cPTSD or ASD/ADHD

When people hear the word “trauma,” they often imagine a single vivid event: an accident, an assault, a disaster, violence, a situation where a person faced a threat to life or physical safety. In the classic understanding, PTSD is indeed often described through this logic: there was an event, after it the nervous system stopped perceiving the world as safe, and the person developed flashbacks, avoidance, hyperarousal, anxious vigilance, sleep disturbances, and changes in mood and self-perception.

But cPTSD, or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, is often structured differently. It is a story of prolonged, repeated exposure: years of emotional abuse, bullying, neglect, life in an unpredictable family, chronic invalidation, discrimination, medical gaslighting, the constant feeling that your reactions are “too much” and your needs are “inconvenient.”

In ICD-11, complex PTSD includes PTSD symptoms and, additionally, the so-called disturbances in self-organization: - Difficulties with emotional regulation, - A persistently negative self-concept - Problems in relationships.

In this sense, cPTSD is a condition in which traumatic experience changes not only reactions to specific triggers, but the very internal organization of life: how a person perceives themselves, other people, closeness, conflict, safety, the right to have needs, the right to boundaries, and the possibility of being seen.

🧠 What happens in cPTSD

In PTSD, the nervous system often lives as if the danger has not ended yet. Even when a person is at home, there is no aggressor nearby, and the situation is formally safe, the body may react as if the threat is still here. This can look like constant inner tension, sharp reactions to a sound, tone of voice, facial expression, a pause in a message, an ambiguous phrase, a smell, a place, a date, or any other reminder. The National Institute of Mental Health describes re-experiencing symptoms as flashbacks, recurring memories or dreams, distressing thoughts, and bodily signs of stress that can be triggered by words, objects, or situations that remind a person of the trauma.

With cPTSD, a deeper layer is added to this. A person is not only afraid of something specific, but may also live with the sense: “something is wrong with me,” “I’m too complicated,” “I’m impossible to love,” “if I show my real feelings, I’ll be rejected,” “if I relax, something bad will happen.”

📌 Main symptoms of cPTSD

• Intrusive memories,
• Flashbacks, nightmares,
• Strong bodily reactions to triggers,
• Avoidance of people, places, conversations, or situations that may bring up traumatic material.
• Emotional dysregulation. A person may very quickly fall into shame, anger, panic, numbness, tears, irritation, or complete shutdown.
• Negative self-concept: “I’m defective,” “it’s my fault,” “I’m impossible to love,” “my needs are dangerous,” “if I relax, something bad will happen.”
• Difficulties in relationships: avoidance of closeness, choosing unsafe people, fawning, emotional dependency, abrupt ruptures of contact, difficulty asking for help, and difficulty tolerating kindness.

🌿 How cPTSD affects quality of life

CPTSD rarely remains only “in the head.” It affects everyday life, work, relationships, the body, money, food, sexuality, learning, career, the ability to rest, and the ability to choose.

A person may be a competent professional, but live in fear of making mistakes. They do not just check their work, but recheck it to the point of exhaustion, because inside, a mistake does not mean “this needs fixing,” but “I’ll be exposed, humiliated, rejected.” They may agree to extra tasks because refusal is perceived as a threat to the relationship. They may avoid emails, work chats, phone calls, medical appointments, and documents because any interaction with a system evokes not just unpleasant tension, but a sense of danger.

In relationships, cPTSD may show up as a constant expectation of a catch. The partner is tired — that means they’ve fallen out of love. A friend replies dryly — that means she’s angry. The therapist rescheduled the session — that means they want to get rid of me. A person may understand rationally that this is not necessarily true, but the body is already reacting: the heart beats faster, the muscles tense up, and the mind starts cycling through possible explanations, apologies, ways to save the connection, or disappear completely.

⚡ Intrusions: when the past invades the present

Intrusions (or a flashback) — are involuntary incursions of traumatic material into consciousness, the body, emotions, or perception.

Intrusions can be visual, when a fragment of a scene seems to flare up before the eyes. They can be bodily: sudden nausea, tightness in the chest, weakness in the legs, trembling, a feeling of cold, pain, or tension that reminds the body of the moment of danger. They can be emotional: a person suddenly plunges into shame, horror, helplessness, disgust, loneliness, or guilt, even though outwardly nothing “terrible” has happened. They can be cognitive: intrusive phrases, images, thoughts, self-degrading formulas, memories of words once spoken. They can be recurring dreams, nightmares.

