Did you know there is a strong correlation showing people who have ASD and/or ADHD being more likely to develop PTSD after trauma than neurotypical people?
The theory is that since our brains are more sensitive to stimuli that trauma impacts us more profoundly.
It’s still just a theory but anecdotal evidence seems to support it. It also supports the theory that PTSD in people with ADHD (ASD wasn’t mentioned but it’s likely the same) is exponentially more debilitating and they are more likely to be disabled by it than neurotypical people.
So If you’re struggling more than you think you should be? Or you think that what happened to you wasn’t traumatic enough to have caused your PTSD? There’s a reason you’re struggling that much and you aren’t alone, and it was traumatic enough. You aren’t weak or pathetic. Your brain works differently than other people’s, that’s all.
❤
There have been a few requests for sources so here are a few I’ve come across. A mixture of scholarly/academic papers and more casual language articles that provide similar information as those papers. Also included an interesting paper I stumbled on that shows a correlation between ADHD and Traumatic Brain Injuries.
Articles and Papers claiming risks of PTSD is higher in individuals with ADHD
– Emerald Insight (Scholarly Journal) *AN This is a slightly different subject as it compares a subgroup of ASD individuals to the larger ASD community but I thought it was important to include.
Articles and Papers claiming severity of symptoms are greater with comorbid ADHD and PTSD
Please let me know if any of the links contain harmful language or ideologies. I’ve read some in full but not all and even the ones I did are pretty dense so I may have missed something.
Here I am, a person with Real Actual PTSD who has been professionally diagnosed for 19 years and got that diagnosis re-confirmed by a different professional 3 years ago, telling you that:
Self-diagnosis is valid.
It doesn’t matter if it was “just” bullying or “just” emotional abuse or “only” mild physical abuse or “not that bad” of an accident or “not that dangerous” of a situation. All of those things can cause PTSD, even if it wasn’t as severe as what other people have gone through.
Your triggers are not stupid or exaggerated or made up.
Your triggers don’t have to cause a full-blown panic attack or flashback to be real.
Your flashbacks don’t have to be vivid visual hallucinations of a past event to be real.
You are not too young to have PTSD. Trauma doesn’t card you. Your age doesn’t make your experience invalid.
You matter.
And as somebody who has been through bullying, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse pretty much nonstop throughout their life and had the police involved many times… You’re not taking anything away from people with “severe” PTSD (there’s no such thing as severe PTSD, every experience is relative and will affect everyone differently). Despite having been diagnosed with PTSD by every professional I’ve ever been to, I still doubt my struggles because I wasn’t beaten every day or I haven’t been to war. It doesn’t matter how “big” or how “small” the thing/things are. You matter.
In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.
There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.
I realized what happened after about two seconds.
The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.
For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.
I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.
This can be reblogged, if anyone was wondering. I wrote up this post with the intention that hopefully people who read it and didn’t really get triggers would understand a bit.
So, a thing that’s particularly important here: The trigger here is not the bad experience itself.
after my super funtime medical adventure, i had to change all my bath products, because my brain had associated the scent of them with being terrified and in extreme pain.
these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.
but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.
triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:
– if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.
– if you don’t have triggers, don’t assume you can judge what a ‘real’ trigger is, and if someone asks you to accomodate them, don’t be a dick about it. even if you don’t want to make that accomodation, decline politely and apologize, don’t disparage their request.
all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt
but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.
so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears
…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.
#thanks Youre welcome. I’m writing out all the shit I learnt from the cptsd specialists when I was in the hospital because so much of it was brand new information for me, (and i consider myselr fairly well educated on my illness) and even being there for only three weeks gave me enough info to completely change how im viewing my plans in terms of treatment and recovery.
