21. Codependency and Autism: 5 Reasons ASD Women May be more Prone to Codependent Patterns - Linking ASD and Codependency - Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court, Season 2

After introducing common codependency traits and behaviors, along with the concept of self-verification in Episode 20, we move on to shocking links between the wiring of the austistic brain, and the well-known codependent traits. It is my belief that just like people with narcissistic personality disorder may target people with autism, the reverse may be true as well. Let's dive in.

This is the transcript for Episode 21.

Welcome back to season two of Light in the Battle, emotional detachment as a tactical advantage for family court. Light in the Battle is a podcast for autistic single mothers healing from narcissistic abuse and it is a podcast where we get clearer, calmer, and spiritually and legally harder to mess with.

What I learned in my journey is that the legal advice and strategy for family court against people who make us feel confused or scared just does not land when emotions are running high. Survivors keep losing in court over and over. Then I figured it out: the safe parent has to show that they are the stable, child-focused parent both in all the evidence that they generate (emails, texts, medical reports) and in their demeanor in court.

As long as survivors show up in court frazzled with raging PTSD and resentment and as long as they keep writing angry emails or share how mad they feel that contact has been allowed or refuse to cooperate on certain aspects, they're never going to win and to be able to protect the kids.

Although their concerns and feelings are mostly valid and they won't change after we achieve emotional detachment, domestic abuse survivors need to stop creating content for the other side to use to make them appear unstable and unsafe for the child.

So I'm taking you on the journey that I traveled to get to a point where I detached completely. I cared just as much about my child's well-being, however, I got my head out of my butt and I worked on myself so I could get to a new and improved version. A version of myself that could play by the court's rules to show the truth and the patterns of behavior in an indisputable manner.

So far in Season 2, Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court,

• we've covered how to understand and break the trauma bond in episode 15A to episode 16B

• we've covered PTSD, CPTSD, and what EMDR is, as well as what EMDR did for me though it doesn't work for everyone in episodes 17 and 18.

• we've covered forgiveness, which does not mean reconciliation and how that can be a game changer for your level of peace in episode 19.

• we started covered codependency with definitions, behaviors, and traits as well as the key underpinning concept of self-verification in episode 20.

If you just landed here for some reason without hearing episode 20, I encourage you to start there so that this episode makes more sense if you don't know what codependency is and what it may look like in your life. Episode 20 also explains the concept of self-verification which is foundational to understanding codependency and narcissistic personality disorder. Now let's talk about the link between codependency and autism.

I'm going to list five autistic traits in ASD women that match the five codependent traits we saw in the previous episode. Next week is where we will get a little more hopeful and talk about ways out of codependency as an autistic woman. Side note, I had to script this episode again because I have so much to talk about when it comes to codependency in autistic women, and I needed to structure it well so forgive me if I'm not as spontaneous as I have been in more recent episodes. After codependency, to stay on the topic of emotional detachment in the context of being able to receive, hear, process, and apply any legal advice you're being given by counsel, we'll cover the gratitude piece.

After the piece you will hear about fellowship and mentorship with the Star Network. There will be an episode about surrender and grief, most likely through a Catholic lens but I haven't decided yet and I think that will be it for this specific journey. So make sure to follow the show if you want to catch all the episodes as they drop every week in this season.

Please keep in mind that I am not a trained professional. I'm here to share lived experience, things I've observed, things I've researched, my own analysis, and things that worked for me and have transformed my life. My obsession, my vision is to be a voice that ties things together.

Quick recap of the last episode - codependency looks like:

• lack of boundaries or enmeshment,

• need for control,

• people pleasing and caretaking,

• low self-esteem,

• addiction or substance abuse.

And people with NPD tend to

• attack,

• devalue or discard,

• rewrite reality through gaslighting,

• punish boundaries,

• pull others back into old roles.

And to the ASD brain, as sick as that may sound, this is gold. We're drawn to these dynamics.

I have a blog post about why narcissists target ASD women. This episode is the other side of that same coin. ASD women are at risk of seeking out people displaying dysfunctional patterns of behavior, and codependency in autistic women may be rampant simply due to our wiring. Third thing we covered in the previous episode is that both codependency and NPD are about self-verification.

Self-verification theory explains that human beings seek relationships that confirm how they already see themselves, even when that self-view is painful. We gravitate toward dynamics that feel familiar, predictable, and coherent because that feels safer than uncertainty, even if that uncertainty is objectively safer.

