Autism Anxiety Depression Psychosis and Paranoia

By Travis Breeding

This is a very thorough look at Autism from all angles. This book address anxiety, depression, psychosis, and paranoia. These are secondary issues that can affect people with autism. Travis provides real-life examples from his life and talks about how anxiety, depression, psychosis, and paranoia coincide with autism to present a unique challenge and opportunity in his life. Travis breaks it down and describes each secondary symptom of Autism in this amazing book.

Travis explains how anxiety from social situations and life in general has triggered psychosis and paranoia. Travis experiences hallucinations and delusional thinking from time to time. He must try to stay grounded and try to minimize his anxiety. He also explains how anxiety can trigger depression. He continues to explain how his perseverative thinking causes him to obsess over his depression turning it into an unwanted special interest.

Travis also explains how he has tried to mask his autism to fit into a society that doesn't sometimes doesn't understand him. Masking or hiding autism comes with a price because it creates an added layer of anxiety in trying to be someone you aren't constantly. This added anxiety can lead to increased depression and paranoia.

Travis gives tips for increasing self-esteem for autistic people while staying true to themselves and who they are. Travis preaches that you can create your own happiness when you stop masking to please others and embrace the autistic self.

This book is an in-depth look at how the secondary co-morbid issues of anxiety, depression, psychosis, and paranoia all interact with one another to work with autism. This is an amazing tool to help autistic people with co-morbid mental health issues. It is an even better tool in helping people who love and work with autistic people understand what they go through on a daily basis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breeding Publishing
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463630877

Travis Breeding

Travis is an author from Huntington Indiana how enjoys entertaining and educating through words. He enjoys telling a story and taking it from his mind to paper. He has authored several books on autism, mental illness, schizophrenia, and disability issues. He continues to write about those issues but also explores some fiction writing as well. Travis has a loving family and enjoys spending time with friends and family. He loves to play bingo and meet new people. One day Travis hopes to start a family of his own and give them so much love. Travis would like to thank his readers for supporting him on his journey of becoming an author. He could not have done it without you. If you would like to get in touch with Travis please email him at tbreedauthoratgmaildotcom,

Book preview

Autism Anxiety Depression Psychosis and Paranoia

Travis Breeding

Published by Travis Breeding at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Travis Breeding

All Rights Reserved

Contents

Chapter One: An Aspie’s Psychosis

Chapter Two: Beating the Aspie Blues

Chapter Three: A Super Anxious Aspie

Chapter Four: I Want to Be and Love My Autistic Self

About the Author

Chapter One An Aspie’s Psychosis

Many things have happened over the years before being diagnosed with autism and since being diagnosed with autism over the years to make me feel like I am not a real person as an autistic man.

I suppose it is a combination of all those things that have happened or all the experiences I have had through the years that have led me to feel the way I am.

The combination of developing feelings of desiring close friendships and relationships with a female friend along with not feeling like autism therapy services want to help me with that issue have probably led to these feelings.

I have much confusion about well just about everything sexual and sexuality wise. One thing I do know that is a real feeling for me is that I know that I am not a real person and will never be a real person without either having close strong connections with women or becoming a woman myself.

That is why it is so important for me to connect with women. Not only because I think women are beautiful but because I want to be their friends.

Something that is hard for me to understand though is that sometimes if you show that you think women are beautiful too much without connecting with the emotionally you are creepy and when I am creepy that makes me feel like I am a bad person. That also makes me feel like I am not a real person.

Add to that my understanding of emotional connection and I sometimes feel trapped inside of my mind like I can’t get out. I feel I cannot express myself and sometimes I secretly wish that I was non-verbal and had a different kind of autism than just Asperger Syndrome.

At least being non-verbal you cannot say the wrong things. You might be able to do the wrong thing in some way, but you cannot say the wrong things that offend people or upset them or hurt them.

As time has went on my desire for close friendship with women has increased and I sometimes don’t know what to do with those feelings.

It is all a very confusing world for me to live in. I mean take for example the fact that sex is something that we do with someone we love and care about but also then there’s the whole idea that sex is something that we only do with people that we care about in a certain way.

One thing I’ve learned about life and socializing in general as being someone with autism is that context is everywhere. One thing we must be able to do is understand social context and that is where I struggle.

So, there are many kinds of love, right? But there’s only one kind of love where you get to experience touching a woman or connecting with her in a physical way.

So maybe love has context too. It is a certain context of love where you touch a breast or kiss a woman. But what if we don’t understand that context and more so what happens when that context of love seems to take the most advanced type of social skills there are. Even more advanced social skills than just being friends with someone.

But here again context comes into play again because after-all even if it is a romantic relationship, I’m constantly told it is still a friendship and it is just simply that the two people have become better friends now and are now good friends.

But then this makes me think that only good friends get to kiss a woman or caress her breast. Then I start to feel bad because I feel I am not a good friend. It takes super amazing social skills to become a good friend.

