When trauma healing isn’t enough: supporting the neurodivergent nervous system
When the sun is too bright and the silence too loud. . .
For years I thought my hypervigilance, extreme startle reflex, panic attacks, and fainting spells were all due to PTSD. I worked diligently in therapy, read every self-help book, did yoga, meditation, and breathwork. And it helped. . . it helped so much that it felt like I could self-help my way to being a calm, grounded, steady person.
I became a trauma therapist and helped many people put their PTSD into remission. But for me and for a certain subset of my clients (the ones who eventually turned out to be Autistic, ADHD or both) the challenges did not end when the PTSD cleared. It turns out, the neurodivergent nervous system operates a little differently from what I was taught about how a “healthy” nervous system should function.
The ND nervous system, trauma, and daily life
Neurodivergent people are at high risk for bullying, abuse, and accidents, which puts us at risk of developing post traumatic symptoms. PTSD is characterized by intrusive thoughts and memories of the precipitating events, as well as physiological changes including cortisol and adrenaline imbalances. Sleep disturbance is common along with nightmares. And if people were involved, it can disrupt our natural drive to seek connection for emotional support.
Meanwhile, the neurodivergent nervous system was dealing with a lot of that stuff already!
Autistic people tend to have somewhat elevated cortisol levels compared to controls, whereas ADHDers often struggle with low cortisol in the morning and higher levels in the evening. Both groups have high rates of sleep disturbance. And most of my clients seek help managing intrusive thoughts, often frightening ones. And of course, we tend to be wary of humans. Whether this is innate or learned is hard to piece apart.
Over the years I’ve worked with many people who thought they had PTSD but couldn’t recall any traumatic events that would have caused it. The more we learned about neurodivergence, the more things made sense.
Sensory Processing and Sensory Pain
The neurodivergent nervous system is busy. It’s filtering through and processing tons of information. Some of this is sensory, and some of it is thoughts about the present moment, the past, and endless predictions and preparations for the potential futures that may unfold before us.
As I’m writing this, I find I’m anxious and distracted. I am struggling to find my usual hyperfocus because my working memory is impaired today. I am on edge, worried that I will miss an appointment or something else I’m supposed to do later in the day. I am trying to parse out ideas for other things I want to write about, cook, tell a friend, and worrying that I’ll lose those thoughts if I don’t write them down somewhere.
I am desperate to hold onto my own mind.
Partly this is a trauma response: I have lost my mind several times before. I have lost verbal (the ability to speak) and I’ve lost reading and writing. I regularly struggle to access working memory. So the stress reaction I’m experiencing is partly a learned response to my lived experience. But I think part of it is innate as well. Autistic brains tend to have a smaller corpus callosum, which is a checkpoint between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, slowing or holding boundaries around the flow of information and energy. Perhaps my brain gates are wide open, letting all the impulses flow unchecked through my brain space. And part of ADHD is challenges with impulse control. Once the thoughts get in there’s not a lot of capacity to down-regulate or deprioritize them.
In addition to all these challenges, ND’s often have a different experience with sensory information that adds complexity. For example, we may have sensory processing differences, so some of us have brains that take longer to interpret and file away the data coming in. While we’re processing, we may develop a backlog or start missing incoming information.
Many ND’s also experience sensory pain. A pen tapping, the feel of socks on our feet, the color and contrast of words on paper or a website can hurt. Sometimes it hurts the organ involved, and sometimes it floods the whole body. When my sound sensitivity is high, I often have shooting pains in my elbows, go figure.
The intensity and sheer volume of this processing takes its toll. Not just in the moment, but on our earliest attachment relationships, which become the blueprint for future relationships. When our pain is misunderstood it is often disbelieved, which leads us to lose trust in ourselves, learn that we are inherently “wrong” or wrong about our understanding of the world, and embark on a lifelong pattern of self-dismissiveness, dissociation, and self-abandonment.
So even after you’ve done your trauma-healing work, you may find your nervous system needs special care and attention! And when those accommodations are in place, the work of healing the relationship with yourself and others becomes much more possible to engage in.
If you relate to this, and would like to get coaching from Amy and me at ND Friendly Life, please fill out this contact form and we’ll set up a time to meet. If you’d like to read more about what happens when neurodivergent sensory needs go unmet, read the follow up to this blog post.