Example: A person receives a short message from their boss: “We need to talk.” On the outside, this may be an ordinary work situation. But inside, a chain reaction instantly starts: the body tenses, breathing becomes shallow, a memory of school humiliation or a parent’s “come here, we need to talk right now” flashes through the mind, and the feeling appears that punishment is coming. The person may rationally understand that the boss may simply want to discuss a task, but the nervous system is already on alert.

Another example. A partner is tired and responds less warmly than usual. In a person with cPTSD, this may trigger not just sadness, but a sharp sense of abandonment, shame, and inner panic: “I ruined everything,” “they’re going to leave me now,” “I want too much.” The intrusion here may not be an image from the past, but an emotional flashback — a state in which the person once again feels small, helpless, guilty, or unwanted, even though the current situation is incomparable in scale to past experience.

Intrusions often disrupt attention and executive functions. A person may lose the thread of a conversation, forget what they wanted to do, freeze in front of a task, become suddenly exhausted by simple actions, because part of their mental energy is spent on suppression, avoidance, controlling the body, and trying to return to the present. In Neurodivergent Insights material on autism and PTSD, it is specifically noted that in PTSD, distractibility from intrusions and hypervigilance overloads the brain, and outwardly this can resemble executive difficulties in autism or ADHD.

🚨 Hypervigilance: life with the alarm system switched on

Hypervigilance is a state of heightened alertness in which the brain and body constantly scan the environment for threat. A person seems not just to be in a room, but at the same time to be monitoring the doors, windows, intonations, glances, distance to the exit, other people’s moods, possible signs of displeasure, noises behind the wall, changes in messaging. The National Center for PTSD describes PTSD as a condition in which the world can feel unsafe, the person feels “on edge,” sleeps worse, avoids reminders of the trauma, and may experience intrusive memories.

Hypervigilance may look like: “I just notice everything,” “I’m good at reading people,” “I always prepare in advance,” “I don’t like sitting with my back to the door,” “I need to understand what mood a person is in before I can relax.”

Sometimes it is even perceived as a useful skill, especially if in the past it truly helped a person survive: noticing that a parent is becoming dangerous; catching that classmates are about to start laughing; predicting that a partner is angry; adjusting in advance to avoid conflict.

The problem is that hypervigilance stays switched on even where there is no real danger anymore. A person may be at home, in a warm room, next to a loving partner, on a day off, with no urgent tasks, and still feel internally that “I can’t relax.” As if, if they let go of control, something will definitely happen.

Hypervigilance is often linked to bodily armor. The muscles of the neck, jaw, shoulders, back, abdomen, and pelvic floor may be chronically tense. The body seems to be constantly preparing for a blow, flight, explanation, defense, or freeze. A person may notice that their teeth are clenched, their shoulders are raised, they hardly breathe with their belly, they sleep lightly, wake up from any sound, cannot lie comfortably, constantly change position, and feel tired even after “doing nothing.”

For other people, this may look paradoxical: “But everything is fine now, why are you feeling worse? You’re finally safe, you can relax.” But safety itself sometimes becomes the trigger. As long as a person is in survival mode, the psyche has a clear task: hold on, control, solve, do not feel too much. When the external threat disappears, conditions appear in which the suppressed material begins to rise, and the body seems to get its first chance to say: “Now I’ll show you how much I’ve been holding.”

That is why in some people symptoms intensify not during the crisis itself, but after it: after moving to a safer country, after leaving a toxic relationship, after quitting a destructive job, after finishing studies, after a caring partner or therapist appears nearby. From the outside this seems illogical, but for the nervous system it makes sense. While it was dangerous, falling apart was not possible. When it became safer, it became possible to feel how frightening it had been before.

🧬 The neurobiology of cPTSD: what changes in the brain and stress system

With prolonged traumatization, stable changes can indeed form in the systems responsible for threat, memory, emotions, the body, and self-regulation.

The amygdala is involved in recognizing threat and initiating the fear response. Under traumatic stress, it can become more reactive: the brain recognizes ambiguous stimuli as dangerous more quickly, reacts more strongly to reminders, and is worse at “letting go” of the alarm signal. That is why a neutral phrase, a sudden sound, or a facial expression may be perceived as a threat before the person has had time to evaluate the situation rationally.

