@VTdad
Many of us have "comorbidities". In my case, one of those in particular has caused me
far more trouble than being ASD has.
I don't know the exact name (or even if there is one) but I call it "Executive Dysfunction" here for convenience.
I might have gone with something like "toxic procrastination" otherwise.
Not that I'd expect this to be relevant for your situation: the point is that it might be useful to separate ASD (which isn't all that well-defined anyway) from anything else.
ASD as such isn't "treatable", but I'm personally confident I would have benefited from targeted education (for example on NT language, social norms, body language norms, etc, when I was younger.
Many of the other things that are not ASD but are probably linked to it would have been best handled with something like CBT - i.e. addressing the functional issues rather than being concerned with causes.
An aside - at this point, I can hide that I'm ASD easily and indefinitely, but I hardly ever do so.
It took a long time and quite a lot of solo analysis and effort to get to this point though. It would have been easier with some practical help, but I agree with
@Outdated above (as usual - we've been through similar processes): there doesn't seem to be any
useful help for adults like me yet.
FWIW what I did as an adult was figure out that I was "masking" (**), why and how I was doing it, and then "tuned it" for my adult self. It doesn't seem to be possible for
me to teach it, but it's certainly
learnable, at least in principle.
(**)
"Masking" as we use it isn't the same thing as having a social persona, but there are many similarities.
I realized I'd being doing it for many years without realizing it, and that I was still using a system that had come about at random while I was fairly young (mostly tweener/teenage years). The "upgrade" has been
very useful.
Adjusting it for my adult self fixed a lot of issues (but not the procrastination /lol.)
