Autism and Trauma: The Hidden Details

by Eric E. Cane

“Oh, you can’t let that go? Seems to me you are still back there and haven’t forgiven.”

I’ve had conversations like this that had nothing to do with forgiveness, but my simply relaying some traumatic event that a person asked me to recall for them — curiosity, concern, or a desire to help being their reported motivation.

I sometimes think my autism is a gateway drug for people who find manipulation easy. In fact, some of the trauma I’ve experienced was directly the cause of not knowing what kind of people are actually out there willing to cause substantial physical, emotional, and/or financial harm to other human beings.

I like that I have some innocent qualities. I think it extends from my deep curiosity and focus when sensory overload isn’t an issue. I’ve been told my presence puts people at ease, and I don’t want to lose that — even though I haven’t a clue how it comes about. Fortunately, life lessons being what they are, I haven’t fully lost my trust in most people. I’m just more cautious about giving of myself now.

There’s something about humans that a lot of other humans don’t understand. Whenever any individual experiences a traumatic event — or any moment-to-moment experience — our sensory systems (all of them, internal and external-facing) “record” the encounter of every moment of our lives. If we open a door, we feel the doorknob through our hand skin, we feel the clothing on our bodies stretch or flex or change in tension and pull on our skin hair, temperature, moisture, our ears pick up the sounds of the mechanism of the lock sliding out of the latch, we see shadow, color, and light changes, we smell the paint of the door, ourselves, our clothes or makeup or shampoo, we feel our blood pulse to our fingers — and much, much more.

All of these things are experienced at the same time, moment-to-moment, and are processed in that 12–13 pound moist computer in our skulls. We might be thinking of the person we will soon be meeting and don’t realize all this other stimuli is being processed — we may barely realize we’ve turned the door knob. It doesn’t mean this data collecting doesn’t happen. We just aren’t aware of it.

But some of us are aware of these things. Our neurobiology makes us very aware of many of these things at the same time, and this can be overwhelming. It can cause shutdowns or the need to close off from sensory activity for a while.

When trauma occurs, some of us record powerfully more of the sights, scents, sounds, temperature, textures and more. They are etched into the memory of the trauma right along with the intense emotional upheaval and subsequent confusion, anger, depression, shame, etc. The memory becomes 16k resolution vs 2k standard.

Recalling some of my trauma for another person (in whom I trusted at the time) can be nearly as intense as when the trauma first took place — even decades later. I can sweat, my heart races, I can get depressed or in fight or flight mode…and this can present itself to a neurotypical person as “not having let go” of the situation, “not having forgiven” and other phrases that have nothing to do with what I was actually processing for them.

Then I spend the next 30 minutes trying to explain that it has nothing to do with forgiveness or letting go (all while still trying to come down from the experience). It’s difficult for anyone who’s gone through any trauma to fully impart to another individual the scope and depth of etched memories — and more so difficult for autistics, who have a challenging time describing emotional states and even using any words at all when under certain types of stress.

And it isn’t just trauma, unless life itself is a trauma. I recall deeply the smell of embers burning and ashy, charred wrought metal at the same time as I smell the 1970’s linoleum floor and stacks of old newspaper used to start the fire and my dad’s dirty flannel shirt and sweat and scent of fresh snow on him as he pushes the paper into the opening in the wood-burning stove to get the fire going.

I could go on and on.

I’ve had friends read paragraphs from a novel I was working on in an IKEA store, they are my beta readers, and they were shocked at how quickly they were taken into my descriptions — taken into memories — that I had written in a clean, sparse store where none of my written descriptions were experienced.

There are daily simple things that can instantly fire memories from past events — things like how salt can recall tasting the moisture of someone’s eye as you kiss them, or mundane recall like how the smell of old wood can bring up the sound of a fly buzzing and rebounding from a thin pane of glass trying to get out of a window from my childhood home.

As an author, I can call on these memories and they help enrich my writing. As an autistic individual, I sometimes have a hard time “letting go” of my experiences. That is a benefit and bane, I suppose.

I don’t think the general public understands the depth of the autistic experience enough any more than we understand the neurotypical experience. We can only do our best to share what we understand about ourselves, sometimes a long journey, and impart that to our friends out there who have experiences not our own.

If you see us sitting and lost in ourselves, it might be that we aren’t just processing the now, but the past because of the now.

Our autistic minds can become overwhelmed by seeming simple things, but also gather great details that undergird our existence as something unique, scary, wonderful, traumatic, and yes…something we can’t let go.

Thank you for taking the time reading this.

If you like my writing, please share, clap or comment — as I do read them all and value your shared experiences. If you’re curious about some of my books and novels, I have them on Amazon here. I also have some on Medium, like My Hand At The End Of Life.