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Hi everyone, it's Iain. Welcome to Happy Healthy Autistic, where I share my dual perspective as an autistic psychologist exploring an informed and empathetic understanding of neurodiversity. Today I'm going to start exploring a larger idea of what do I do after I find out that I'm autistic. Oftentimes when I am discussing a diagnosis with one of my clients after we have finished the assessment process and are going through my rationale and what they're thinking and how they're feeling and what questions they have, it's very, very common for people to say to me, "Well, now what? What

am I supposed to think about this? What am I supposed to feel about this? And how do I tell people? Do I tell people? Just where do I go from here? What do I do with this information?" Obviously everyone's different and they have different sort of ways of answering those questions and they may or may not want to ask me certain questions like that. Some people don't ask me any of those questions of course, but for the people who do, I thought I would spend some time discussing it across a small series of three episodes

where I dig into this idea of, "Well, now what?" And so this isn't for people who got diagnosed necessarily, it's just for anybody who discovers later in life that they are autistic. And by later in life, you can take that to mean whatever you want. I guess I would say outside of childhood, perhaps after 18, but it doesn't really matter. So for today, my focus is really going to be on sort of the emotional aftermath and processing of finding out that you're autistic and some of the identity work that can come along with that. So

things related to the emotional reactions we're having as we go through this in the early weeks and months, things related to self-acceptance, hope, internalized ableism, and so on. So our first consideration is going to be the emotional labor and processing that often accompanies finding out that we're autistic. Where this really came from, certainly in those feedback sessions where I'm debriefing an assessment with somebody and their results, there's often a lot of emotion in those conversations, which is really normal and moving for people and I find them to be wonderful, beautiful conversations. But where this is

really coming from is that for a subset of my clients, depending on what services they've signed up for, we do a three-month follow-up call where I speak to them for however long, an hour or something like that. And there's no huge agenda for that call. It's just whatever a person needs, but roughly speaking, we're discussing how it's been for them to sit with this idea that they are autistic and how they've been feeling, how life has been going, what it's been like to tell other people that they're autistic if they've chosen to tell anybody how

it's interacted with their self-acceptance, their identity, their work, their school, their hobbies, and anything that they'd like to discuss. And for some of those clients, I'll hear from them that they haven't been doing that well. They'll say to me, "This has really been heavier than I expected it to be." Saying when I initially found out and when we had talked three months ago, I felt really excited about it. I felt very validated and relieved. But since then, it's been a lot to take in and I felt pretty overwhelmed sometimes. And sometimes I have to take

a break from it completely. It's easy to wonder or to believe that this is going to start positive and just continue being positive and wonderful to find this out and very helpful. And I think that that's true. I just think that for a lot of people, it often is a more complicated emotional experience than that over time, or it can be, and it can involve some challenging or unpleasant feelings as well. It can really be a very significant emotional experience to process all of this, a lot of emotional labor, I keep saying. But beyond that,

this processing doesn't happen in a vacuum, as in you're still living a life of a human being in addition to trying to wrap your head around this whole thing of finding out you're autistic at 25 or 55 or 70. So that can really be a lot. And I've spoken to clients who, in addition to trying to make sense of this autism diagnosis, in the intervening three months, they lost their job or got diagnosed with cancer or got married or any number of things. But there can be significant life events or multiple life events that can

really add to that sort of difficulty or the energy we're outputting. And so some people continue to do the emotional process related to finding out that they're autistic and some people need to take a break. Lots of people are more burned out than they thought that they were or they know they're burned out even so we're trying to process this autism piece and then life shows up and gives you something else you have to deal with for a time. There's a lot of different reasons why processing this diagnosis or just finding out your autistic can

just require a lot of energy and that's okay. Personally, I was wildly burned out when I first found out that I was autistic and I was early in my career of being a psychologist and I was just very overwhelmed. The point is I had no room for no emotional capacity at the time to do this processing. So I tried and I kept trying but it was to the point where I couldn't finish watching a video. I couldn't finish reading one article. I'd read one paragraph or listen to one minute and it would just bring up

so many memories for me and so much emotion that I just thought, "I just can't do this right now." And I kept feeling that way. It sort of improved somewhat over time as I got settled with the idea but really it took me many, many months. A three-month check-in with me wouldn't really have done anything. I probably would have been more overwhelmed three months into trying to process this discovery for myself than I was at the beginning but that was more a byproduct of the circumstances of my life at the time. There were other times

before that or after that where I think I could have attended to this quite a bit more directly but that particular time really was not one of them. Regardless, there is no wrong way to feel about finding out that you're autistic. People will feel all kinds of things about that. The most common thing I hear from people is validation and relief and I think that that speaks to a lot of experiences but in large part how misunderstood and dismissed people have felt or criticized for these differences that they've been suspecting represent autistic traits over years

