How Autistic Trauma Compromises Executive Function | The Neurodiverging Podcast

In this series, we delve into a personal journey—Danielle’s recent experience with (almost) autistic burnout—and explore practical strategies that facilitated their surprisingly swift recovery.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube

About Neurodiverging

Neurodiverging is dedicated to helping neurodiverse folk find the resources we need to live better lives as individuals, and to further disability awareness and social justice efforts to improve all our lives as part of the larger, world community. If you’re interested in learning more, you can:

• Join our mailing list to make sure you are notified when there’s a new episode!
• Take a look around at previous podcast episodes, blog posts, and coaching offerings here on neurodiverging.com.
• Looking for something specific or have a question? Send us an email at contact@neurodiverging.com.
• Check us out on Patreon to support this podcast and blog!

Transcript: How Autistic Trauma Compromises Executive Function

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Neurodiverging Podcast. My name is Danielle Sullivan, and I am your host. I am happy to be back with you today.

If you missed it last episode, I was talking about a recent experience I had where I almost went into full burnout after many years of not even coming close. This episode coming up is part of that series,
exploring burnout from my own recent experience, and what I think burnout is about for a lot of us and how it affects us in the long term.

Before I get excited and start talking, I do want to thank my patrons over at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging. They are just so fantastic. I know I’ve been saying that. a lot lately, but I’ll just say it again. We do these Get Stuff Done body doubling accountability calls twice a week over there, and it has just been so fantastic lately being able to talk to folks and work on stuff together and get to know each other and make really good friendships.

And I know many of the other folks in the community are feeling that way too. I have just been so honored to work with them. They are, in fact, the impetus behind our upcoming executive function challenge. So thank you so much to my patrons. If you would like to join us in supporting my ability to do this podcast and supporting me in this work, please go ahead to patreon.com/neurodiverging and check out the Patreon. It’s real cool. There’s a lot of perks. It’s a great community.

When I recorded my first episode on burnout a couple of weeks ago, I had been thinking that after that episode explaining what started my my roll down into burnout, I thought, the second episode will be, once I recognize that I was going into burnout, what I started to do or what I started to change to make it so that I could climb back out.

I still want to do that episode, because I think it’s an important piece, but I was thinking about it this week and realizing that actually there’s a whole other chunk about burnout that I don’t think is talked about enough that I really had to contend with in my recent experience, that I want to devote the episode to today. And that chunk is executive function.

Now, we had already planned to do the executive function challenge before I realized this, so that was kind of interesting to me. It’s like, wow, executive function really is everything, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve talked enough about executive function on this podcast. We do have an episode from a long time ago,
like maybe the second season or so, talking about tips for improving your executive function. But I don’t even know if I like explain what executive function is. And a lot of you are new.

So here’s what I’m going to do today. I’m going to explain what executive function is, and I’m going to explain why I think that contending with our expectations of ourselves around executive function are so important when you are in or approaching autistic burnout.

The best way I have found to explain executive function to clients and other people I’m working with is: Think of when you go into the doctor’s office, and there’s a person at the reception desk,
and that person’s job is to filter everyone coming into the office and all the phone calls coming in and all the emails coming in and send them where they’re supposed to go so they get dealt with appropriately.

Executive function is within this prefrontal cortex part of your brain, and that’s basically its job, is to filter everything coming into your body, whether that’s through, well, it’s always through your senses,
right? But whether that’s stuff you’re seeing, stuff you’re hearing, stuff you’re thinking about, to filter all of that and send it into places where you can pick it up later and like do something, act upon it. So that’s the easiest way I can think of. or the best metaphor I can think of, to talk about executive function.

This is another thing I think people should know. When you Google “executive function,” you find lists that are like you have seven, you have nine, you have 30, you have two! The reason that that happens is because different researchers divide executive function into different bits. So yeah, there are seven, there are nine, there are 30, depending on how granular you want to go on executive function. I tend to like the list from, I think it’s Dr. Brown, who is an ADHD researcher. I’ll put a link below. I find his the easiest to sort of wrangle with and use practically in my day-to-day working with clients on these issues.

Here are some things that fall under executive function. The ones people know are things like organization, prioritizing, being able to take information and put it in places so that you can find it later and act with it later. Another piece of executive function is working memory: being able to hold information from one environment to another environment. So when you go through the door and you’re like, “What am I doing here?” That’s a failure of working memory.

