Okay there's one thing about me that is quite strange I believe. It's quite difficult for me to follow the plot of a movie (or a book). If I want to enjoy it I can't follow the plot. It's a set of scenes and realizations in my head, and sometimes some reflections, but there's no order of the scenes or cause-effect relation between them. So I mostly don't understand how the movie develops. Combine this with my problems with recognizing faces and someone could switch the movie to anther one that has similar colors and I wouldn't notice. I could of course focus exclusively on memorizing events and their order (and actors' faces) and then I maybe could emulate following the plot. But even if I did that, towards the end I would already not remember the beginning (who would be able to memorize an hour of random items handed over every couple of minutes?). A day from watching a movie I do not remember anything but the emotions this movie evoked. If someone asks "oh you said you loved it, I won't watch it, but can you tell it to me?" that's really embarrassing.
Yesterday we were asked to find a Disney movie we all know the plot of and I realized that there's no such movie in my case. I know vaguely the characters and the setting, maybe relationships between them at some time (but don't know which time), but that's it. And I don't remember the names. And next I thought that I actually don't remember the plot of any movie. And then I realized: OTHER PEOPLE DO!
Now it's no wonder that I hated writing essays about the books in school at the beginning when it was more about describing what happened rather than telling what thoughts the book provoked. It explains why the teacher accused me of not writing my essay myself but having it written for me by someone older. It explains why she would always claim I didn't read the book when I did, I just could not reconstruct any of the plot when asked during the class. I would have my reflections to add after other students finished summarizing the book and I would be accused of reading and memorizing articles about the book rather than the book itself. So I gave up on reading and writing for quite some time. On the final primary school exam I saw the essay question about one particular book that I could not recall anything from the order of events so I stood up and left. All the teachers were saying I was too stressed, I studied too much, and freaked out - but I didn't. The question was simply very narrow and I knew I couldn't answer it. It was like "what do you think about the colors that zebras have" question - yes maybe the zebra colors are obvious but if someone really didn't know them, there's no way they could answer other than actually seeing a zebra. Luckily the exams in the future were asking about concepts rather than books, and that went quite well.
I equally don't remember the plot of my own life or my friends' lives. I have a set of events in my memory but they are not chronologically ordered, and do not explicitly fix the people involved: when I think about those events, the people who took part in them are like variables in a mathematical equation. But I remember the people too, they just have anther compartment in my memory, and are not connected to the events. So I have a set of people and a set of events, but no relation between the two.
That's a good example for Asperger's vs CPTSD. Is this physical or emotional? Or maybe it's physical caused by the emotional? If I look back to when I was a child I remember anxiety connected with realizing I don't know the plot. Thinking "come on how can I just not be able to access that information?". I remember there was one cassette with two long fairy stories we would watch all over and over again with my sister and she would always be surprised at how I don't know what was coming next. I was really bored with watching the same stuff over and over again but still would not be able to tell what happened in which order. It's like with those cartoons for little kids where there's no plot just happy creatures jumping around in different sceneries, as that few year old can't follow the story line. I guess my brain is simply still at this stage.
That explains how someone like me is prone to be abused.