I figure it will also be extremely relevant to a lot of my friends on here, but it’s going to take me a while to sort it all and write it out in a readable way. But I’m working on it.
this is so fucking helpful for me
the symptoms of ptsd (and cptsd) are so poorly known by the general public tbh, as is the cause. Friendly reminder:
And child abuse is chronically under-reported. I didn’t know until I left my family that anything was unusual about my upbringing, and was diagnosed with PTSD this year from it.
also, that
you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood
This is a type of flashback. What’s known as an emotional flashback. People think flashbacks have to be sensory hallucinations, when in fact in C-PTSD (that is, PTSD from chronic mistreatment, like child abuse) it’s more commong for flashbacks as a symptom to manifest as emotionally responding to a situation as if you’re “back there”. You sense your friend is mildly displease with you and you get a strong fear response, despite the fact that your friend hadn’t and wouldn’t be hurtful towards you for it? That’s your body using that maladaptive schema it developed from when you were in abuse!environment to try to protect you from what it learned was a dangerous situation. It too is absolutely a symptom of PTSD.
This is why confrontation is so difficult for survivors sometimes. Reactions to people who have reasonable/mild disagreement can FEEL like a serious threat, so you can be compelled to respond with appeasment, strong defensivness, shutting down, basically your go-to survival response.
It’s a hard thing to train yourself out of, but if you have this kinda symptom you can mitigate the effects by actively recognizing when it’s happening (this is the hardest part imo), then taking a step back to assess the reality of the situation. Is this person’s emotions your responsibility? What is the likely outcome of this conflict? How mad is this person actually? Are they even mad at you?
It can also help to have a plan for people you interact with a lot, like a partner or best friend. For instance, you sense someone is angry and it feels like dangers, talk about asking how angry they are outside of a conflict, maybe like a number scale. “I’m senseing you upset. What’s your number? What’s going on?” “Oh, pfft I’m just a two cos my amazong package didn’t get delivered on time today.”
You can learn how serious a vibe is and what it’s actually directed at by asking, and it can help mitigate that constant impulse to ask if someone is mad at you.
Also, if you have access, I strongly rec a good therapist to help you reasses how much responsibility you should claim in other people’s feelings. Maladaptive schemas can make you feel like you’re responsible for other people’s happiness, to the point where you can start to micromanage and become codependent. It can even feel like you’re doing a good thing. It’s not. Pls learn how to take care of yourself folks
PTSD is a chronic illness and depending on your history, it might never be gone completely. Especially if that trauma was ongoing and happened young, before your brain is fully formed. And thats pretty much any age under 25.
25!? Yeah. So the reason the shit that happened when you were a pre-teen or a teenager? That’s why it’s still not ok. That’s why you might not be experiencing your expected results from therapy, because it’s not enough to treat your trauma as though you are/were an adult.
Popular theory states that it’s only in early childhood development that ongoing trauma or abuse* forces physical and permanent changes in the brain, because it’s still forming.
But the fact is that human brains aren’t fully formed until adulthood (which can be between 18 and 25 – the same reason you can’t get car insurance till then and why they say you shouldn’t drink) and this extreme trauma forces the brain into what is essentially a ‘reset’ state, where it then adapts to the environment of constant abuse and is harmed in exactly the same way. (*Abuse can be physical, sexual, emotional, mental, or environmental (neglect, emotional neglect etc), and/or being witness to extreme ongoing abuse of someone else.)
So what’s the damage?
Well there is a few things that happen.
Trauma affects what children anticipate and focus on (y’all are children till you’re adults in terms of brains remember), and how you can view and understand the information that you receive.
Changes in how you perceive threats because of trauma end up being expressed in how you think, feel, behave and even how you regulate your biological systems.
This presents in problems with
self regulation (being able to start or stop doing something when you think you should, overeating or over-doing anything really is a good example of this)
aggression against themselves and others
problems with attention and dissociation
physical problems (I will expand upon this later)
difficulties in self concept (who am I, what am I, believing you have worth, believing you are a person, etc)
and the capacity to negotiate satisfactory interpersonal relationships. (Why do I keep ending up in abusive relationships, why can’t I make friends or connect with people etc)
Trauma is so powerful because the amygdala starts functioning almost immediately after birth; children rapidly are able to experience fear and assess danger. Babies get scared even when they can’t think properly because of this.
Basically, early abuse and neglect can affect the development of the limbic system which makes individuals with traumatic histories to become highly sensitive to sensory input, which is known as hypervigilance.