The hippocampus is involved in contextualizing memory: where and when something happened, whether it belongs to the past or the present. In trauma, this system may work less steadily, and then the memory is less firmly “attached” to the past. That is why a flashback is felt not like an old story, but like a current reality: the body reacts as if the event is happening now.

The prefrontal cortex helps inhibit impulsive reactions, make sense of a situation, hold perspective, choose behavior rather than simply react. Under chronic stress, its regulatory role may weaken: it becomes harder for a person to “talk themselves into” believing everything is fine, harder to stop the spiral of anxiety, harder to hold a plan, harder to choose a different response instead of an automatic defense.

Separately important is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis. This is one of the main systems of stress regulation. Under normal conditions, it activates to consolidate all the body’s resources for survival. But under prolonged traumatic exposure, it remains activated constantly, which over time leads to nervous and physical exhaustion.

🕯️ Why good and safe can feel dangerous

One of the most important and often misunderstood phenomena of cPTSD is the worsening of symptoms against a background of external safety. This can frighten the person themselves: “I left a bad relationship, so why do I feel worse?”, “I moved away, the old threat is gone, so why am I overwhelmed?”, “I met a kind person, so why do I want to run away?”, “Therapy has become gentle, so why do I feel shame and anger?”

Several mechanisms may be at work here:

1. Delayed reaction: while the person was in an unsafe environment, the psyche may have forbidden itself from feeling everything in full.
2. The brain has not learned to feel safe. If a person is used to tension, predictability and care may be perceived with suspicion and confusion.
3. Fear of losing control: to relax means to become vulnerable, and in the past vulnerability may have meant pain, humiliation, or punishment.
4. The return of contact with the body: when things become safer, bodily sensitivity returns, and with it may come a huge number of signals that were suppressed for a long time.

🌫️ Dissociation

Dissociation is a way for the psyche to reduce overload when what is happening, a memory, or a bodily reaction feels too intense. If hypervigilance is like an alarm system switched on, dissociation is sometimes like an emergency power shutdown because the nervous system can no longer cope with the intensity of the experience.

Dissociation can look very different. Sometimes a person seems to “freeze” and stops understanding what they feel. Sometimes the body becomes limp, the voice emotionless, thoughts slow, and what is happening around them feels distant, as if behind glass. Sometimes derealization appears: the world seems unreal, flat, strange, like in a dream. Or depersonalization: the person feels as if they are not quite themselves, as if they are observing what is happening from the outside or acting on autopilot.

In everyday life, it may look like this: during a conflict, the person suddenly stops responding even though inside they are scared; in therapy they say “I don’t feel anything,” even though the topic is clearly painful; after an unpleasant message they may scroll on their phone for several hours without understanding where the time went; during closeness, praise, or care they may start to feel empty, awkward, or detached. To others, this may sometimes look like coldness, indifference, passivity, or “not wanting to talk,” but from the inside it feels like losing access to oneself.

In cPTSD, dissociation is often linked to experiences where neither fight nor flight was available. If a child cannot leave the family, an employee cannot safely argue with a boss, a person cannot stop the abuse or protect their boundaries, the psyche may choose freezing and shutting down as the most available way to survive the situation.

<div class="note"> <strong>Example:</strong> a partner calmly says, “It’s important to me to discuss what happened.” In reality, this may be a gentle conversation, but the body recognizes a familiar pattern: “now I’m going to be blamed.” The person first tenses up, then stops understanding what they feel, answers in monosyllables, or says nothing at all. This is not necessarily sabotage of the conversation. Sometimes it is dissociative freezing. </div>

It is also important to note that dissociation may overlap with an autistic shutdown, but they are not the same thing. In an autistic shutdown, the shutdown is often related to sensory, social, or cognitive overload. In dissociation in cPTSD, the link to a traumatic trigger, shame, threat, helplessness, or the feeling of being unable to protect oneself is more often noticeable. And one person can have both of these mechanisms.

🫶 Fawning, or people-pleasing, as a survival response

When people talk about trauma, they usually recall three responses: fight, flight, or freeze. But there is another response that is especially common in prolonged interpersonal trauma: fawning, that is, the attempt to please, to become convenient, safe, pleasant, needed, indispensable — anything to keep the other person from getting angry, rejecting, leaving, humiliating, or becoming dangerous.