(I’m well known for this.) Being able to keep information in your short-term memory for long enough to act upon it [is working memory]. This is also exemplified by, like, you tell your kid, “Hey,
when you’re done watching this episode, can you bring your laundry upstairs?” And they can hold the thing that you ask for an amount of time, but they might not be able to hold it long enough for the episode to end.

And then they’ve forgotten to bring their laundry upstairs and we get frustrated with them, right? And so that’s an example of the skill with working memory not being up to the task that is being demanded of, them.

Another piece is flexibility. And this is both emotional flexibility and cognitive flexibility. [For example,] being able to reframe how you think about things. Being able to say, “Well, that was frustrating, but I can learn from it and I can change it moving forward.” Or, “Oh, my plan has been disrupted, but that’s okay. I can tweak. I can rebuild.” That’s cognitive flexibility. That’s a big piece of executive function.

Then [there’s] something called inhibitory control, which is the ability to suppress or reduce irrelevant or impulsive responses. [For example,] controlling impulsive behaviors, regulating emotions, making decisions, and managing impulses around those decisions, that’s all part of inhibitory control. And that’s all part of executive function.

And then obviously, attention, we talk about a lot.

Here’s why I’m talking about executive function so much in an episode that’s supposed to be about burnout. What I really noticed in my recent experience, that I hadn’t really put together before, having experienced the trauma of the miscarriage and then other burdens on top of that, and almost sliding into burnout…

One of the things that I recognized was going wrong pretty quickly was that my executive function (which is not that great to start with. On a scale of one to 100, I’m at a 60/70 on a good day. It’s not terrible, but it’s not my strongest skill.) My executive function skills started to lag incredibly.

And that made me think about how much trauma of any kind affects executive function for most of us — I hazard to say all — but for many, many, many autistics anyway, those of us who are going into burnout are going into burnout because of a long-time chronic trauma.

Whether that’s the trauma of being neurodivergent in an ableist world, the trauma of masking for the long term, or the trauma of constant sensory input day after day, or some combination, or an external trauma like I had with a health issue or somebody dying or a breakup or anything like that. So many autistics experience burnout as a result of trauma, or their burnout is compounded by trauma in some way.

And trauma, we know, affects our executive function because brains are complicated. Your executive function is not like a stable skill that you just hold through your lifetime. It’s a skill that varies based on how your brain is functioning, and trauma affects brain function at a very basic level.

And saying this now, I’m kind of like, “Well, duh.” But when I figured this out, it was a huge Aha! moment for me, because I have noticed in the past that many, many, many clients have struggled with basics during an autistic burnout. We struggle to eat, we struggle to drink, we struggle to go outside, we struggle to talk to our friends, we struggle to keep our rooms clean or have clean clothes. We struggle to feed the cat or walk the dog.

As a coach, I had attributed all those struggles to an energy dip. When you’re burnt out, you are tired, you are fatigued. I had not put together explicitly that diminishing executive function is also a direct result of the trauma of autistic burnout.

So anyway, when I hit the nadir of where I was going to get recently with that almost burnout, I noticed some of the things I just labeled for you. And I talked about it in the first episode too. I had trouble eating, I had trouble going to bed on time, I wasn’t keeping my room clean, I was late feeding the pets, I was feeding the kids, I wasn’t always feeding myself, I wasn’t going outside, I wasn’t talking to as many friends, I stepped back from Neurodiverging.

A lot of that was to create room for recovery in the sense of like feeling better and doing the somatic work and the emotional resilience work to feel better, which I will talk about soon. But a lot of it was also that my executive function was totally borked because I was recovering from trauma.

When I did my trauma-informed certification and also in some of the neuroscience work I’ve done, I have looked at trauma and its effects on overall well-being. But I hadn’t looked at executive functions specifically, which was a huge oversight on my part in retrospect, because like, again, now that I’ve hit the ah -ha, it’s like, “Oh, duh,” right?

But here are some things that trauma does to the brain that I think are related to executive functions.
So the first thing is the thing I already talked about: trauma can impair working memory. Working memory is crucial for holding and manipulating information temporarily. Trauma can affect working memory by disrupting the neural networks involved in that function.

So, people who have experienced trauma will struggle with tasks that require holding and manipulating that information in their minds, which can affect our ability to plan, to organize, and to solve problems. So all of us who feel like we’re drifting in a fog during burnout, there you go.

