RELENTLESSLY bullied and trapped in a destructive cycle of sexual and domestic abuse for more than three decades, Michelle Basson was an unwitting victim, targeted and preyed upon by those around her.

Riddled with guilt and shame, the mother-of-one blamed herself for her inability to fit in and build healthy relationships. Until, at the age of 40, the shadow of a lifetime of wrong turns and perceived failure was lifted in a consultation room with just two words: Asperger syndrome.

She could not have acted any differently.

“I had absolutely no idea why these things were happening to me,” says the 44-year-old shaking her head. “When you’re the common factor of the bullying, the abuse, everything else, you think it’s your own fault.

“The diagnosis gave me answers and a vehicle to change the things that have been problematic. But it doesn’t change the past. It’s not easy to look back and say, ‘I didn’t know, I had Asperger’s’. I felt isolated my whole life.”

An introverted and quiet child, Michelle struggled to make friends in school. Her awkwardness and failure to pick up on social cues or feign interest in her classmates’ “girly” chatter turned her into an all-too-easy target.

“I was looking at the others and I knew something was not right,” she recalls. “I started to realise I had a different mindset. I found it hard to relate and fit in. It was hell on earth for me. I was relentlessly bullied throughout secondary school. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong. I had a habit of talking over people – I just thought they were done talking. I didn’t understand the dynamic of conversations. I didn’t necessarily pick up on sarcasm.

“I still tried to blend in, to mimic what others were doing. It’s like putting on a mask every day. The stress and pressure of doing that is immense. Asperger’s is like having been asleep for a very long time and you wake up and realise you’ve been plonked in the wrong country. You don’t speak the language and you can’t learnt it no matter how much you try.”

Asperger syndrome is a form of autism that affects how a person makes sense of the world, processes information and relates to others. This means they find it more difficult to communicate and interact, which can lead to high levels of anxiety and confusion.

Through school, until the age of 12, Michelle was also sexually abused by a man she believes had taken advantage of her age, social ineptness and relative isolation. This, she would sadly find out, was only the beginning of years of abuse, emotional and physical, at the hands of the men in her life.

Leaving school at last at the age of 16 to study for her A Levels at college was a relief. But she soon became overwhelmed by a new environment. A few weeks into her first term, she woke up unable to move – her body had seized up and she was in agony. She was hospitalised for five months and diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis triggered by stress. Doctors now believe it was an attack of fibromyalgia. This, the trauma spawned by years of sexual assaults and the bouts of depression that followed all contributed to mask Asperger’s for years, Michelle believes.

Back on her feet, she went back to college for a short while but unable to cope she dropped out.

At the age of 18, she met her first partner. Very soon he became controlling, taking advantage of her vulnerability and inability to read between the lines. After years of what she realises now was emotional abuse and manipulation, he turned physically violent.

“He chipped away at my self-esteem,” says Michelle, of North Swindon. “Females with Asperger’s are ideal candidates for men who are predatory. It can be a chain of events for them that leads into an abusive relationship. You take everything literally so if he says ‘You’re stupid’ or ‘You’re fat’, you believe it.”

In her mid-20s she fell in with a party crowd and met the father of her 14-year-old son Ben. She started drinking and abusing drugs, which gave her the illusion of finally blending in. She decided to take a step back from that life when she fell pregnant but her partner became physically abusive and she left him.

Since then, she has only been in one healthy relationship, which ended when her boyfriend moved away.

Even after her diagnosis at the end of 2011, Michelle got into yet another abusive relationship. Her partner knew she had Asperger’s. She gathered up the strength to end it after three years in February 2015.

“I remember when I was diagnosed someone told me, ‘Be careful who you tell, some people can use it against you’,” she sighs. “You are more vulnerable and people prey on you.”

The spiral of abuse could have gone on indefinitely gnawing away steadily at her sense of self-worth had it not been for her son.

When Ben started acting out in class, Michelle became certain his unpredictable behaviour was caused by an underlying condition. In 2007, he was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of six and Asperger syndrome four years later. Researching the conditions she was amazed at how many of the symptoms matched her own personality traits and behaviour.

She sought a diagnosis and immediately hit her first hurdle.

“They asked me ‘What are you hoping to gain from a diagnosis?’, because I was older and there’s no help whatsoever for adults. I said, ‘I just want to understand my own head, why it works that way.’”

In 2011 at the age of 40, her suspicions were confirmed: she had been experiencing life through the prism of Asperger’s unknowingly for four decades. She was also diagnosed with ADHD.

“It took 40 years,” says Michelle, deep frustration palpable in her voice. “What a diagnosis doesn’t do so late in life is remove the legacy of a lifetime of cockups and feeling like a failure. “It affected my education and my life. But now at least I have a path.”

Since then she has joined a campaign by SEQOL to support women with Asperger’s build healthy relationships and understand where to draw the line.

Despite her belated diagnosis, her new understanding of the condition has allowed her to raise her son to be self-aware and avoid some of the pitfalls of life with Asperger’s.

“I do have to say I still wish I didn’t have Asperger’s,” concedes Michelle, who is poised to study nutrition at Reading University next year. “It’s been years of living on survival mode. But now I’m able to help my son. I’ve raised him with an awareness of it so it would be harder for someone to take advantage of him the same way it was done to me. I’ve been able to help him understand when people are not necessarily being sincere, judge situations. If that’s the only good thing that comes out of what I went through that’s enough. He’s my driving force.”

PANEL

•Asperger syndrome is a form of autism, which is a lifelong disability that affects how a person makes sense of the world, processes information and relates to other people. Autism is often described as a 'spectrum disorder' because the condition affects people in many different ways and to varying degrees.

•The exact cause of Asperger syndrome is not yet known. However, research suggests that a combination of factors - genetic and environmental - may account for changes in brain development.

•There is currently no cure or specific treatment for Asperger syndrome.

•It is estimated 1 in every 1,000 people in the UK is on the autism spectrum. More boys are diagnosed than girls, usually because girls are more adept at mimicking their peers and falling under the radar.