 What can they do? What should they do if they feel like they might be struggling with PTSD or CPTSD? Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely treatment for PTSD. And before we start recording, we talked about innate neurodivergence versus acquired neurodivergence. So autism isn't innate, like you're born with that neurology. PTSD is acquired. And so it's an acquired neurodivergence that can be treated, can be supported, we can heal from it. I think for a lot of people, the combination of pharmaceutical, so medication support and therapy tends to be the ideal equation. This gets much more complicated for autistic people. We don't have it so far anyway, just for helping autistic people with like mild anxiety. Yeah, partly like therapists are scared of us. If you go to a therapist and you're like, I'm autistic and I'm PTSD. A lot of therapists, if they don't have like extensive training in autism, they're like, oh, I don't do autism. Like it feels, I mean, talk about alien, like a lot of therapists treat it like this alien other of like, oh, you have to go to a specialist for that. So finding support. So finding someone who's not scared of you and it will take you on. But then also finding someone who understands your neurology. So for example, alexithymia, someone who's autistic could be in therapy and suffering a great deal. But their mood is flat. They may be talking about incredibly traumatic things but not showing a lot of emotion. So a therapist might misinterpret that as they're not suffering because they're not displaying their emotion in the typical way. I suppose you have the lack of using the indirect communication as well. That as well. And yes, and also then with trauma work, really considering the sensory profile. A lot of trauma work, not all trauma work, but a lot of trauma work involves exposure to some extent because one of the core symptoms of PTSD is avoidance. And avoidance actually perpetuates the anxiety around the trauma and it makes it grow. So trauma treatments, different levels of exposure. Some it's like really intense exposure, like a lot of kind of military PTSD treatments are very intense exposure. It's not all that intense, but there's some element of exposure to talking about it. So considering the sensory profile of the person when you're doing exposure based work, I think that is one of the tricky things. You asked me what people could do and I'm telling you like all the hard things about getting. So let me flip to something more hopeful. So those are some of the barriers people experience. There is no one like therapy that works for all autistic people because we're an incredibly diverse group. Some of the therapies that I often hear autistic people have positive experiences with include internal family systems or parts work. And that can also be really powerful for trauma. So IFS is the acronym, internal family systems. EMDR is effective. Yeah, it's I do some IFS and I really like it. You're talking about different parts of yourself, which makes it, it takes this kind of abstract idea of the fact that we have multiple parts of us in terms of concrete, which I like. So I like it for autistic people for a lot of reasons and I like it for trauma. And so I think it can go really well in the combination of autistic trauma. Some people respond really well to EMDR, other people don't. Cognitive processing therapy is kind of the gold standard for PTSD in a lot of circles. I think that's where you really want to be considering the person's sensory profile. I think some autistic people can certainly respond well to it. Some have a really strong reaction to it. But I think, I think, so yeah, there's all these different theories. I think finding a therapist that you feel really safe with connected to is probably the most important part. Is this someone who is curious about your experience, who you feel connected to? Because that co-regulation that happens in therapy, as you're working through your trauma, like, I don't want to be dismissive of what kind of therapy you do. But I actually think that's probably the most important is finding a person that you can connect with and feel safe with. So you don't feel like you have to mask how you are, you don't feel... You can tell like, hey, I'm getting sensory overloaded or like, I'm shutting down. I know I look regulated, but I'm shutting down. We need to hit the brakes here. Someone where you can safely communicate that, yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to kind of look at you with an inquisitive light. What do you mean? What do you mean, you look so calm? I've had lots of ones like that before, but yeah. I'm just, my head's going off on all the barriers in therapy and stuff, and yeah, it's there. I think finding someone that you can genuinely connect with is the best. If you're always closed off and you're trying to present in a certain way, then it's going to be really hard to open up about things. And throughout all the years of therapy that I did when I was younger and some of the therapy that I've done in adulthood, really, it's really tough. It's hard to find anyone. We already have an issue with employment and pretty much all of the autism specialists that I can find in the UK. There's no general health care version of it. You go there for them to help you treat with your depression and anxiety, but not in the context of autism. If I was to say, Alex, if I were to them, they would have no idea exactly at all what I mean. Even just the basic concepts, so the majority of the actual therapy that's done is me explaining to them bits about autism. So it's like almost I'm educating them rather than telling my experiences and having it dissected and broken up and processed. There's so much education that happens. There's a really interesting article. It's a qualitative study. It talked about autistic people's experiences with therapy. And I think that was one of the themes that came up. I just feel like they were educating their therapists about what autism is. On one hand, if it's a long-term therapist and they're curious, I think that makes sense that we do some of that. And that can be part of explaining our internal world. But if it's a shorter-term therapy and a person's feeling like they're spending the bulk of the hour educating versus actually diving into the work, that's just not a great equation. It's also awareness of the overlap of things as well. The different reactions that we can have to different conditions, different neurodivergencies, acquired neurodivergencies, like PTSD. I mean, panic disorder for me, I'd probably say that. Acquired. I don't know, it's a hard world to have a game. Yeah. I'm starting to feel guilty that I was so negative. Can I skip back to some practical suggestions for people who are maybe listening to this and feeling so deflated now? Yeah, yeah. I think, so I know for me just learning the science of what was happening to my body with PTSD was so regulating. Similar to like, oh, my dopamine is low. And I think for autistic people, if we can understand what's happening to our bodies, it's really helpful. A good therapist can do this, but you can also actually do this with YouTube of the anatomy of PTSD or just understanding the fight-or-flight response. And then being able to kind of like, okay, my amygdala is going haywire right now. So I think for autistic people, learning what's happening is really helpful and people can do that on their own. The second thing is grounding strategies. People hear a lot about relaxation strategies, which helps get us out of our stress response. I think the two basic ingredients of a good trauma treatment starts with grounding and then relaxation strategies. But I actually prioritize grounding first. And that is, again, those practices that help us relocate ourselves in the here and the now. So it can be as simple as going and washing your hands with cold water and focusing your attention. Like this is what the water feels like on my hands or creating pressure or like there's the classic five, four, three, two, one, like list five things you see going through the senses. I actually have some grounding strategies up on my website available for free like a PDF or you can YouTube or Google grounding strategies. But education of what the heck is happening to your body, grounding strategies and then getting some like medication support. I think for a lot of people, especially if they can't sleep, those would be kind of until you find a unicorn therapist that knows how to work with you. Well, in terms of the medication front, I mean, I don't know much about PTSD medications. I imagine it would be similar to anxiety. Or is it kind of more like the type of. Depends on the person depends on the provider depends on what they're like presenting with if they're if they're more dominantly like shut down depressed. Versus if they're more in that activated state, but getting like good pharmaceutical support just to help your body kind of be able to absorb some of it, especially because like I mentioned, I think our sleep gets really dysregulated for autistic people. But yeah, there's there's a variety of different medication options.