Another thing I talked about already was cognitive flexibility, that ability to change your plans when something goes wrong and to not have a big emotional tantrum about it. Trauma can lead to difficulties in cognitive flexibility because when you’ve experienced trauma, you are using so much background energy to do basic things that it limits our ability to be flexible, and we end up having more rigid thinking patterns.

(This is also part of a bigger discussion about what autism is, and I’m not going to get into that too much today, but you might know if you’re autistic or you know people who are autistic, that one of the traits that is looked for when you’re considering a diagnosis of autism is you are looking for this trait of cognitive inflexibility or rigid thinking. And a lot of us who work in this field are now starting to realize that actually maybe rigid thinking isn’t an autism symptom.

Maybe rigid thinking is a result of the stress that autistic people are facing. And when we reduce our stress and live more neurodivergent-affirming lives, we actually reduce our rigid thinking patterns.

That’s been my personal experience. I was definitely a rigid thinker. And when I am tired and overwhelmed, I go right back to rigid thinking. But for me, it’s a stress response. It might be related to my autism, but it is not of my autism. I don’t know if that makes sense.)

But anyway, trauma is deeply related to this rigid thinking pattern that we often find. And if we can’t adjust to new information or perspectives or ideas, how are we supposed to get out of burnout? Part of burnout is changing what you are doing to fit what you need to do to heal. And if we can’t because we’re stuck in rigidity, that’s hugely related to trauma.

Other things related to trauma that affect executive function: trauma survivors often have difficulty in sustaining attention and focusing on tasks. That is a hallmark of executive function, part of its job. And when you have trouble sustaining attention and focusing, you can end up being hyperaroused or hypervigilant. You might experience intrusive thoughts related to the traumas. I definitely experienced intrusive thoughts when I was recovering from my miscarriage and that did impede my ability to remember that I should make dinner or focus on thinking about what I should make. Concentrating on everyday activities that require consistent attention can be really negatively affected by trauma.

The other big thing is emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is one of those executive functions that people don’t realize is an executive function, but it is again part of that prefrontal cortex. Emotional regulation is also, I should just say, the ability to feel your feeling, but not let it take over your actions.

When you get angry about something that is a perceived injustice and you know that something unjust has happened and you want to fix it and you feel that emotion and those physical sensations that accompany anger, but you also know that whatever situation you’re in, it is not the place that’s going to affect justice.

For example, if I hear on the news that something terrible has happened in the world and it makes me angry, yelling at my kid is not the appropriate emotional response to dealing with that injustice. It’s not going to create a more just world, right? I should go yell at some other people, but not my kid.

That’s emotional regulation. That’s feeling the feeling and wrangling with it and deciding where to output that feeling.

Trauma disrupts emotional regulation. It disrupts the neural circuits that are involved in the emotional processing. That can make it hard to manage and regulate your emotions. Then, you’re more reactive, you have more mood swings, you have difficulty coping with newer stresses, and if you can’t can’t deal with new things coming your way, as I couldn’t… I talked about that in my last episode. The miscarriage tipped me over and made it impossible for me to deal with any new thing that happened.

We get snippy. We have mood swings. We go from highs to lows. For me, I get emotionally reactive in the sense that I’m not as able to handle increased sensory input. So I got really, I’m just gonna say it, when I was dealing with the miscarriage, I got really bitchy anytime anybody made squeaky noises or yelled or jumped up and down.

I was like able to handle it, but it wasn’t my normal response. That emotional dysregulation that came out of the trauma for me was a big piece of what impeded my ability to do everything I wanted to do.

So why am I talking about emotional regulation in a series that’s supposed to be devoted to burnout? What it is for me is that I think there is a misunderstanding, or a lack of understanding in our community, that it is normal when you experience a trauma to have reduced executive function thereafter.

In my clients, I can say I see reduced executive function for something like six months to two years after the identification of an autistic burnout. It is a natural trauma response. It is not an indication — and I spent some time trying to drive this home last episode, but I’ll drive it home again. It is not an indication that you are failing or that you aren’t good enough, or that you could try harder and you’d be able to do things.

It is an indication of brain damage, to be honest. Trauma affects the physical structures of our brains,
sometimes for the long-term. It doesn’t mean that you’re never going to get your executive functions back, but that part of burnout recovery is giving yourself space to rebuild a lot of that stuff or to try new things. And to recognize that you have experienced a really significant heavy event and you don’t have to push through it, and you don’t have to feel like you’re not healing fast enough.

