Did you know anxiety presents differently in autistic people?
"Autistic anxiety", like "autistic burnout", is different from the non-autistic presentation of it.
There is also the more nuanced difference between trauma and anxiety:
- Anxiety = often difficult to acknowledge.
- Trauma = specific event or collection of events/reasons you're behaving that way, especially if you're experiencing fear.
And there's even more nuance to acknowledge, because autistics who struggle with alexithymia may struggle to determine what they're feeling, why they're feeling it, and even when they're feeling it...or that they're feeling a particular way at all. 🤔
There isn't a lot of research on this topic, specially "good" research that doesn't involve perceiving autistic people as "weird" or worse.
For non-autistic people, maybe even neurotypical people more specifically, the "fear of being perceived" is associated with "social anxiety disorder"...but for autistic people, we often know how we're being perceived AND the effects of allistic people's perceptions of us...because we've paid the price for allistic perceptions or have heard about an autistic who has.
And in that context, our fear is trauma-based...but allistic perspective claims otherwise.
What are your thoughts on these topics?