So in a codependent dynamic, the autistic woman's self-image as the responsible one, the reasonable one, the emotionally competent one, is constantly reinforced. The relationship confirms who she believes she is. It stabilizes her internal narrative. And that's where narcissistic or highly self-focused personalities come in as perfect mirrors for this self-concept.

One person needs to be centered over here and will seek someone who centers them. The other sees herself as the stabilizer over there and seeks people who need to be stabilized. This is objectively unhealthy, but from an autistic nervous system's perspective, it feels predictable and it makes sense.

And in turn, predictability and things that make sense, that feels like safety. Autistic nervous systems are wired for predictability, pattern recognition, and consistency. When you grow up feeling different, misunderstood, or responsible for smoothing social friction, you often form a self-concept around being the one who adapts, fixes, explains herself, holds relationships and friendships together.

And so let's go one by one through five characteristics of autistic women that may make them more prone to codependent patterns because they match codependent traits to a T.

So again, the codependent traits, which we're going to match to ASD behaviors and traits, are mainly:

• lack of boundaries or enmeshment,

• need for control,

• people pleasing and caretaking,

• low self-esteem,

• addiction or substance abuse.

  
  

Let's match those to our autistic traits. It's pretty scary.

I'm going to show you how the codependent traits can easily be found in women with ASD. And I'm adding a bonus trait, not listed actually, so make sure to stay until the end. Before we start, I'd like to ask you to leave this post show a five-star review so that my content can reach more women who need to hear this.Thank you so much.

Okay, let's go.

1. The first autistic trait is the reliance on routine and predictability, and that matches the "lack of boundaries or enmeshment".

Here's why. For many women on the spectrum, predictability provides emotional safety and regulation. So when a relationship becomes part of a daily routine, the idea of losing that structure can feel destabilizing, even if the relationship is imbalanced or draining.

The fear of disruption or change can make it harder for neurodivergent women to speak up, set boundaries, renegotiate needs to step away. So it's that much harder to leave. And also when we see ourselves a certain way and the other person reinforces how we see ourselves, the concept of self-verification will compile with our need for predictability, reinforce how we see ourselves, and keep us right where we feel like ourselves, even when it's destructive.

2. The second autistic trait that matches this second codependent trait is the "need for control".

   
   

Control is part of the codependent tendencies. We believe that by erasing ourselves, or by cleaning more, praying more, fasting more, cooking more, looking better, whatever, we can influence the other into the behavior that we want. That's codependency.

Well, ASD women come with a built-in need for control simply because of our wiring and how uncomfortable we feel when things are out of control. We need things to be a certain way to reduce our anxiety. We need to control our environment to not suffer from our sensory challenges. We need to be able to plan our days in advance to know what's coming. We plan recovery time after social interactions. We practice scripts in our heads to control where a conversation might go, etc.

So the codependent trait of needing control, it's built into our system as autistic women.

3. Third autistic trait that matches the third codependent trait: masking and habitual people-pleasing, fawning due to the trauma of living in a neurotypical world. That matches "people-pleasing and caretaking".

   
   

Many autistic women spend years learning how to act normal. Follow unwritten social rules and keep situations positive.

That often requires putting our personal needs aside repeatedly. Namely, to name a big one, the sensory accommodations. How many times have I gone to a restaurant with someone and the noise around me is unbearable and I'm smiling through it, being pleasant and behaving in a socially acceptable manner... While I'm dying inside.

So that's kind of the story of our lives as autistic women. Over time, that coping strategy can spill into adult relationships where autistic women may over-accommodate, struggle to assert boundaries and shape themselves around what they believe others expect. There's a name for it: it's called autistic masking in women and it matches the codependent trait of people-pleasing and fawning, to a T.

4. Fourth autistic trait that matches the fourth codependency trait, rejection sensitivity dysphoria, also known as RSD. I would match that with "low self-esteem".

So for those of you who aren't familiar with this concept, to put it simply, RSD, rejection sensitivity dysphoria, is when you always think that you messed up in a social interaction and people won't want to be your friends.

So you're at work having a seemingly normal conversation with a co-worker and then you leave that situation and you'll go over it in your head over and over trying to analyze all the things you said that you shouldn't have said, and how that person is going to judge you, not want to interact with you again, and just lost respect for you. That's pretty much a daily reality for women on the spectrum. And so yeah, after a lifetime of being corrected, excluded, criticized for being our authentic selves, a lot of women on the spectrum will experience Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. That emotional pain of constant perceived rejection can feel overwhelming and it makes us crave acceptance and ease in relationships.