Your brain is going to heal as fast as it can, and your brain’s really flexible and resilient. But also brain damage is serious. And we don’t always think of trauma as brain damage. And it’s not the same as getting hit by a car, but in some cases, it can have somewhat analogous structural changes to the brain. And that’s important to remember. Burnout is a health event.

If you are struggling with executive function during or after a burnout, you’re not alone in it, and it’s super normal. It’s not an indication of failure. It also doesn’t mean that you are bad at executive function.

And that’s, I think, what I wanted to get across with this episode especially, and with the education that has hopefully been helpful for you about how your brain is working. So many clients come in after a burnout and are just like, “I’m bad at executive function. I can’t do it. I can’t organize. I can’t prioritize. I can’t emotionally regulate.” That might be true.

Maybe you can’t do it right now, but your skill with executive functions right during or after a burnout is not indicative of your overall executive function skill when you are healthy and well. It’s just not. It’s like looking at a stroke survivor’s speech and saying, “Well, you’re just bad at speaking!” Yeah, you might have diminished executive function for many years or for life-long, possibly, but we don’t actually know because you’ve just been through a huge event or series of chronic trauma-instigating events.

We don’t know what your skill is going to be because we’re redeveloping that skill right now. I guess this is another call for a growth mindset when it comes to healing from burnout. I really strongly advise you to notice when you’re telling yourself, “I’m not good at,” and to offer a reframe to yourself and say, “I am relearning this skill after a serious event.” And to take what happened to you seriously, because so many of us pushed through burnouts because of this internalized shame and this idea of we’re just not trying hard enough.

Sometimes we have to push through burnouts because of our life circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also offer ourselves some recognition of the fact that just because it’s hard now doesn’t mean it will be hard forever. And just because you can’t do the thing now doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to do it.

I used to think I was bad at executive function stuff, but from post-(autistic)-identification-Danielle, all the way up to pre-miscarriage-Danielle, my executive function skill was in significantly better shape than it had been at any other point in my life.

That’s not just because I’m studying the hacks and I’m talking to people about it and I’m learning about it. Like learning about it helps. But also it’s because I felt better ,and when you feel better you’re able to practice prioritizing and organizing and holding on to working memory stuff longer and all these things from a place of healthier brain function.

When your brain function is inhibited, of course your executive function is going to be inhibited. Of course it is, so why are we judging ourselves about it?

Anyway, if you’re dealing with burnout or you have dealt with burnout or you might deal with burnout again in the future, this is just a call to understand your brain is going to be more or less functional based on how mentally well you are in the moment.

And mental wellness is not something that we get to decide for ourselves fully. There are things we can do to improve our mental wellness, absolutely. But there are also times when you’re going to hit a traumatic circumstance that has nothing to do with that you couldn’t have avoided.

Being gentle with yourself and recognizing that this could be a substantial injury and that just like you go to PT after a car accident and maybe to speech therapy after a stroke, you also need to be kind to the whole prefrontal cortex after a burnout. Your emotional regulation might take time to rebuild. Your prioritization and organization might take time to rebuild.

It doesn’t mean you’ll never be able to do it again. It just means you can’t do it right now and you’re practicing, okay? So what can you do today to practice? Just say to yourself, “I’m practicing emotional regulation. I’m practicing taking deep breaths when I get overwhelmed. I’m practicing not shaming myself when I walk through the door and forget what I came into the room for.”

You’re practicing. Thanks so much for being here with me today. I hope this was helpful for you. If it was and you’d like to throw some money in the pot, please go to patreon.com /Neurodiverging and tell us about what’s going on for you and avail yourself of the many resources in the great community we have in the Patreon.

Also, I know there’s was a little plug in the beginning, but we do have a five day free executive function challenge coming up. You can sign up and learn more at neurodiverging.com/together.

It is a free five day challenge that we are hosting. It will have a video lesson for me and then a thing you can do every day to learn how to improve your executive function. And I hope you’ll join us. There’ll be a community support aspect. There’ll be lots of feedback opportunities for me. It’s going to be a great to be really fun. I’m like really excited about it. It starts on March 18th, neurodiverging.com/together.

And saying that, please remember, we are all in this together.