a good choice. Having shown no prior interest, he really enjoyed it because the teacher was so passionately interested & engaging. He didn’t follow up on it, but that year broadened his knowledge & understanding of how the world works.
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ND Dev

@BernieDoesIt

I didn't know that dissociation and hypervigilance were associated with #autism, but five minutes with a search engine shows that you're right.

The articles I read just now suggested that autistic hypervigilance was caused by sensory overstimulation. In that case, I guess one could tell whether hypervigilance was caused by cPTSD or autism by comparing one's experience in various situations with differing levels of stimulation and differing levels of psychological safety.

I've said for decades that I live two seconds in the future. It makes me an alert driver but am intense conversationalist. 🙂 If I could turn it off, I don't think I would.

@Sci_Fi_FanGirl @actuallyautistic

#autism @Bernie Merrily Does It @ActuallyAutistic group @Random Weirdo

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Bernie Merrily Does It

@nddev "Sensory trauma" isn't a mainstream concept in the autistic community yet, but it has a lot of currency for me. So hypervigilance from sensory overstimulation seems to me like just another way to have hypervigilance from trauma.

In hindsight, I certainly had more hypervigilance when my cPTSD was raging, but it was still just more of the same of what I already had.

After many, many years of anxiety medication I'm not hypervigilant anymore.

@ND Dev

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Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

@murdoc @hellomiakoda @duckwhistle @Zumbador @Tooden
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I qualified, but I have a hard time calling myself any of the names, I mean, I'm no savant at anything, unless my whole philosophy thing is true, and if it mattered.
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I suck at math, I'm no nuts and bolts any sort of science person, hard science intimidates and soft science - again, I'm trying to write my own, if I'm thinking at a high level there, no-one else seems to think so. Music, I have the opposite of talent, took a lifetime to play this slowly and sing this badly . . . I think of my theories as the only thing I have to offer, but I can't dazzle anyone with them, it's all high level stuff, not detail science and if it's good, I think I'm a good generalist, I try to uncompartmentalize, audit things with everything else, but I'm pretty sure nothing about me screams, "gifted."
.
Having said all that, my theories do add up to that most of humanity is . . . delayed. I suppose that's the same thing, in negative?
@Murdoc Addams 🧛🏻 🇨🇦 @Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷 @🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳 @Zumbador @Miakoda

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Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

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the special interest groups, the idea that MENSA is full of Autistics, I hadn't thought of that.
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That was maybe the first thing I did trying to figure myself out after it all went pear shaped, the IQ test. I didn't hatch for another five years, just revisiting that now, thanks.
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Silver Arrows

I'm still trying to figure out if it's autism or schizoid, or that the autism caused me problems which led to me becoming schizoid, or maybe it just really all is my own fault.

Edit: also, while being a nerd, I am in no way gifted. I'm more a Jack of all trades, but master of none (which is oftentimes better than a master of one, I've heard).

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Random Weirdo

@SilverArrows I'm so sorry, this must be so draining and frustrating 😔

Probably you have already come across this article, so just in case you haven't:

neurodivergentinsights.com/sch…

Schizoid PD vs. Autism

November 1, 2021 Schizoid Personality Disorder vs. Autism Before discovering my autism, I would frequently reference my “schizoidness”. At the time, this was the only language I had to describe my relational peculiarities.
Neurodivergent Insights
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Silver Arrows

There's a lot of overlap. I'm happiest when alone. Online chat is enough for me, but I could probably do without if I had to.

Autism is from infancy, but schizoid is meant to start near adolescence. But my issues (mutism, strong food aversions, social cluelessness, imaginary worlds, obsessive interests) started at a very young age, 3 at the latest. There are autism traits, ADHD and schizophrenia in my family. I made a thread on it, I think on my old account. I'll try to find it.

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