For a while I allowed myself to entertain the idea that I had been hurt in a way that could be "traumatic" by attributing it to my autism and autistic experience of the world.

Which has some truth to it: bodily experience is viscerally intense for me in a way that (based on observation and writings) I think few other people relate to. Sensory memories are encoded with high fidelity, particularly tactile memories.

It makes sense that others would be less affected by experiences of distressing things happening to their body if they can distract or remove their consciousness to some extent (something I can't do, at least not with tactile stuff) or if their memory of the thing does not persist as intensely or with such detail.

But still, I was intensely ashamed of trying to claim the "trauma" narrative, and wanting that to be true of myself was motivated reasoning: thinking of dealing with The Fear like it was a "phobia" (something irrational to be overcome through exposure) made me feel violently angry and disgusted, and I couldn't really articulate why at the time, but the repulsion was too intense for me to engage with it in that way (thank god).

And ultimately I couldn't make the horrors I was going through make sense through clinical categorizations of human experience. Psychiatry has decided basically that only events that are socially and culturally considered aberrant in a loud, dramatic way can traumatize you.

This framework does not work for me. It automatically categorizes my fear as pathological and disordered in a way that is arbitrary and not worth being curious about, and its only solutions are based in domination of the body by the "higher" functions of the mind.

From the natural world, I learned that it was important to approach everything with openness and curiosity, even if it seemed ugly, chaotic, and inconvenient. Patterns and interconnections were woven throughout the most repellent and confusing parts of nature.

I understood, I think, that I was part of nature and my body was a wilderness like any other, therefore it would be a mistake to dominate and subdue it, imposing artificial order upon it without being willing to sit with it as it really was. I remember the forest and the weeds teaching me this: It is okay for a thing to have no explanation. In fact, existing outside the boundaries of what can be categorized is the most natural thing in the world.

I have found that my fear is rich with information: it communicates to me about my safety needs. Whether or not I can point to a single classically "traumatic" experience to explain it, my fear is deeply and closely connected to fundamental, basic safety needs.

The need to defend one's body from being physically violated is fundamental. The need to be treated with dignity when you are in a vulnerable state is fundamental.

My fear had grown so big and ferocious because it was enforcing these needs when I didn't have the words for them. Approaching my fear with curiosity allowed me to begin thinking, "What are my safety needs?"

Which is something that therapy never investigated in any depth.

I know that exposure therapy is supposed to be about getting in a place where you feel safe while being exposed to the scary thing, but the concept of genuinely feeling safe was incomprehensible to me, and no therapy or therapist seemed to think it was important to investigate whether I knew or could imagine what safety felt like.