The Myth That Time Heals Everything – And Why It Fails Autistic People

⚠️ Blog Editors Note / Disclaimer This article is not part of my field of studies or research. It emerged out of a simple discussion which lead to this small summary. While I am not a medical expert, this summary has been compiled to the best of my ability from descriptions and discussion results.

Introduction

One of the most common responses people give to distress, pain, or personal crises is some version of: “Just give it time.” For many neurotypical individuals, this is meant to be comforting - a gentle nudge toward the idea that everything eventually settles down, that wounds close themselves if you just wait long enough. Emotions, after all, often pass with time. Problems seem to dissolve. Distance creates perspective. And for them, in many cases, it does work.

But what if you’re not wired that way?

For autistic people - especially those with Asperger’s or ASD Level 1 - the assumption that time alone will fix things is not just ineffective. It can be harmful, alienating, and profoundly invalidating. Time, in these cases, doesn’t heal. It calcifies. It deepens the trench between pain and resolution, while those around you wait for your struggle to fade quietly into the past. We have looked into emotional memory and time fading as well as continuity and time perception before.

When someone says “It will get better” or “Just give it time,” it often feels not like comfort and more like a dismissal - a way of saying, “I don’t want to engage with this” or “please shut up I don’t want to be bothered, can you please stop to exist, thanks”. To an autistic person in distress, such phrases can land as an insult, a sign that the other person neither understands nor cares - not about the problem, and not about the person having it.

What many fail to see is that for some minds, time is not a soothing wave - it’s a magnifying glass. And the longer a wound goes unacknowledged, the more it begins to shape the person’s experience of the world.

There is no logic in expecting time to resolve something that is real, active, and present. Problems do not fade just because the clock ticks. There is no mysterious force of emotional erosion that wears down the edges of suffering. The issue persists. It sits, unaltered, in the mind and body. There is no magical event, no sudden spark of joy that cancels out the pain. Life experience shows again and again: nothing improves by waiting alone. Everything that ever gets better does so through intention, effort, or intervention - not through passive hope.

The logic of neurotypicals is flawed here. Their assumption that time heals all comes not from superior emotional strength, but from a position of social privilege - from being part of a world that unconsciously supports them. Often, others step in, help resolve things behind the scenes, or life simply bends in their favor without them noticing. They forget not because they worked through the pain, but because someone else quietly cleaned it up. For autistic individuals, this doesn’t happen. There is no invisible hand smoothing the path. The problems remain exactly where they were left. Expecting the same outcome from such different circumstances isn’t just unreasonable - it’s ignorant and unempathetic.

• Why Neurotypicals Default to “Time Will Fix It”
• Why This Fails for Autistic Individuals
• Emotional Fallout: What This Leads To
• A Better Way
• Time Doesn’t Heal. People Do.

Why Neurotypicals Default to “Time Will Fix It”

Literature research suggests that neurotypical emotional experience tends to be fluid. People feel bad, then better. They move on. Their social culture encourages emotional softening, even if nothing really changes. It’s not about resolution - it’s about forgetting, or more accurately, ignoring. Problems are not resolved; they are blended into the background, blurred by time and distraction, just like people who don’t fit the image of a happy, successful life are quietly removed from sight. Neurotypicals often see the world through unrealistic pink glasses, avoiding discomfort at all costs. They exclude anything - and anyone - that might disrupt the illusion. And this selective blindness isn’t benign. It’s a socially accepted form of aggression: a quiet, smiling act of erasure. Worse still, when someone dares to point out what’s wrong - even if it’s objectively true, clearly visible, and logically irrefutable - the reaction is often not reflection but hostility. Neurotypicals frequently attack what violates their constructed illusion, not because it’s false, but because it’s inconvenient. They defend the illusion even when they know it’s wrong, reacting aggressively to preserve comfort over truth.

This default stems from several psychological and cultural patterns. For one, neurotypicals often experience emotions as brief fluctuations - sadness or frustration tends to subside on its own, creating the illusion that no deeper resolution is needed. Compared to autistic people, their emotional experience often appears shallow, lacking the depth and persistence that autistic individuals face. This shallowness can come across as a form of emotional unavailability or even unempathetic detachment. Neurotypicals may not understand what deep, sustained emotional intensity feels like because they rarely encounter it themselves. From an autistic perspective, it often seems like they have no lasting emotional memory and little capacity for genuine emotional bonding. Their affective connections fade quickly, and relationships are interchangeable or superficial. This contrast creates a fundamental barrier in mutual understanding - one side feels too much, the other often not at all.

