@Gritches can you say more about what you mean? How did you tackle the PTSD and do you mean it's a result of the confusion caused by our reality being different but ignored / not recognised?
Essentially, yes. Because we're forced to be a part of society when we have social deficits/differences caused by ASD, we're going to get pushback from that, often cruel pushback; traumatizing pushback. If all you've really known is cruelty as a direct result of trying to play nice and interact with others, it seems perfectly logical to me that Complex PTSD would be the natural result of what seems to be the typical Aspie growing-up experience; that is to say, one version or another of highly traumatic.
We're Aspies, and we're going to be Aspies, no matter what.
As for how to treat that PTSD, it's a matter of building your self-confidence. Most trauma therapists, especially with TFCBT, will follow a formula that uses exposure to densensitize you to specific traumas. The problem I found with that is that I had hundreds, if not thousands of traumas; no, in all my years studying trauma I can say with confidence there's a step that comes before exposure/desensitization:
Addressing the reason for the trauma so you aren't just retraumatizing yourself in the process of desensitization. Think about it, if you just start with just being thrust into social situations without having the requisite skills to disprove what your experience has taught you (that socializing will end poorly), you're just going to dig in further and further with every failed social experience.
No, trauma tied to social experience isn't the same as desensitizing someone who's afraid to cross bridges by making them cross a bridge 100 times. The point of that exercise is to teach the bridge-phobic person that nothing bad's going to happen when they cross a bridge.
But if you drag an Aspie by the collar out into society without them having learned the skills that nobody ever bothered to teach us, it's going to result in one social failure after the next and a deepening of the trauma; as for the bridge example, it would be like sending the bridge-phobic person over the bridge 100 times and having the bridge collapse every single time. That person would be terrified of bridges after that, and rightly so.
It's for that reason that TFCBT can be counter-productive for Aspies if social survival skills aren't learned sufficiently before attempting to desensitize, and a new approach needs to be taken towards this near-ubiquitous issue.