In healthy care, there is choice: I can help, but I can also refuse; I can stay close, but not betray myself; I can take the other person into account, but not disappear inside their needs. In fawning, there is almost no choice. The psyche reacts as if one’s own disagreement, irritation, fatigue, boundaries, or requests could destroy the connection and lead to punishment. So the person automatically smiles, smooths things over, justifies, explains, rescues, adapts, agrees, even if inside everything is already screaming: “I feel bad, I don’t want this, I’m hurting, please stop.”

<div class="note"> <strong>Example:</strong> a person says “yes, of course, everything is fine,” although in reality they feel hurt, scared, or uncomfortable, because in their internal safety system an honest “no” may feel not like an ordinary boundary, but like the risk of losing the relationship (or a risk to safety). </div>

In cPTSD, fawning often forms where direct resistance was unsafe. If a child could not stop an adult, argue, leave, get angry, or defend themselves, then another strategy remained: read the mood, be good, be funny, be useful, not create problems, anticipate desires, take responsibility for the other person’s emotions. And if this strategy once truly helped reduce danger, the psyche may continue to use it in adulthood, even when the person is no longer facing a dangerous parent, but a partner, boss, friend, or therapist.

Fawning may look like strong empathy, but inside there is often not calm compassion, but anxious scanning: “he isn’t angry, right?”, “she didn’t get offended, did she?”, “did I say too much?”, “I need to fix the other person’s mood right away.” A person may be brilliantly attentive to other people’s micro-reactions and almost blind to their own. They may spend hours thinking about how to phrase a refusal gently, and in the end not refuse at all. They may help when they have no strength. They may agree to closeness, conversation, a meeting, work, sex, care that they do not actually want, because refusal feels too dangerous.

And yes, this too can be behavior in cPTSD: a person may not avoid closeness, but on the contrary desperately seek it, yet seek it through a familiar traumatic schema. Not “I feel good with you, I can be myself,” but “I have to earn love,” “if a person is jealous, controlling, and suffering — that means I matter,” “if the relationship is calm, that means there is no love,” “if I’m not abandoned, that means I have to endure,” “if it hurts, that means it’s serious.” This is not because the person “just wants to suffer.” It is because the psyche may confuse intensity with closeness, anxiety with love, control with care, drama with depth, and calm with emptiness or an approaching threat.

The phrase “he hits you because he loves you” is a harsh example of this kind of traumatic logic. In reality, violence is not a form of love, but a person who grew up in an environment where attachment was mixed with pain, shame, punishment, coldness, or unpredictability may unconsciously recognize precisely this dynamic as “familiar.” Not good, not safe, not consciously desired — but familiar. And for the nervous system, the familiar can sometimes feel more “real” than the healthy.

🧨 Why the psyche seeks not calm, but familiar fu*ked-up chaos

This is one of the most painful paradoxes of cPTSD: a person may sincerely want calm, but when it appears, they become bored, anxious, empty, suspicious, or unable to tolerate it. Whereas chaos, emotional rollercoasters, an unavailable partner, conflict, rescuing, urgency, dramatic messaging at three in the morning — all this may feel alive. Someone might say, “you just like suffering”! But often this happens because the nervous system has become used to living in mobilization.

If all your life love was connected with tension, then calm closeness may not be recognized as love. It may feel like a lack of chemistry, a lack of depth, “we’re just friends,” “I’m not drawn to them,” “it’s too boring,” “something is wrong.” And relationships where you have to chase, earn, explain, guess, endure, rescue, and wait for rare flashes of warmth may feel like strong attachment. On the level of the body, this may not be love, but a familiar mixture of anxiety, dopaminergic anticipation, fear of loss, and relief after brief reconciliation.

By the way, those very “butterflies in the stomach” may in fact be not a sign of falling in love, but bodily anxiety, when a person, for example, reminds your brain of an abusive parent.

<div class="note"> <strong>Roughly speaking,</strong> if the psyche has lived for years in a mode of “fu\*ked up, but understandable,” then calm at first may feel not like safety, but like suspicious silence before the next blow. </div>

This is especially important in therapy and in relationships. Often the task of recovery is not only to leave a traumatic environment, but also to teach the nervous system to tolerate normality. To tolerate a person who does not punish with silence. Care that does not come with a bill. To tolerate slightly boring, predictable, human closeness where you do not have to constantly prove your right to be loved.

