Adjusting to Autism diagnosis

In our later years.

Recent diagnosis at any age can be a relief, a shock, cause emotional pain and distress, relieve emotional pain and distress, all of the above, or none. For each of us, our perspective will likely be changed forever. Things we thought we understood may change, as we begin to sort our long histories and pasts and make sense of many of the “whys” of the long lives we have lived before we ever discovered our autism.

Along the way, many of us may have learned ways to cope, adapted behaviors to survive and to get along, and many of these may not have been healthy! We may come to our recent diagnosis feeling overwhelmed, incompetent to deal with life and new perspectives our diagnosis might give us. That’s OK, and you can pretty much expect some form of all that!

The good news is that we can learn new ways to communicate and our diagnosis can give us tools and insights that might not have been evident before. We can figure out our worst struggles and find ways to “do life” in easier and less distressing ways, now we know about our autism.

I learned to communicate in healthy self assertive ways.
I learned to see when I was being “guilted” , “intimidated”, “manipulated” and how to set boundaries and protect myself against those behaviors from others.
Along with those skills, I also had to be taught to recognize “what is my job, and what is not”.

Let me explain. All my life I had been trained to please others. Frequently somebody would say “you made me cry” “You hurt my feelings” “you make me so angry”

See a pattern in those statements? The person involved is telling me it is my responsibility to make sure they are happy. That they do not have hurt feelings, that they are not “made” angry by whatever I do. Punishment reinforced this idea, that somehow it was my job to please and appease others in my household, or any other part of my world. I had that power! I had to control it, no matter what I wanted or how I felt, how I disliked doing whatever was asked of me. I must please the other people at any cost.
Now, of course each person’s experience will have been different, but I bet a lot of readers will relate to this experience on some level.

One thing that has helped me tremendously is to learn to recognize “things I can control” versus “things I can’t” . This has been surprisingly difficult to learn after the first 30 years of my life being indoctrinated to this point of view.

I started reading about control, about who can control me, (only me!) and who I must please (only me). things I can’t control include the weather, people’s opinions, disease, catastrophe/accidents, other people’s actions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings. OH? I wasn’t responsible after all when you cried over something I did and punished me over and over for it? OH? I was not responsible for the times you hit me because I did something that “made you” be angry? This was an extreme revelation to me… I had such a difficult time processing the fact that persons chose to respond to me and my behaviors in their own ways of their own choosing, and that I, in fact did not cause their hatred, their anger, their violence, their shaming, blaming, controlling behavior toward me. When people said I “should” do something, or I am “supposed to” do something or feel something, or believe something, I thought they had a secret manual or list of rules that I was not able to access. I believed that they were telling me rules I must live by, rather than understanding that these were things that THEY believed, things that THEY thought, things that THEY wanted from me.

Many of the ways we deal with our world are due to habit or learned as children to survive our struggles in “less-than-understanding” or healthy situations growing up. The ways we learned to protect ourselves may not work well for us as adults, but there are so many ways we can choose to behave in any interaction with others… we just need to find out what our choices are and learn how to use the newer and healthier tools we have access to as we discard our old struggles and make adaptions for ourselves as we age. It is Ok to reach out to a counselor or therapist or social worker to ask for help and explanations if you find it a struggle to sort all of this on your own.

Look for more information about healthy self assertive behavior, look for more information about things you can’t control, things you can, and learn how to tell one from the other. You may suddenly find yourself feeling freer than you ever have before.

When we are able to make our own choices depending only on what is right for us and be free of others opinions, feelings, agendas and wants, we are better able to have healthy relationships and fewer worries and struggles. Check it out!