Additionally, avoidance is a common coping strategy; rather than resolving issues, many people simply distract themselves or wait things out until the discomfort passes. They have the luxury of a non-functioning emotional memory - they forget things even if those things were important, painful, or meaningful. What an autistic person might carry for a lifetime, they drop within days, not because it’s resolved, but because it’s out of sight. This capacity to forget pain so easily might look like resilience, but from an autistic perspective, it resembles irresponsibility - a refusal to process, to engage, to remember, to solve. It’s as if memory itself has been optimized for convenience, not connection. Social conditioning plays a role too: phrases like “It’ll be fine” or “Just give it some time” are repeated so often that they become automatic responses, offered more as ritual than remedy. Underlying all of this is projection - the belief that others must (dys-)function emotionally just as they do. If time worked for their minds that are incapable of really recognizing and processing emotions, it should work for everyone else. But this belief fails to account for entirely different ways of experiencing and processing distress.

These assumptions work within a shared cultural logic. But autism often exists outside that logic - and this is not incidental. It reflects one of the core effects of autism: the presence of deep, persistent emotional memory, a different logic of processing, and an inability or refusal to ignore reality for the sake of social convenience. What is easily forgotten or filtered out by neurotypicals remains ever-present for autistic individuals. The autistic experience insists on coherence, fairness, and truth, even when it’s painful - a sharp contrast to a social culture built on overlooking and erasing what doesn’t fit.

Why This Fails for Autistic Individuals

Autistic people often process experience differently. Emotional memories can remain vivid for years or more likely forever. Unresolved problems don’t fade - they accumulate. Nothing is ever forgotten Waiting doesn’t soften them. It corrodes existence and the remaining life.

Here’s why the “time heals” approach doesn’t apply:

Autistic individuals often carry emotional experiences with an intensity that defies neurotypical expectations. A single negative encounter doesn’t just sting for a moment - it imprints itself and becomes part of a persistent emotional landscape. These memories do not fade. They remain active, alive, and unresolved until they are addressed.

Autistic thinking is typically literal and systematic. If something has gone wrong, then it logically needs to be corrected. Waiting for it to evaporate makes no sense. The absence of action or resolution feels fundamentally broken - like being handed a riddle with no answer and told to enjoy the confusion.

Worse still, a social environment that chooses to simply wait or ignore rather than help (i.e. actually resolve the problem, not making it even worse or destroying further) sends a clear, painful message: that the autistic person does not belong. That their life and their pain do not matter. It is a quiet reinforcement of exclusion - a demonstration that the social world of neurotypicals does not recognize autistic experience as valid or worth responding to. For the autistic individual, this isn’t just indifference. It’s a repeated, structural form of neglect masquerading as patience. And over time, it teaches one thing above all: that they are alone. “Friends” proof that friendship does not exist.

Adding to this difficulty is the frequent presence of executive dysfunction. Even if an autistic person knows a problem needs solving, they may struggle to begin. The steps might be unclear, overwhelming, or impossible to initiate without guidance or support. It is not unwillingness - it is paralysis born of overload and under-support.

This becomes even more tragic in the context of social problems, which lie at the core of autism. Autism means having fundamental difficulties with initiating and navigating social relationships - and those are precisely the kinds of problems where neurotypicals believe that “everyone” just knows what to do, instinctively and effortlessly. Because of this belief, they often react with discomfort, judgment, or indifference when asked for support in these areas. It feels “unnatural” to them to intervene or assist, because they wrongly assume it should be easy and automatic for others as well.

Rather than engaging, they start looking for excuses - distancing themselves, minimizing the problem, or waiting long enough to claim, “Oh, it’s been too long to matter now anyway.” The result is that the autistic person is denied help exactly where they need it most, reinforcing isolation and feeding the illusion that social rejection is justified or unavoidable.

Furthermore, autistic minds are highly sensitive to patterns. If someone has hurt them repeatedly, if a system continues to fail, or if trust has been broken more than once, those patterns don’t blur into noise. They define reality. They become structure. There is no “letting it go” - only the recognition that it is bound to happen again unless actively changed.

One cannot overwrite a past injury or betrayal with a new positive experience. For autistic individuals, the original problem must be resolved - not distracted from, not covered, but genuinely addressed. Even a string of good experiences - which in the case of social life are often rare to begin with - does not dissolve the presence or weight of unresolved pain. The past isn’t replaced by something better; it persists until repaired. And often, that repair never comes because noone cares and they think time will solve everything anyways - which is untrue.

Telling someone in this position to “just wait” is like watching someone trapped in a maze and assuring them the concrete walls that get more solid and solid over time will evaporate eventually. It’s unrealistic and agressive.

