Today was a hard day emotionally for me.  Something good that happened to someone triggered a feeling of shame.  This person had not always treated me well and did things that made me feel ashamed. 

In the 10-plus years that I have been aware of being autistic, I’ve learned how much people with autism deal with shame.  Now there is a difference between guilt and shame.  Luna Lindsey describes the difference between the two:

The first is that shame is related to your social position, while guilt is a personal feeling. That is, shame requires your sense of relation to others – you have done something and others are exerting pressure on you to stop. OR, if they don’t know what you’ve done, you are afraid they will find out because if they did, they would exert pressure on you. Whereas guilt is the knowledge that you’ve done something wrong, and you feel remorse and a desire to correct the behavior regardless of whether anyone else knows about it.
The second difference is perhaps the most enlightening. Guilt is about what you have done; shame is about who you are. Guilt is, “I have done something bad”. Shame is “I am bad”.

That is what I’ve been dealing with today: the feeling not that I’ve done something bad, but that I am bad.  I can put myself back at this very traumatic event and remember hearing the cutting words that made me feel that I am this horrible person.  Whenever I get this feeling, all I want someone to do is tell me that I’m good.

Having Aspergers or Autism, makes these feelings even stronger, especially because of the problems with social interactions. Here’s Lindsey again:

Putting in the effort to avoid these mistakes only works for so long. Because I have Asperger’s. I will miss social cues. Sometimes, everyone misses the social cues, but I have had a lifetime of doing so.
What may be the even more important distinction, I don’t have the skills to recover from social mistakes. I can’t gracefully apologize or flatter or smile my way out of trouble. I’m usually still stuck on Step 1: flabbergasted, trying to understand where I went wrong.
For those of us on the spectrum, this is normal. We live life in the face of continual negative social feedback and the constant making of incomprehensible mistakes. And it is here where the dangers of shame lurk. Where no matter how many times I tell myself how wonderful and likable and lovable I am, I still find myself on those dark nights hating myself. Because I’d done it again.
It is very easy to feel like nothing I do will improve my ability to be acceptable. After trying so hard and making so many mistakes, eventually I can’t help but think of myself as intrinsically broken.
This topic is particularly important. I hope healing professionals and researchers will look into it on a scientific level and counsel their ASD clients accordingly. But it’s possible they won’t for a long time. 

What I have to do is remember all the good things I have done and as a Christian, knowing my worth in the eyes of God.  I also know it is time to start seeing a therapist again. 

This will pass, but for a time it will hurt like hell.