I’ve read so many how to books on autism and dating and dating in general and even autism and friendship and friendship in general and while I apply many things I read or try to I still often feel a failure and don’t feel like a real person or a good person because I don’t have that one type of contextual connection that involves touch or intimacy with a woman.

I know that my social understanding of life in general is flawed but the sad part is that I am very aware that my social understanding of sexuality and relationships are even more flawed.

I have read numerous studies that suggest that individuals with higher functioning autism sometimes experience more depression simply because they are more aware of their disability and how it affects their life. I firmly believe this is 100 percent a true statement.

It’s very hard for me to get help because not everyone’s brain works like me. I have found over the years that even what seems like the easiest social task for some breaks down to hundreds of little micro-steps for me and I find myself analyzing each step trying to figure out how to do it. Often by the time I have analyzed each of the micro-steps the opportunity for me to apply the social skill has passed.

One thing is for certain. I don’t feel confident without women. I don’t feel like a good person without women. I don’t feel like a real person without women.

I try to explain to people my feelings. I think it is a developmental issue. I never picked up on the social stuff of how to relate to women but more so how to relate to women changed over time as I got older.

In elementary school girls would engage me and teach me things. Like it seemed like they wanted to be around me. It was not creepy to be fond of them and think they were awesome. But I think it’s the combination of puberty for them and puberty for me that made it so at about middle school girls didn’t seem to appreciate the same kind of attention from me as they once did in elementary school and often that same kind of attention, I gave them in elementary school was now perceived as creepy by them.

Perhaps that is why I feel like I am not a good person and not a real person. I mean, creepy isn’t exactly a feel-good word. It is not a compliment to tell someone that they are creepy.

Believe me I have heard the word creepy from women so many times over the years. I think after a while I just started believing I was creepy instead of Travis.

But perhaps what has been more confusing is the word that women often use with creepy. They often use the phrase you’re creepy nice.

Before I continue, I want to say that I have no anger or hate towards women. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I love women and want to be best friends with every woman I meet. That is why I have tried so hard to dedicate my life to learning how to not be creepy or creepy nice.

You might even say that this phrase creepy nice became the true definition of what autism means to me. I am not sure why other adults with autism or Asperger’s seek out help originally but I can honestly say the reason I went to my first counselor ever is to find out why girls were always telling me I was creepy nice.

Digging deeper into the issue and after several referrals to different doctors and counselors probably a year to 18 months later I was told I had Asperger’s Syndrome.

At the time I think I was a bit sad and a bit confused but also a bit excited to have an answer or a reason for why I was creepy nice. I thought well maybe now I can get a girlfriend or be closer with women.

One thing I have learned is that while a diagnosis is nice to have it does not change anything developmentally about your brain.

Imagine being someone who has difficulty understanding social and emotional things being told they are creepy nice repeatedly. Eventually I believed that creepy nice defined me and I was no longer Travis, but I was on a quest to change that.

My research into those two words creepy nice was interesting. Sitting here I was trying to analyze this. By the way creepy nice is one of those things that doesn’t really have a true definition. There is nothing anywhere in the world that says, if you do this you will be creepy nice, if you don’t do this you will not be creepy nice. I have also learned that usually a woman cannot sit there and explain to you what it is you are doing that is creepy nice. For one, chances are if you have made her feel like you are creepy nice she is not exactly going to want to help you or explain anything to you to help you not be creepy nice. Two, sometimes they do not even really know or understand because they just know that it is a certain feeling that they get.

This led me to my realization that you cannot really define feelings. Feelings also have context so what feels happy to one person might not feel happy to another person. Happiness can look different in two different people. It makes me chuckle just a little to think about social context and emotional context. All my research about social relationships have led me to learn that context is king and probably the most important part of autism spectrum disorder and life.

Sitting here with autism even as I write this, I still feel perplexed and confused. How is it that the words creepy nice go together in the same sentence?

Throughout my entire life I have thought of things in either one of two categories in everything in life. That is because I am a black and white thinker and struggle with grey areas.

I can separate things easily most of the time. You might imagine how confusing it is to try and separate the words creepy nice.

When I learned about the word creepy which by the way was definitely not a word that was even in my vocabulary at all until girls started saying it to me and told me about it I was able to draw a conclusion and associate something that is creepy as being bad which I also associate to someone who is creepy is being bad.

But then there is the word nice. Which totally and completely throws this entire thing into a tail spin. Generally, most people think of nice as being a good thing. But now, nice was being associated with creepy which was a bad thing. What was I to do?

It was not long before many questions started flowing into my brain. Some of the questions really stick out and still stick with me today. I know that this social confusion over sexuality and relationships is because I’m autistic which is why some days, I hate autism and wish I wasn’t autistic but that doesn’t mean I don’t desire to learn to think how neurotypicals think. That doesn’t mean I want to be neurotypical, but I do desire to learn to understand how neurotypical women think.

There will be some back-matter to this story as I continue but one of the biggest questions that is on