😂 Humor and laughter when telling something heavy

Humor is a common psychological defense when it comes to painful memories. A person may talk about a frightening, humiliating, or painful experience and laugh, joke, make a meme out of their own trauma, say “well, that was fun, haha,” even though the content of the story is not funny at all. This does not necessarily mean they are lying, exaggerating, or over it. Often laughter is a protective mechanism against pain, so as not to fall into it completely.

Humor can serve several functions. It reduces tension, helps maintain control, makes the story more bearable, protects against shame, tests the listener’s reaction, allows the person to talk about the frightening thing sideways, without entering full contact with the experience. Especially for people who are used to being “convenient” or “strong,” a joke may be a way not to burden another person with their pain: I’m sort of telling you something heavy, but I immediately devalue it myself so you won’t feel too awkward.

<div class="note"> <strong>Example:</strong> a person says: “Yeah, I was bullied at school, but it’s fine, at least I maxed out my invisibility skill, premium subscription to anxiety since childhood,” and laughs. But inside, this may be standing on years of shame, loneliness, and unsafety. </div>

In therapy, it is important to notice such laughter as a signal: there is a lot of tension around this material. Sometimes a therapist may gently say: “You’re laughing right now, even though you’re telling something very heavy. Let’s try to notice what it is helping you tolerate right now.”

For neurodivergent people, humor may also be a way of social survival. Being funny is sometimes safer than being strange, angry, confused, too direct, or too sensitive. A joke may cover autistic awkwardness, ADHD impulsivity, shame about overload, fear of being “too much.”

Sometimes the funniest people tell the heaviest stories precisely because without humor they are too frightening to touch.

♾️ Why neurodivergent people may have a higher risk of cPTSD

In people with autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence, traumatic experience often begins not with one big event, but with life in an environment where their traits are not recognized, not accommodated, or are directly punished. Neurodivergent Insights emphasizes that autism and PTSD often coexist, that autistic traits may be mistakenly attributed to trauma, and that traumatization in neurodivergent people may include not only trauma involving threat to life and health, but also marginalization, bullying, discrimination, and sensory trauma.

For an autistic person, years of being forced to mask can be traumatic: “look people in the eye,” “don’t rock,” “speak normally,” “don’t be weird,” “go hug grandpa, it’s rude not to,” “put up with it, everyone is tired.” If a child receives the message every day that their natural way of being in the world is unacceptable, they may grow up not just with social anxiety, but with a deep conviction: “it is dangerous to show my real self.”

For a person with ADHD, traumatization is often associated with chronic shame: “lazy,” “irresponsible,” “you’re smart, so why can’t you just do it,” “you forgot again,” “you’re interrupting again.” When executive difficulties are interpreted for years as a moral defect, a person may begin to live in a mode of constant self-criticism and expectation of punishment. A 2025 systematic review shows that ADHD and PTSD often overlap: comorbidity in studies was estimated at about 28–36%, and the combination is associated with more pronounced functional difficulties.

In autistic people, studies also show increased traumatic burden and high levels of probable PTSD. In a study by Rumball and colleagues, autistic adults reported a wide range of events experienced as traumatic; more than 40% of participants showed probable PTSD in the past month, and more than 60% showed probable lifetime PTSD.

🌀 Where cPTSD overlaps with ADHD

ADHD and cPTSD can look similar outwardly: attention difficulties, impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, irritability, sleep problems, procrastination, forgetfulness, chaos, difficulty completing tasks, fluctuations in motivation.

But the mechanism may be different. In ADHD, the core problem is related to neurodevelopment and executive functions: the brain has more difficulty regulating attention, inhibition, working memory, switching, planning, time, and motivation. In cPTSD, attention difficulties arise because most of the resources are spent on scanning for threat, suppressing memories, fighting anxiety, shame, bodily tension, or dissociation.

🧩 Where cPTSD overlaps with ASD

With autism, the overlap is even more complex, because both ASD and cPTSD can manifest through social avoidance, fatigue from people, difficulties with trust, sensory sensitivity, a need for control, rigidity, shutdowns and meltdowns, difficulties recognizing one’s own states, and a high need for predictability.

But again, the mechanism and developmental history matter. In ASD, sensory traits, communication differences, the need for routine, intense interests, literalness, and difficulties with neurotypical social rules are usually present from childhood, although they may be masked and become more noticeable only as demands increase or during burnout.

