Rambling thoughts about stress
firemonkey
Citizen
Severe stress is supposedly a risk factor for me. The problem being what may be very stressful for one person will be water off a duck's back for another. It's not something that can uniformly be described as high/moderate/low/ no stress at all. Events don't indicate level of stress IMO , reactions to those events do.
Comments
You shouldn't need to justify yourself in front of anyone else, it's annoying when people are being dismissive or try to invalidate something that affects you.
One of the first books I bought on having my autism recognised was a self-help CBT guide called 'Overcoming Anxiety and Depression on the Autism Spectrum'. I am instinctively sceptical about both self-help books and CBT (brainwashing?). Yet when I picked up this one, I recognised so many of my own reactions that I bought it there and then.
CBT is not uncontroversial and it is not for everyone. I am not an evangelist for it. But there were some useful things for me. Our past does not necessarily have to determine our future. We can acknowledge our own feelings (without rejecting them or criticising ourselves for having them), while at the same time setting them into a different perspective. As someone who has often been preoccupied with thoughts of suicide and wondered if I were somehow irreparably damaged by sexual abuse during my childhood, this has been quite liberating.
My situation is the opposite . First saw a pdoc autumn 1973, first hospitalised May 1975 & dxed with schizophrenia, but not diagnosed with Asperger's till May 2019. Like a good number of psych patients later found to be on the spectrum treated in less than a supportive manner, for the most part, by mental health services.