What We Carry When We’re Missed Again and Again
By Michelle Labine May 12, 2025
When we talk about trauma, we often think of the major ruptures, losses, events that change everything.
But there’s another kind of trauma.
Quieter. Slower. Often unnamed.
And for many Autistic women—especially those diagnosed later in life—it’s the kind that shapes us the most.
The micro-traumas.
The tiny moments of being missed, misunderstood, or misnamed.
The subtle corrections. The unspoken rules. The pressure to perform.
The way we learn to contort ourselves—just to stay connected.
No single moment breaks us. But over time, these small wounds accumulate.
And they leave a mark.
What Micro-Trauma Looks Like
It’s the teacher who told you to “stop being so dramatic” when you were overstimulated.
The friend who called you intense and drifted away.
The way people rolled their eyes when you shared something you were passionate about.
Being told you were too sensitive. Too serious. Too much. Again, and again.
The times you laughed when you didn’t feel like it, just to smooth things over.
The social gatherings you left feeling like you’d done something wrong—but you didn’t know what. The constant analyzing. The self-correction. The never-quite-knowing if you said the “right” thing.
It’s not just what happened.
It’s what was missing.
The understanding.
The mirroring.
The safety.
When You’re Not Reflected, You Disappear a Little
When you grow up without being accurately reflected—when no one sees your sensory needs, your emotional depth, your communication style—something quiet happens inside you.
You stop trusting your instincts.
You begin editing yourself in real-time.
You learn to watch others before responding.
You become skilled at shaping yourself to meet the moment.
And it works—for a while.
Until it doesn’t.
Because somewhere along the way, we lose access to our internal truth. We know how to keep the peace, but not how to rest in ourselves. We become fluent in performance—and disconnected from our own needs.
That’s what micro-trauma does.
It teaches us to survive.
But it often teaches us to disappear in the process.
The Weight of What Wasn’t Named
For so many late-diagnosed Autistic women, the diagnosis doesn’t just offer clarity—it offers a mirror we’ve never had. And with that mirror comes grief. Because we finally see what we’ve been carrying.
We see the emotional labor of masking.
The impact of being told our reactions were wrong.
The years of wondering why everything felt harder than it should.
We see how many moments we abandoned ourselves—not out of choice, but out of necessity.
And we start to understand: this isn’t about being overly sensitive.
This is about chronic misattunement.
This is about living in a world that expected something different from us—over and over again.
What We Can Do Now
We can begin to notice the places where we still override ourselves.
The reflex to laugh when something isn’t funny.
The impulse to explain, to apologize, to justify.
The way we shrink our enthusiasm to avoid judgment.
And gently—without shame—we can interrupt the pattern.
We can choose to pause instead of perform.
To ask, What do I actually need right now?
To sit with our feelings instead of explaining them away.
And we can name what was never named:
That this hurt.
That it mattered.
That it wasn’t our fault.
You’re Not Broken. You’ve Been Carrying a Thousand Paper Cuts.
If you feel raw sometimes and you don’t know why—this might be why.
If you feel like your reactions are “too much” but also deeply true—this might be why.
If you’re only now realizing how much you’ve had to contort yourself to be acceptable—this might be why.
Micro-traumas don’t leave bruises. But they shape the way we move through the world.
And now, we get to move differently.
We get to offer ourselves what we were missing all along:
Safety. Understanding. Permission to just be.
Let this be the beginning of unlearning the performance.
Of meeting yourself where others couldn’t.
Of slowly tending to the places that learned to disappear.
- What small moments from my past still linger in my body?
- What patterns of self-editing or performance am I ready to interrupt?
- What did I need that I didn’t receive?
- What do I want to begin giving myself now?
