Therapy for Late-Diagnosed ADHD and Autism

When masking stops working

Many people spend years holding it together in a way that looks effortless from the outside but takes everything they have on the inside. You get the work done, but the cost stays hidden: the crash afterward, the elaborate systems you built to keep everything going, the sense that this seems easier for everyone else and you cannot work out why.

So you assume the problem is you. Not trying hard enough, not disciplined enough, not enough in some way you cannot name. Over time, this belief can lead to chronic stress, low self-esteem, a feeling of falling short at work and at home no matter the effort, and often anxiety or depression that gets treated for years before anyone asks a different question.

Recognizing ADHD or autism as an adult

More adults are recognizing, in their late twenties, thirties, and beyond, that what they took for a personal failing was ADHD or autism that went unnamed. If you achieved, masked well, or were called gifted, the signs were easy to miss.

Relief, grief, and what a late diagnosis changes

Coming to that understanding later carries a particular mix of feeling. There is relief in finally having an explanation. There is usually grief alongside it, for the younger version of you who kept trying harder and blamed themselves for needing to, and for the life that might have gone differently if someone had noticed sooner. Often there is anger too, at the people and systems that did not.

Then there is the question of what it changes. Masking is not a habit you drop once you have a word for it. It shaped your friendships, your work, and your sense of who you are, and much of it happened early enough that it is hard to tell where the mask ends and you begin. Some of what you built to cope you will want to keep. Some of it you have been paying for without noticing.

Unmasking, burnout, and what therapy looks like

In therapy, we look at how masking formed and what it protected you from, the burnout that tends to sit underneath years of competence, and the identity that is still taking shape now that you have language for your experience.

This is reflective work. We ask a lot of questions, and the aim is for you to understand how your own mind actually works, well enough to build a life that fits it rather than one you have to keep compensating for.

I also see mixed neurotype couples, where one or both partners are neurodivergent and you are working out what that means between you.