Were you a walking-on-eggshells-kid? Me too.
This isn’t about blaming parents/teachers/carers although in a practical sense many could have done better, it’s difficult to even say they ‘were doing their best’. Some were just so unconscious, so wrapped in their own mental/emotional/physical pain.
This is about you, the child you were. You didn’t deserve to have to tip-toe to self-censor, to hide in the places that should have been safe. You should have been safe to feel, to question, to challenge. To be.
In the neurodiversity-affirming world, the consideration of stress and trauma veers rapidly into the realm of controversy in terms of whether one causes the other. Are you anxious and hypervigilant? Do you put everyone else’s needs first? Do you create masks and facades or hide in addictions? My personal opinion is that it becomes very difficult to say whether trauma created the presentation of neurodivergence or whether the traits of neurodivergence created propensity towards trauma (is autism even a solid entity? See my Neurodiversity Controversy blog. I suspect often it’s both.
I’m not negating the experience of those who have diagnoses or hard-relate to the experience of autism. Believe me, I get it. However, what happens if you are a sensitive child and you learn early on to always be scanning for the emotional needs of others. I think you know where I’m going with this.
Whether you consider yourself autistic/ADHD or simply sensitive or empathic… your needs matter. Finding ways to gently come back to yourself matters.
This process of coming back to yourself can occur, whatever your hidden wounds are, whether your automatic stress response is fight/flight/fawn/feign or a beautiful cluster of all of those.
If you could use some help untangling your trauma responses from your uniquely beautiful way of being in the world, I'd love to hear from you.
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