WARNING: SOME READERS MAY FIND THIS POST TRIGGERING

I have a lot of trauma from growing up as an undiagnosed autistic. My peers treated me horribly, making mean comments behind my back, pretending to be friends so they could pull humiliating pranks, isolating me and making fun of me in front of the rest of class, excluding me from parties, spreading false rumors, pushing me into lockers, you name it, I went through it. It was one, long, living hell, one that I shared with no-one until I got into therapy a few years back. I have PTSD from this trauma that I have worked through, although it still catches me off guard sometimes.

But there is another type of trauma I suffered as a young adult that has proven far more difficult to work through, and that is betrayal trauma.

In my mid-twenties, I became involved with a man that I only many years later realized was a narcissistic sociopath. He broke down my barriers, pretending to be in love with me, while keeping a marriage and three kids going behind my back in another state. He forced me to do a lot of things I didn’t want to do, with drugs, with sex. He insisted I was his one true love and the only person he was having sex with while sleeping with dozens of women and not telling me. My friends begged me to leave him, insisting (correctly) that he was lying to me, but I didn’t want to believe them. Even when he got tired of me and tried to dump me, I kept going back to him, over and over, for years. It wasn’t until I literally walked in on him having sex with another woman that I finally realized I’d been had.

This relationship caused a type of trauma referred to as “betrayal trauma.” While sociopaths are highly skilled manipulators, and one needn’t be autistic to be taken in, autistics are especially susceptible and will stay with someone long after many neurotypicals would have been able to tear away. We don’t just believe our manipulators, we want to believe them, and will keep believing them when they tell ever more outrageous, easily detectable lies. After not having close relationships with friends or significant others for the better part of our lives, we will grasp at anyone who shows a little kindness, and will cling to them long after the kindness has been traded for abuse.

And so, despite the fact that this happened half a lifetime ago, I am still like this. Until my forties, I would stay in relationships and jobs long after whatever was good about them had become impossibly bad, continuing to give and give and not get back. In relationships, I finally grew tired of always being at the ass-end of these situations and made a decision to never settle again.

When it comes to work, however, I am still reliving that trauma. I can understand intellectually that the people I work with are toxic people, but I still won’t leave. I keep thinking that once I’ve been there long enough and they’ve gotten used to me, I will become part of the in-group and the mistreatment will stop. Or if I hold out doing crap work long enough, someone else will come along and have to do that work and I will get to do the real work that I had thought I was hired for. Or if I kill them with kindness they will eventually relent and accept me.

After years of working in the veterinary industry, I can tell you that veterinary workplaces are notoriously bad when it comes to office culture. Among my bosses were an active alcoholic who would insult and belittle the nurses in front of patients, a micro-manager who would spy on the staff through the office phone system, a moody practice manager who I had to flat-out lie to to stay on her good side, an anesthesiologist who constantly accused me of misconduct (while no-one else did) that I was taken to task for each and every time, and a doctor who willfully ignored the mean-girl treatment I suffered by the rest of the staff and, when I tried to inform her of it, insisted I must be mistaken.

In each of these situations, I would burn out or find an “acceptable” excuse to leave, weeks or months after any other self-respecting person would have quit. I was lulled into the idea that if everyone else was putting up with the climate, why should I be the one to complain? In my whole life, I have only worked three workplaces that weren’t toxic, if I can include subbing in as a receptionist at my father’s business over the summer when I was in my twenties. The second was the research animal wing at the university where I got a bachelor’s in animal sciences, but as it was a student position, it rotated every year; I had to leave after fifteen months. The third was an emergency veterinary clinic, where I couldn’t handle the emotional toll of several dying or euthanized animals and their owners multiple times per shift. Emotionally, I am most definitely not equipped for that sort of thing, but I still regret having to leave because the manager was the best boss I had ever known.

As bad as betrayal traumas are, they can be much worse for autistics. Our social difficulties render us unable to see non-verbal cues, and most of us endured constant negative feedback growing up, teaching us that our instincts in any given situation are always wrong. Since we always say and do the wrong things, any mistreatment we receive must be due to us being wrong. It’s never the other person’s fault. If we are being treated poorly, we think, we must deserve it. And that is the line if thinking that leads us to stay, because if it is our fault, then we must be able to do something to fix it. So we keep trying and trying with no results, and it is not until we encounter hard, incontrovertible evidence that we are being treated badly for something that isn’t our fault that we are able to make a break.

Betrayal trauma is also accompanied by post-traumatic guilt, that we should have known, should have paid more attention, wrote things down, believed our guts or hearts. That it is our fault for staying. This mental sleight-of-hand, the seamless shift from our fault due to behaving badly to our fault for not seeing mistreatment and leaving sooner, is what makes betrayal trauma so damaging and so hard to undo. We have to clear two separate hurdles; the first, that we didn’t deserve to be treated poorly, and the second, that we could be forgiven for sticking it out and trying to make it work.

My problem with these ideas is that, to me, they are incompatible. That I both don’t deserve to be treated badly and should forgive myself for not seeing it sooner… I can’t get those two paths to merge in my head. Because I feel like the first says I should be more aware that I am being treated badly, and the second that I shouldn’t feel bad for not being aware of it. In my autistic brain, which relentlessly tries to apply logic to every situation even when it’s impossible, I can’t concede one without precluding the other.

So the work continues.

If you’re an autistic and you recognize yourself as having suffered (or suffering) this type of trauma, don’t be so hard on yourself about how difficult it is to overcome. Just stick with the therapy and remember that thought patterns, no matter how seemingly baked in, are still plastic and can be moved or replaced.

And remember it’s hard. I’m middle-aged and still working through it. Allow yourself some grace.