I have big communication issues that affect my social life and marriage and I need insight to “fix” this… (long post!)

This turned into a long post but the essence of it it’s in the title and my username i guess.

English is not my native language, I’m fluent but there might be some mistakes here and there.

The main points of this post are in the intro below for those who don’t have the spoons to go throught the entire thing (and understandably so), and the details of it will continue further below with a trigger warning for trauma.
While writing this post I got the first insight by myself, which is that I get lost in extra details. My communication is chaotic from that point of view.

I should add here that i’m quite new to reddit, I’m feeling very vulnerable writing this here to you, kind internet strangers, and I am grateful for any insight that I might get.

Introduction/ Main points :

– I seem to be very litteral in my communication so it often happens that the things I say get interpreted in an unexpected way that I never meant for.

– This has been an issue my entire life but usually when people get to know me understand this quite fast and it never poses a problem again in my communication with them.

– The biggest issue about my poor communication skills is that i feel that it’s taking a big toll on my marriage, on the stability of my family, social life and on my mental health.

– I’ve learnt 3 years ago that I am autistic, which explains many of my struggles and my need to understand the “why” and “how” behind everything, but the hardest struggles I had in my life were mostly due to trauma.

– I’ve been (and currently still am) in therapy for the past 7 years and I made tremendous progress, both in terms of trauma healing as well as in terms of personal development and growth.

– My husband has been by my side during this entire process, and also during the latest traumatic events in my adult life, he is fully aware of my needs and limitations, just as well as he is aware of my “positive qualities”.

– I am still, every day, learning how to improve my social skills and how to be a good wife, mother, friend, colleague, doctor and generaly a good human being over-all. Not that I am not all of that naturally, my intentions are always there, but there are still moments when my intentions are being misunderstood by the people I interact with, and especially my husband and the extended family. So I need help.

Now to the more detailed story.

I’m an autistic (29F) mother to an autistic son (5) and I suspect (~90% positive) that my husband (33M) is autistic/neurodivergent as well but he doesn’t know/see it (nor he *needs* that piece of information about himself but more about that later) and i/we have communication issues that are taking a toll on my marriage/ life overall.

I still struggle to communicate effectively (meaning absolutely no misunderstanding) with everyone but my son and some of my closest autistic friends from my home country. I think it might be relevant to mention that my husband and I come from different countries/cultures and that we now live in his home country in northern Europe since last year.

Another relevant piece of information is that I grew up moving a lot, changed over 20 schools, moved to a different European country in my teens and then went back to my home country for med school in my early twenties, where I met my best friend and the love of my life, my husband. Moving around so much is one of the main reasons that explains why nobody figured out during my childhood that I am autistic and also one of the main reasons why nobody figured that I was going through trauma at home.

I won’t get into the trauma-related details because it’s not that relevant, but what is relevant about it however is that my husband, at the time my best friend, was the first person I ever opened up to and he was the first one to tell me that all of those horrible experiences were not “normal” by any means and that it was abuse. Before that I just thought my childhood was normal and I had no idea I was traumatized.
That information triggered a chain of realizations plus classical signs and symptoms of cPTSD, i started having nightmares and flashbacks about details of traumatic events that i seemed to be wiped from my memory prior to that, I was having panic attacks and meltdown after meltdown and all of that combined with unidentified neurodivergence (autism and ADHD) led to me spiraling deep into severe self-hatred that took many years to heal.

Nowadays, my issue lies within the stability of my marriage because of my communication issues, or at least my fears related to that.

I recently started having again nightmares and some intrusive self-loathing thoughts because I sometimes feel that no matter how I formulate my sentences, how hard I try to explain myself and my inner processes, the messages cannot reach my husband the way they were intended to and he cannot fully understand me which leads to unnecessary heated arguments. Those lead to him feeling tired and frustrated and they leave me feeling guilty, “broken”, misunderstood and terribly lonely.

I noticed a pattern in what leads arguments. It often happens that I ask a genuine question (or make a comment that “states the obvious”) and he responds with an aggressive/defensive tone attached to an answer that has nothing to do with my question (at least from my perspective) and tells me that i am “patronizing”, or “condescending” and I get anxious/scared by his reaction because I find it totally unexpected, unrelated and impossible to understand, so I start overexplaining myself trying to help him understand that what I asked had absolutely no hidden meaning and it was meant litteraly, stricto senso, and that under no circumstance I,*now or ever*, tried to be passive-aggressive or to criticize him in any way, and I genuinely don’t understand how he could interpret what I said in a negative way.

