Apparently, I am high-masking and have a hyper-systematized mind. This is what I’ve learned over the last handful of months.
One time, someone I respect and listen to told me, ‘When I am venting, do not hang onto my words.’ My mind took that instruction and wrote it into my system as a rule. The next time they said something hurtful to me, my system applied the rule and didn’t even process the content of their words.
It felt like a dual-core phenomenon, where I am the actor and the observer at the same time. While the observer calmly logged the input of the hurtful words, the actor completely bypassed processing them. In the aftermath, I am left knowing that I technically heard the words, but I can’t even tell you which ones were hurtful.
Another aspect of this is how my brain naturally seeks out and finds regulation, satisfaction, and focus in geometric precision, symmetry, and rule-based visual systems. I remember back in high school, I collected empty bottles and lined them up on my window sill, I was drawn to their shapes.
Around that same time, I excelled in mechanical drafting. One of the core requirements was to draw the perfect arrowhead, which we used constantly to denote measurements. I would find myself completely hyper-focused on this single task, happily filling up a blank page with nothing but precise arrowheads. Perfecting the arrowheads was a form of visual and motor stimming.
That was a glimpse of what a hyper-systematized mind looks like. Now I turn my focus onto social interactions.
I can recall three specific incidents in my life where I was in deep distress, and the person I trusted, the person I was opening up to, set me up. They collected my raw distress and presented it to authorities in school, work, and society as evidence that I was ’destructive’. There is a name for this, it is called Institutional Betrayal and the Pathologization of Autistic Distress.
I didn’t even realize I was carrying deep trauma from those moments until a few months ago. I found myself in distress once again, speaking to someone I trusted, when suddenly a wave of pure danger hit me. I felt the setup happening all over again, and a third person might be quietly listening in.
I have been masking from my past traumas; I have been masking from the world; and I have been masking from my subconscious mind. As a high-masking individuals, masking is not a conscious choice to lie or fake who I am. It is a fully integrated operating script.
What causes trauma for a hyper-systematized mind? For a hyper-systematized mind, safety is built on predictability and rules. Follow the rules and the output will be fair. One would think that expressing distress would yield help and safety. But instead, expressing distress yielded punishment and exile.
Injustice causes trauma, but so does breaking a rule handed to me that I have accepted and written into my system. Rule-breaking feels inherently dangerous because it carries the threat of betrayal. Being falsely accused of malicious intent, words, or actions is equally traumatic.
This is exactly why a high sense of justice and intense morals are such common traits among the autistic community. For us, rules and order is safety. Last week, I discovered I might have unknowingly broken a rule. I was terrified and I experienced a trauma response that impacted me physically.
Separate from trauma is a different phenomenon, one that is heavily discussed in the ADHD community but rarely addressed in autism. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD. While injustice or the probability of injustice causes my trauma, it is a sudden lack of logic that acts as a catalyst for my RSD.
But once RSD is triggered, it doesn’t matter if the observer sees a logical explanation. The actor’s rational mind is completely bypassed, I turn inward to cannibalize myself. My system defaults to the assumption that I am the broken variable, that I am the failure, that I am to be blamed for everything. Nothing but self blame. My mind starts to loop to find the broken logic of an unsolvable problem.
For three months, my hyper-systematized mind has been running overdrive. I am now experiencing what I think is a dopamine crash, where I have no motivation to get started on anything. However, a dopamine crash is supposed to be temporary, maybe with a lifespan of one hour.
I am experiencing severe burnout.