Emotional Fallout: What This Leads To

The widespread myth that time will fix everything does not only fail to help - it actively damages autistic individuals. One of the most insidious effects is the development of guilt and self-blame. Especially for undiagnosed autistic people, there is a constant inner question: “Why am I not getting better like everyone else?” The world keeps insisting that it will pass, that things get better, but they don’t - not without real support. And even then, neurotypicals often misunderstand what ‘support’ actually means. They tend to equate support with therapy - a space to talk, reflect, or reframe the issue - but this model is often mismatched for autistic individuals. Therapy frequently focuses on learning to see things from different perspectives or on waiting things out while gaining ‘insight.’ But most autistic people have already spent countless hours analyzing every possible and impossible angle of the problem. They do not need more reflection - they need resolution. Nothing fades, nothing is ‘talked out of existence.’ Therapy that doesn’t actively lead to concrete change often feels like a cruel waiting room with no door - a space that promises relief but delivers nothing. This leads to self-doubt and the false belief that the problem must lie within - and that one does not belong in the given universe.

Withdrawal becomes a self-protective response. Every attempt to reach out, every cry for help, is typically met with dismissal, minimization, or empty phrases. No one engages in a useful way. No one listens, noone even seems to understand the problem and it’s implications. Help, if it ever comes which is very unlikely, is superficial or misdirected. And so, over time, the autistic person learns that asking only leads to silence or distance. Interaction begins to feel pointless - or even harmful. Why open up when every attempt is met with ignorance, excuses, or rejection?

And then comes burnout - not simply emotional exhaustion, but a full-body collapse. Already close to the limits of capacity, the person keeps pushing, trying to solve what cannot be solved alone. But when the problems are inherently unsolvable without external support - and that support is denied - the stress becomes intolerable. Burnout sets in, taking with it executive functioning, emotional stability, motivation, and even the ability to speak or interact.

This is not passive suffering. It’s a system breaking down under pressure it was never built to carry alone.

Instead of help, the person receives distance. Instead of empathy, silence. Instead of recovery, stasis.

A Better Way

If you know someone autistic who is struggling, the best support is not a vague reassurance or an empty phrase. It is recognition, stability, and action - and above all, the willingness to do something even when it feels unfamiliar.

Support begins with truly validating the problem. That means actually understanding what the autistic person is saying - not interpreting it through one’s own expectations or assumptions about how the world should work. It often means accepting something counterintuitive or foreign to neurotypical emotional logic. Validation requires stepping outside one’s own mental model and being willing to see the world from a perspective that is usually invisible.

Next comes offering real structure - not abstract advice, but practical steps. Ask sincerely: “Would it help to break this down together?” or “Can I help with the first step?” But don’t just offer once. If the answer isn’t clear, ask again. Suggest something small. Be present. Do not wait passively for the autistic person to reinitiate the conversation days or weeks later. They may be too exhausted to ever try again.

And importantly: suggesting to “meet up and do something fun” is not help. It may sound well-meaning, but it avoids the issue. It offers distraction instead of resolution. It’s only helpful if the core issue is already being actively worked on and the fun activity comes as part of the recovery - not as a substitute for solving the problem. Autistic people don’t want to forget the problem; they want to fix it. What is needed is a step that genuinely resolves the problem. That does not mean neglecting, softening, or reinterpreting it - it means addressing it directly. Help means helping with the problem itself, even when it feels strange, uncomfortable, or outside the realm of what neurotypicals believe “everyone just figures out on their own.”

Checking in regularly is crucial - but it must be done carefully. For autistic individuals, constant or shallow check-ins can actually create stress. A generic “how are you?” without context or a willingness to truly listen often feels like an obligation rather than support.

Support is not about simply “being there” in a vague, symbolic sense, and it is certainly not about distraction. It must be about solving the problem. Presence without action, or talking without doing, becomes meaningless - or worse, performative. Real help means taking steps toward resolution, even if those steps feel strange, awkward, or socially unfamiliar. What matters is not that someone appears, but that they contribute to a path forward.

Above all, support must be aimed at resolution. Just talking does not help if it ends in more talking. There is no magical closure through conversation alone. What is needed is stability - and actual resolution of the problem. That means being willing to help solve something. Even if that feels unnatural, even if your instincts say “people must figure this out on their own,” resist the urge to withdraw. The autistic person likely already tried everything they could. If they ask, it means they cannot do it alone.

Stability is not abstract. It is something you build - together - through presence, engagement, and effort.

Time Doesn’t Heal. People Do.

For many autistic people, time is not a medicine - it’s a pressure. The world expects pain to pass, without acknowledging how memory, logic, and unmet needs trap it in place.

When support is active, thoughtful, and real, solving problems becomes possible. Not because time worked - but because someone did.

This article is tagged:

• Psychology
• Asperger
• Autism