I especially don’t understant this because we’ve been having the same type of misunderstandings for the past 7 years and discussed about it every time, and not only that i see no improvement but to me it seems that it somehow got worse over time….

(additional info about my education, volunteering activity and special interests, feel free to skip the upcoming paragraphs if this is not your thing)

*I realize now that it might be relevant to add some additional information here because it might show that it’s not all just from therapy but also me being a nerd with some knowledge about mental health:
I studied and graduated medical school, both my husband and i are medical doctors.
I have a special interest in psychology and psychiatry, subjects that I’ve been passionately studying on my own in parallel to my regular curriculum over the past 3 years. (I’m also currently looking for options to start a PhD in psychology in parallel to my medical training)
I’m a member of a global association for autistic doctors, as well as I’m actively volunteering in a self-advocacy autistic association in my home country.
I have been invited to (and attended) medical conferences in my home country to hold presentations about “Autism from the perspective of an autistic doctor” and the importance of early identification, the importance of understanding the need for change in perspective and approach regarding the supportive measures: such as adapting the environment to the person and not try to force the person to adapt to the environment, allistic parents as well as allistic health proffesionals and teachers to seek for additional information about autism from the autistic community/perspective and from the most recent peer-reviewed international medical studies that are, in fact, backing up the main arguments that the autistic community is/has been stating for years… etc (end of nerdy infodumping).*

………

So as i worked on myself in therapy for the past 7 years, plus the knowledge I accumulated over the past 3 years from individual studying, i did a tremendous progress in terms of trauma healing, self-awareness and personal development. I worked hard on improving myself and I continue to do so. I am still, every day, learning how to improve my social skills and how to be a good wife, mother, friend, colleague, doctor and generaly a good human being over-all.
On that note, most (if not all) of my/our goals from 7 years ago have been successfully achieved.

Going back to the main point of this post,
over the past 2 years at least, my husband has been by my side and I progressively shared my new discoveries/ realizations and knowledge about myself (and mental health) with him and and i explained to him that I am litteral and that whenever i say something (statement or question) is always meant with a neutral to positive connotation and never something negative and if it ever happens that I need to communicate a negative feeling about something he said/did I formulate the sentence like this: “Feedback ahead about X or Y thing that you said/did and *not about you as a person*, I’m not mad/upset with you but with the action and I need to understand why this happened, what was your inner process, and I’m going to explain why it made me feel the way it did, so we can find solutions and alternatives together in order to try and avoid similar situations in the future.”

So I don’t understand… I don’t know how else to express myself or where I can find the tools to learn how to “speak his language”.

My therapist tells me that I already did everything humanly possible on my end, not only to improve our communication but also to bend myself to understand, respect and satisfy his needs (and everyone else’s) and that now it’s entirely up to him to become self-aware and work on his personal development in order to improve his communication skills. My circle of friends who are also mental health proffesionals tell me the same thing. All of them, plus some other common friends and family members think that my husband is also autistic (they refer to it as “obviously autistic” but I find that stigmatizing) and I have to agree that I see that he checks all evaluation criteria according to the proffesional tools but that doesn’t really matter as long as he gets offended by any suggestion that points in that direction.

The thing is that I’m also worried of the possibility of an “echo-chamber effect”, that their opinions might be biased. And that’s also exactly what my husband thought when I tried to bring this up to him and he got upset about it.
He says that he is just a “normal person” (which is a hurtful word to use as a definition for non-autistic, and he knows that) and that it’s crazy to suggest that he might need to work on his personal development because he doesn’t have any “struggles” or “problems” and he is a very rational guy and I’m just being too emotional.
He insists that he cannot deal with all of that because things are very simple for him and he cannot understand the complexity of my emotions and he thinks that he “shouldn’t have to” put in any more effort because he is perfectly fine the way he is.

All that being said, it’s up to me to learn more, hence this entire post here.

Any constructive criticism, opinion, insight or advice on how to learn to communicate more efficiently (or other possible solutions if you notice something that i don’t) would be more than appreciated.

I will try my best to not let the negative comments, if any, to get to me because as I said, I’m fully aware of the fact that I have issues and I genuinely want to fix that, I want to be better for myself and the people around me.

Thank you so very much !!

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