Your amigdala is part of the limbic system that controls instinct, your “lizard brain” that keeps you safe and controls your “fight, flight, freeze, or feign” instinct. (The amigdala and the limbic system are so heavily affected by this hypervigilance that I am going to write a whole nother post just on it’s effects on the body.)
SO. We now know PTSD from your developmental years is more damaging than if the same abuse occured later in life.
That’s why regular therapy focusing only on CBT might not be enough, that’s why you might not be fully recovered when you feel like you should be. And there are heaps of us with this shit. So you’re not alone, and now that we know why, we’re going to get through it.
I’m capping this off with some important notes:
ongoing abuse of any kind between the ages of ‘born’ and 25 will result in the same physiological and mental damage as abuse as a child
Abuse can be emotional, physical, sexual, or environmental. It can be from a caregiver or from a relationship you chose to enter. Abuse is abuse is abuse and it affects us profoundly.
Many of you reading this might actually have been told (like me) that because of your PTSD symptoms you must have also experienced abuse that you don’t remember as a small child. This is not necessarily true. (NOTE: for some people it might be true as well. do not use this to invalidate people or i will come for you. This part honestly is here because you have no idea how relieved I am to know that there doesn’t have to be more horrible memories lurking in my head)
Trauma affects our ability to process information, to retain information, and to process threats. This means that sometimes everything is a threat (hypervigilance) and sometimes we don’t know what is abusive because that’s our normal.
Being constantly surrounded by potential threats results in hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is when you are so hyperaroused (sensory arousal not sexual) that you are trying to anticipate the reactions and read the emotions of the people you interact with to be prepared and stay safe. It is constantly being in a crisis state, and it is exhausting. You know when you’re so wired you’re trying to see out the back of your head and you can hear which room your neighbour is walking to? That.
This shit makes you physically sick. Asthma, allergies, immune disorders, fibro, lupus, chronic fatigue, osteoarthritis, osteoperosis, gastrointestinal disorders, migrane, vertigo, vomiting and constant nausea are some of the possible physical symptoms.
Mental health wise you get depression, anxiety, self harm, dissasociative disorders, and DID.
That’s it for my intro to PTSD from trauma during developmental years. Which I need to find a shorter name for.
Next up I’ll be discussing the physical changes that this trauma causes in the brain, and how it affects our bodies.
This is a really important read that examines the current state of ABA, studies on the long term effects on ABA, and asks some important questions about early intervention outside the context of childhood therapy.
I used to think i didn’t have any triggers. I’m an abuse survivor and i really thought maybe i came out of it just fine with no triggers.
Then a man slammed his hands on the desk beside me in frustration, he wasn’t angry at me he had just messed up something he was doing.
I froze, like literally froze, then tears started streaming and i was shaking.
I was so fucking upset and distraught, all i could manage to get out was “I didn’t like that.”
My body had a really surprising reaction and i guess i’m not as over my abuse as i’d like to think sometimes. I’m making this post to tell others things like this, triggers, they can pop up at any time.
Try to be patient, and understanding when someone has a reaction that you might not understand.
If you’re the person who was triggered, be patient with yourself.
Don’t be like me and blame yourself for overreacting.
Now i realize what it was that happened to me, and i’ll try to be better with myself in the future, and not blame myself immediately after.
It’s also possible to not even understand this are triggers. I used to think I just had “sudden mood swings” without realising the common thread because I was so deep into denying myself as a victim I couldn’t even recognise my own trauma.
They can appear long after trauma, they can be hard to recognise and it isn’t your fault.
A note on the topic of trauma that I personally found helpful in accepting the idea that I am a trauma victim is that one of the most widely accepted facts in the field of trauma research is that abuse is often not the common factor in whether somebody will develop ptsd.
Many people can go through awful things without developing trauma based disorders as long as they receive compassion and support in processing those events as they happen. The most common factor in developing something like ptsd is emotional neglect. And emotional neglect on it’s own can be enough.
