The Signs Were Deliberately Obscured

Content warnings: Intimate partner violence/abuse, sexual assault (statistical mention, not depicted), coercive control, gaslighting, body dysmorphic disorder, trauma.

Autistic people, along with other disabled people, experience significantly higher rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, financial exploitation, emotional abuse, and coercive control than non-disabled peers.

Our networks are often smaller. This isolation is a critical vulnerability. It means fewer confidantes to voice early unease to and fewer allies positioned offer crucial corroboration. Our ways of processing language, intent, and social nuance are often divergent. Gaslighting – the systematic undermining of a person’s reality – lands with force when your way of processing the world is routinely invalidated.

My first boyfriend exploited my undiagnosed body dysmorphic disorder because the world had already implicitly taught me – and by extension him – that my body and my sense of safety was something to be managed, commented on, and controlled. A more recent ex weaponized my need for clarity and literal understanding because he knew the cultural script often paints autistic demands for explicitness as unreasonable.

A narrative is commonly shared on TikTok and other social media spaces: autistic pattern recognition gives us a radar to be able to tell when someone has bad intentions. The idea that autistic pattern recognition is a protective factor against harm rests on a series of flawed assumptions: that harmful interpersonal patterns are instantly recognizable across contexts; that abuse always wears an easily identifiable face; that trauma itself doesn’t reshape the lens through which we perceive threat and safety.

Pattern recognition relies on matching current input to stored templates, but when the harm is novel or deliberately misrepresented, there’s nothing to match it to.

Lovebombing works because it mimics the intensity of genuine connection and the overwhelming validation of being chosen – sensations particularly potent for those who have experienced social rejection. When grand future-fantasy building is presented as devotion, our pattern recognition system is fed misleading data.

When survival is the imperative, nuanced pattern detection is a luxury. During my years with my first boyfriend, my nervous system existed in a state of near-constant low-grade alarm, with intermittent spikes of terror. Hypervigilance is a state of generalized, exhausting threat scanning that often misses specific dangers while amplifying perceived ones.

In a world that often feels hostile to our neurology, the idea that we possess an innate cognitive shield against bad actors offers comfort. It suggests safety is attainable through individual effort: if I am smart enough, I can outmaneuver all harm. It transforms safety from a complex, collective social responsibility into a personal intellectual achievement.

Acknowledging the systemic vulnerability of autistic people forces a confrontation with uncomfortable truths about the prevalence of predation within society and sometimes within our own communities. Breaking this cycle demands a shift in focus – away from auditing the survivor’s vigilance, and toward demanding accountability and building collective safety.

We need narratives that say: “Lovebombing often feels like this overwhelming vortex of intense attention, rapid commitment, and future-faking that isolates you quickly.” “Exploiting a known, deep-seated insecurity – especially one related to your neurodivergence or co-occurring conditions – is a core tactic of control, not a sign of intimacy.” “Watch for the ‘diagnosing’ of your traits: ‘You’re just oversensitive because you’re autistic’ is used to dismiss valid concerns.” It is wisdom passed hand-to-hand.

My pattern recognition didn’t fail me when I missed the signs etched in the early days of those relationships - those signs were deliberately obscured. The right to exist free from abuse lies in the essential collective work of radical truth-telling and directing accountability to where it belongs: abusers and the systems that enable abuse.