Learning to have boundaries as an adult leads to awareness of the causes for not having developed them as a child. Everyone’s causes will be different but the pattern is the same. Yes, in normal families, kids develop healthy boundaries! (I know it’s shocking if you don’t have any as an adult). As you learn boundaries, you're going to have some realizations and revelations that your family members would prefer you didn't, and kept to yourself and this usually starts with uncovering your overlooked childhood trauma. Unpacking childhood trauma is scary, heartbreaking, and requires professional support. It can lead to growth in unexpected ways, and for me, it gave birth to many new perspectives. Emotional abuses that I was previously unable to heal from were being resolved. I’m so far along this journey that emotional attacks that would have taken months to recover from may only throw me off for a minute or two now (seriously). This is thanks to developing healthy boundaries.
A common theme in late diagnosed autism is losing connection to loved ones because they are unwilling to accept your diagnosis, or previous perceptions of you now require updating, incorporating autism into the model of who they believe you are. It’s hard. Family often cannot tolerate an autistic individuals new self awareness, boundaries or growth and things can blow up in other areas of life that they will be explained as you’re going “insane” or being too difficult, or having a vendetta but these are alternative stories, ways of explaining a situation that arose from an inability to shift perspectives and it’s humiliating to the recently diagnosed Autistic who is working overtime, and at burnout speed to find their feet with this new understanding of self.
This pattern is often the same and is reiterated across many late-diagnosed Autistic’s stories and it stems abstractly from their family’s inability to make a much needed perspective shift. A lot of late diagnosed autistic people face suicidal ideation, depression and burnout and I would ask families of late diagnosed Autistics to approach their loved ones with fresh eyes and open minds as that is what is required. Kindness costs you nothing.
Back to building boundaries; New perspectives bring emotional growth. That emotional growth leads to shifts in your identity, self-perception and self-worth. Doing so gives you a foundation to reassess who or what was responsible for negative outcomes in your life. This insight provides the opportunity to shift your self-perception. It means you can go from a person who felt worthless, unable to speak, under the control of those around you, to being confident and empowered, capable of speaking up and voicing whatever you have on your mind, crushing the baddies, shooting above and beyond those who seek your demise.
Speaking up about personal experiences with living loved ones can be quite dismembering. It can feel like trying too hard to win an imaginary argument with someone that has no awareness they are even being spoken to when the intention isn't even to speak to them. It can also be exhausting trying to share a lived experience without being disrespectful to others who experienced the same individual situations. Firstly they deserve respect and dignity. They may disagree that there was emotional enmeshment, abuse or that they have done anything wrong. Everyone's experience and journey are their own and each person deserves understanding. And secondly, if you're not in that place of emotional growth and being comfortable talking openly, having someone from your past do that could feel utterly embarrassing, humiliating or enraging and this is often what happens when a family member “suddenly becomes Autistic” (or is late diagnosed as Autistic).
Choosing not to speak out of seeking to protect family from their reactions to the truth of the trauma you've experienced is nice but, that's not your job. If you know other family members or loved ones are or will be unwittingly experiencing similar trauma, staying silent does not break the cycle of emotional enmeshment and choosing to speak may be helping others break out before their experience becomes entrenched. If speaking up helps you get past something that is holding you back, then protecting others from the same thing isn't really worth it.
I think it's a personal decision and there may not be a best case scenario. For me personally, I have two adult (almost) children from a previous relationship who are unfortunately caught in the middle of ongoing family dynamics that involve emotional enmeshment and the arduous, lingering effects of my past relationship with their mother (pre-diagnosis). I hate this aspect of talking about anything personal, and it almost always stops me in my tracks. I know the truth cannot be told without hurting others and I don't want to hurt anybody let alone my children who I still love and care about with all of my heart. The dynamic of needing to retain a connection with the kids has been heavily used against me in the past and I have had to let go of attachment to that need (in a buddhist sense) in order to heal from the trauma of emotional enmeshment with a narcissistic codependent family. I now know the trauma was inescapable without cutting off all ties to the group and doing so has lead to spiritual growth and healing that I'm immensely proud of even though I had to make decisions that felt terrifying.
I've come to the conclusion that no matter how hard something is, the truth is always the most fertile seed. I learned the lesson that failing to plant seeds of truth will lead to out of control lies. And subsequently, I learned that sharing the truth with the wrong people, those entangled in codependency, can be equivalent to planting seeds in concrete. The seeds cannot grow unless they are planted in the right place. Essentially now, I find growth in sharing truth publicly, not to make a big deal out of it, but just to plant it in a fertile place where something good can come out of it. Anyone would be welcome to disagree with my truth, but here in the public arena, at least, narcissistic narratives cannot take hold or do their manipulative hidden dirty work. All the shady nonsense is done in darkness, and I'm honored to have been blessed (spiritually) with the courage and confidence to walk away from people who were feeding that darkness. Doing this, teaches others how insidious problems of hidden agendas really are and the small act of truth-telling shines a light on the darkness, to show that walking away from difficult family dynamics can lead to real healing and recovery from emotional trauma and will indeed snuff out false shaming of those who are misunderstood. My hope is that sharing the truth will catalyze positive outcomes for those I love and nothing less.
People in similar situations, may be autistic, maybe they are also the outcast of their family, or the black-sheep. I particularly want my children to know there is hope and that walking away has the potential to be less painful than staying in emotional enmeshment. Maybe my words will resonate in a way that bring awareness, that someone's situation isn't normal and the status-quo that perpetually places them on the bottom rung, far down in the mud, beneath all the lies that they aren't even privileged to hear, is actually trauma and something they need to heal from. They don't have to stay there, and it's the mud they've been pushed through that will be the very thing that causes them to grow further than they can imagine. I know that for anyone in a similar situation to mine, they are a shooting star waiting to blast off and their background, all the shit they've been through, will be their fertile soil, the catalyst for making anything they dream of a reality.
In a toxic enmeshed family you must submit to the dysfunction and be an ally or stand up for yourself and end up an outsider. Autistic people often struggle to conform to social norms which is an inherent part of autism, they aren't just being difficult. This means families with codependent narcissism or any toxic enmeshment often scapegoat an autistic family member because they are not as readily able to conform to the group narrative and the family see this as defection or weakness. I hope all vulnerable and autistic kids learn healthy boundaries and use them with agency and awareness and that they find the self-confidence to speak up about everything they’ve been through regardless of how others around them want to control the narrative of their lives.