Whatever you went through was enough I promise, you’re not overreacting. Abuse and neglect are traumatic at any level, you don’t need to have gone through the worst possible experience you can think of to develop ptsd. If it hurt you then it hurt you.
if you see someone active on social media or something, and you message them, and they don’t reply, they don’t have to. just because they are awake and alive does not mean they have to engage with you whenever you want them to. you are not entitled to someone else’s time.
in the past, an abuser would see me post online and then hound me on aim until i answered. i felt like i had to hide. they also lived in my building and would pound on my door if they saw me online and i wasn’t responding to them. i had to completely ditch a screenname, lie about having skype, and turn off my phone to hide. if i saw they were online i couldn’t post on facebook or interact with anyone without them demanding to interact with me. the only legitimate excuse not to talk to them was being asleep. in their eyes, if i were really their friend, i would always want to engage no matter what, even if i had a migraine or work to do or wasn’t feeling very social. it didn’t matter.
please do not do this. if someone doesn’t write you back, don’t guilt them about where they are or what they’re doing. if you see someone posting on tumblr or facebook and they aren’t signed into aim or google or skype or whatever, that’s their business. if they are signed on but don’t write you back, it’s okay. sometimes people can’t talk to everyone all the time every time. some people can only talk to one person at a time without getting overloaded. some people are signed on in case someone needs to contact them with something important and not to be social. they’re not always hiding from you, and you shouldn’t make them feel like they HAVE to hide from you.
this is probably jumbled and i’m probably missing a lot here, but pressuring people to always be available to you every hour of the day and always answer the phone or text or chat or pm or whatever…if you require that of someone, you might need to take a step back.
Reminder: There are also actual reasons that some of us may have serious trouble responding to messages at all. And it’s unlikely to be about you unless you are acting like that.
I really don’t want to come across as some kind of antisocial asshole, but notifications popping up still freak me out every time. It goes way beyond “I don’t like IMs”. Seeing that it’s from someone I would want to talk to if I weren’t having a PTSD reaction doesn’t actually make it easier to respond, unfortunately.
No worries for anyone who hasn’t been aware of the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable talking about it. And I feel bad about just leaving people hanging.
My mom is from New York City. She was taking the subway alone at the
age of six. As a young woman in the ‘70s, she went gallivanting God
knows where until God knows when, and she (obviously) lived to talk
about it.
At that time, as she tells it, the vanguard of
women’s advancement was on her side. Go West, young woman! Get out there
and seek your fortune. Dance all night and flirt with strangers – and
if you want to do more than flirt, that’s no one’s business but yours.
Ambient “everything is terrible and you’ll definitely get raped”
messages were a relic of her Catholic parents and the associated Old
Guard. They were framed, explicitly, as regressive, as part of
the patriarchal structures that kept women’s heads down and their hands
busy with housework. Defying them was what young Boomer womanhood was
all about.
….This essay goes a little wrong, but please read it anyway.
I’m not a woman, but…. for what it’s worth, I’m a survivor. I agree with every bit of what funereal-disease has to say here. The idea that Trauma Is The End, it is the Worst Thing and if you’ve had it you are Collapsed Forever- it’s the worst thing. It’s the thing that’s kept me from recovering more than anything else.
Reblogging partly for that very important point.
I have dealt with other trauma. But, one thing that really struck me when I was in my early teens and had some other things badly misinterpreted as signs of a very specific trauma history? The repeated insistence that feeling dirty and damaged is only normal and to be expected. It was hard not to feel under pressure to respond that way.
Or to get too far away from the idea that this might also be projection from the people who kept bringing it up, unprompted. They were obviously thinking about that so much more than I ever would have on my own. (Beyond some of the rest of the actually harmful regressive ideas there.)
Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but that does still seem to be such a common attitude, particularly dealing with people affected by certain types of trauma. No matter how good people think their intentions are, messages of brokenness are just not likely to be helpful.
In that particular example, I can only imagine that the whole experience would likely have been way more actually damaging for someone who was also trying to deal with the presumed Horrible Life-Warping Trauma in reality. It messed me up bad enough, and I was afraid of what kind of reception talking about real traumatic experiences might get after that for too many years.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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