In my case I think its due to issues with my father who was not abusive but angry and unpredictable, and unable to empathise with or mirror anyone else’s emotional state. This lead to a lot of trust issues with people that probably comes across as autism but is more anxiety and social awkwardness.
I have a very robotic "manager" part that spent a lot of time running things for me. It takes input from the nearest authority figure and precisely meets expectations, but doesn't feel, doesn't internalize, doesn't connect.
It was protecting a lot of confused, vulnerable little parts that had been kind of pushed out of conscious awareness when I was young, because it sounds like we had similar fathers.
I heard this great line that really helped crystalize part of it for me too:
When children are dealing with unstable parents, they don't doubt the parent. They doubt themselves. They don't stop loving the parent. They stop loving themselves.
It's a process I'm still working through every day, but at least it finally feels like I'm moving forward, not backward or spinning my wheels in place.
But I'm not going out of my way to label it. I'm clearly not neurotypical but whatever label I put on it doesn't really change that. Learning to live with it does make it a lot more bearable though.
In my case, it turned out not to be, as working through the trauma eliminated the symptoms that had previously been interpreted as caused by autism, but it's certainly possible to be both autistic and a trauma survivor.
Difficulty reading social cues, sensory overwhelm, robotic affect and processing--all totally normal for me.
In my case, I later discovered that early childhood trauma's symptoms can often mimic autism, especially if the perpetrator is the type of gaslighter who denies that they meant what every nonverbal cue suggested they meant.
Even the sensory overwhelm can happen because of trauma, because if you were not safe when your neural pathways were forming, you may have learned to pay keener attention to your environment looking for threats, at the same time that your parasympathetic nervous system never developed the normal ability to down-regulate your stress responses because the threat was never really over.
There's every chance you specifically are an autistic adult who's never been diagnosed, or who just has autism-like traits. I just want to bring it up for anyone for whom it might be helpful.