🧭 How differential diagnosis is carried out

A person may have ASD, ADHD, and cPTSD all at once. Moreover, neurodivergence itself may increase the risk of traumatization, and trauma may mask neurodivergence. The Neurodivergent Insights PDF notes that when assessing autism or PTSD, both conditions should be taken into account, because the overlap is high and the risk of missed or mistaken diagnosis is significant.

Differential diagnosis usually includes several directions: a detailed developmental history, trauma history, analysis of current symptoms, assessment of triggers, and studying what is a constant trait versus what is activated by reminders of the past, conflict, sensory overload, or loss of control.

In ASD, it is especially important to look at early development and stable patterns: sensory traits, need for predictability, features of nonverbal communication, intense interests, fatigue from neurotypical interaction, masking, autistic shutdowns and meltdowns.

In ADHD — stable childhood difficulties with attention, impulsivity, organization, time, switching, emotional regulation, and motivation across different contexts.

In cPTSD — the traumatic organization of symptoms: triggers, avoidance, flashbacks, traumatic beliefs, sense of threat, shame, disturbances of closeness, and emotional regulation after prolonged unsafety.

📝 Questionnaires that may help raise suspicion of cPTSD

For complex PTSD, the International Trauma Questionnaire, ITQ, is more often used; it was developed for ICD-11 and assesses both PTSD symptoms and disturbances in self-organization: emotional dysregulation, negative self-concept, and difficulties in relationships.

Also in clinical practice, the ACE Questionnaire may be used to assess adverse childhood experiences, DES-II for dissociation screening, depression and anxiety scales, and, when neurodivergence is suspected, separate tools for ASD and ADHD. But questionnaire results should be considered a reason for conversation, not a final conclusion.

🧷 Comorbidity

CPTSD rarely comes alone. Depression, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, eating disorders, dissociation, chronic pain, sleep problems, addictions, OCD-like symptoms, borderline traits or BPD, ADHD, ASD often may be nearby. At the same time, it is important not to turn comorbidity into diagnostic porridge. Sometimes depression is secondary to trauma and chronic shame. Sometimes anxiety is intensified by unrecognized ADHD and constant failures in organization. Sometimes “social anxiety” turns out to be a mix of autistic overload, past bullying, and years of masking.

Comorbidity with ASD and ADHD is especially important, because treatment built only around trauma may fail or even intensify shame if the therapist does not understand neurodivergence. Therapy should take both conditions into account, not try to treat one as if the other did not exist.

🤲 How cPTSD is treated in therapy

Therapy for cPTSD usually requires more time and caution than work with a single trauma. Here it is rarely enough to simply “process the event,” because the trauma is embedded in the relationship to self, other people, the body, and ways of surviving. International and clinical sources describe PTSD treatment as primarily psychotherapeutic, especially using trauma-focused approaches; medication may be used as additional support for depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and other co-occurring conditions.

In practice, the work often proceeds in stages. First comes stabilization: understanding symptoms, reducing shame, grounding skills, work with bodily safety, sleep, boundaries, recognizing triggers, and getting out of chronic self-criticism. This is an important part of treatment, because without sufficient support, deep trauma-focused work can be overwhelming.

Then may come processing of traumatic experience: EMDR, trauma-focused CBT, body-oriented methods, IFS, Schema Therapy, ACT, DBT skills for emotional regulation. The choice of method depends not only on the diagnosis, but also on dissociation, current safety, resources, neurodivergence, level of masking, relationship with the body, capacity to tolerate emotions, and degree of life stability in the present moment.

For neurodivergent people, therapy should be adapted: more respect for sensory experience, pace, direct communication, need for structure; not interpreting autistic traits as avoidance; not confusing ADHD-related difficulties with resistance.

Conclusion

CPTSD is a condition in which the nervous system and one’s relationship to oneself and other people were formed under conditions of prolonged unsafety. In neurodivergent people, the risk of such experience may be higher, because in this world we are more often met with misunderstanding, rejection, punishment, and demands to endlessly adapt.

That is why in diagnosis it is important to pay attention to the fact that trauma can imitate symptoms of ASD and ADHD, but ASD and ADHD can also exist without traumatic events. Moreover, unrecognized neurodivergence often becomes part of the traumatic story. Good diagnosis asks a more precise question: what was there in the person from the very beginning, what happened later, which strategies helped them survive, which of them now interfere with living, and what kind of support is needed so that the nervous system can finally stop living as if the danger were still ongoing.