As a result, we may tolerate unhealthy dynamics or keep quiet in order to avoid being pushed away again, even when that comes at our own expense. Initially, the narcissist is not rejecting us, (they're targeting us actively, as a matter of fact) and we're like, "Yay! One person who wants me and isn't rejecting me." And so we run towards this because we're so used to being judged and rejected everywhere else, even if it's a dysphoria, whether it's real or not, it's how we experience it.

So what looks like low self-esteem in a codependent person, it's called rejection sensitivity dysphoria in autistic women. That's the link that I'm suggesting between the two anyway.

5. Fifth possible behavior observed in some autistic people that matches the fifth codependent trait: "substance abuse".

Research suggests that autistic people are approximately twice as likely to experience substance use problems as the general population. Substance abuse may be more common in the autistic community due to the predisposition to ritualistic and repetitive behavior and, or a need to soothe the nervous system after prolonged exposure to sensory stimuli. That's what we talked about with the character that I created, her name was Jessica.

She's the woman I used as an example in the previous episode. That's what she's doing. She comes home at night. She's exhausted from sensory overwhelm and she reaches for a drink. Another reason substance abuse may be more common in the autistic community is difficulty with self-regulation ... and well, substance abuse is also often found in codependent people. Interesting.

6. The notion of self-regulation leads me to a bonus link that I'm seeing between codependent traits and autistic traits. It's the emotional side, for autistic people, either intense empathy and "emotional enmeshment" or not a good perception of our feelings (alexithymia).

And you see how substance abuse can be one way to self-regulate if we're unable to name our feelings or if they are too intense. Some women with ASD experience emotions deeply and pick up on others feelings almost automatically. This heightened empathy can lead to absorbing other people's emotional states and feeling responsible for fixing them - back to codependent behaviors.

Without clear emotional boundaries, this pattern can blur the line between self and other, thus reinforcing codependent tendencies. Now with ASD, here's a technical term for you: we also deal with alexithymia.

It's a technical term that I learned, for "not being able to know what we're feeling".

Shout out to Orion Kelly, That Autistic Guy on YouTube. He teaches this. Check it out.

In one sentence, alexithymia is an inability to decipher our emotions in real time, if at all. And it's very common in people with ASD. Okay, so we don't know what we're feeling in real time.

Alexithymia means we don't clock it when a person acts in a way that should make us feel uneasy, angry, disappointed, so we don't walk away.

ASD Women may not clock it

when a person acts in a way

that should make us feel

uneasy, angry, disappointed,

so we don't walk away.

That emotion may hit 48 hours later, a week later, and by then you've put your mask back on and you're accommodating again. And so this inability to feel or decode the response that the situation should trigger, that can keep us unable to demand respect, detached emotionally, since we don't even know what we're feeling.

Okay, so this concludes my disturbing, personal analysis of how ASD women are more prone to codependent patterns than the general population and why they may seek out dysfunction. They may not be equipped to see it coming when they're faced with the potential of a dysfunctional relationship.

That is obviously unknowingly, but we're definitely, (because of self-verification, because of the six autistic traits I just listed) we're seeking them out if we're actively codependent - unknowingly.

I do want to stress that at no point is this your fault.

• Having autistic traits is your wiring. You were born that way. It's who you are.

• Being codependent is the result of growing up in a dysfunctional household.

  
  

So none of this is your fault.

At no point am I putting the blame on anyone. I'm describing factually what is being observed and why it's happening. So when I say we're seeking out dysfunction with someone that could have narcissistic traits, I'm not blaming anyone.

It's my logical conclusion after two episodes of explaining how codependency works and why it matches the more well-known autistic traits to a T.

Okay, so before I move on to ways out of codependency for ASD women, please make sure to follow the blog (register below for future posts) and leave a five-star review. This will help the algorithm push this content upwards to help more ASD women that may be coming to terms with their codependent traits and looking for ways out.

Thank you for spending this moment with me today while I nerded out on the links that I'm seeing between Austism in women, and codependency.

I hope it's helpful and gives you a few things to think about. Next week we will be a little more hopeful and talk about ways out of codependency with the autistic brain. I will see you then.

Until then, you make sure to take this life one day at a time.