and decades can just feel so validating to find out like, "Hey, the reason some of those things have been happening, it's not those answers you've been worried might be true or that other people have been suggesting to you." So when you think about these moments of suffering or confusion or hurting people you care about without understanding why and we come up with some answer to that question but they tend to be quite unpleasant answers like, "I guess I did that because I'm selfish or self-absorbed or rude or maybe I'm worried I'm a narcissist or I'm

too sensitive or I'm dramatic or whatever I'm thinking." Instead, to find out the reason those things happened actually at least in part is that I'm autistic and beyond that in those moments I was autistic and I didn't know which I'll talk more about later but makes it quite a bit harder to take effective care of ourselves. For a lot of people, of course, they feel very positive emotions about it. There's, again, the validation relief. It seems hopeful, helpful. They're just generally happy about it. It can be exciting. There's a lot of pieces to, I think,

look forward to. So if all you ever feel about finding out you're autistic is positive emotion, that's absolutely wonderful. That doesn't mean you've had a shallow emotional experience or anything like that. It reminds me of the classic saying that if you've met one autistic person then you have met one autistic person. We're all very different. If in addition to some of those more positive emotions you feel other emotions, mixed things, unpleasant things, challenging things, that would be very normal. So some common ones could be feeling frustration, disappointment, those kinds of things, or even anger for

childhood caregivers, parents, teachers, doctors, therapists you've seen in the past, people like this, thinking like, "I wish they had have found it or I can't believe they didn't notice this or get me assessed." It's frustratingly common for somebody, often a teacher or doctor or therapist, to suggest to someone's parents that an assessment could be a good idea and then the parents will dismiss that idea. So that can be some work there to reconcile that kind of thing. A lot of people don't have to deal with this. They just find some immediate way to think, "Well,

hey, I'm not going to dwell on the past. Things happened how they happened." And that's okay too, of course. A lot of people's parents are really well-intentioned now and in the past, but some people think a lot about it probably would have been quite helpful had my parents or my childhood caregivers had this information because despite their good intentions, they didn't have all the information they could have had that would have benefited their ability to support me back then. Which leads to another reasonably common experience which might be feeling some grief for our past self.

And again, I hear from some people that they don't and don't expect to feel any grief as they look at this discovery. Again, that's fine. But with the rationale being like, "Well, I can't change anything." And I always just imagine myself being at a funeral for someone that I love and being upset. And then if someone said to me, "Why are you upset? You can't change anything." It's like, "I know, but they're still dead. This thing still happened. It's not bizarre for me to feel grief about this." And so I know it's a bit of

a different situation, but even so, for the people who do or may feel some grief for their past self, I think that makes a ton of sense. Obviously, we can't change what happened, but it's hard to believe nothing would have been different for me. And if nothing bad ever happened, then I guess what is there to be sad about? But for a lot of autistic people who didn't know they were autistic for the first 20, 30, 40 years of their life, not knowing that often will lead to some pretty difficult experiences and perhaps a great

deal of suffering. So I don't think that being autistic is awful or guarantees one to suffer, but it can be pretty hard to be autistic and not know. We can be very hard on ourselves. We can feel confused about our behavior and our needs and other people can be quite hard on us. We can be very burned out. We can feel very overwhelmed. It's perhaps no one's fault, but it can be quite a difficult experience. And so to look at that suffering, if you experienced it and think, "I just feel sad that that happened. Probably

not all of that would have happened had I found this out two years ago, five years ago, 35 years ago, but I didn't." And so if that's you and you feel some grief, that would be very normal. I think a really beautiful part of the human experience is to be able to feel more than one thing at a time. So this sort of processing, finding out we're autistic later in life is often this kind of rich experience with mixed emotions. I've written at great length about this kind of thing, emotional processing in therapy or for

autistic adults and these kinds of things. So feel free to check out my writing on that. There's articles on my website and so on that have no costs. A lot of autistic people find that they will process certain kinds of things slowly. And I'll hear that spontaneously from lots of people just saying like, "Oh, it can take me a while to sort of sort through things like this." Or just saying like, "I process slowly." And a lot of the specific things that we can find take us more time to process would often relate to emotional

stuff, certainly social experiences and maybe more complicated relationships and these kinds of things. And I think to some degree, identity level stuff. So I would suggest for a lot of people that it can be helpful to just not have strong expectations about how long this might take. It can be often, roughly speaking, it's more intense at the beginning. The first hour of finding out might be or the first day, there can be more of that than a week later. But even so, for a lot of people, it's those early weeks and months following discovering that

you're autistic. There can be quite a bit of emotional processing involved. I just think it takes as long as it takes. And in a way, it's a lifelong process. You've always been autistic and you're always going to be autistic as far as we know. There's that front loaded piece where we really have to figure it out for ourselves. What does this mean? And what am I going to sort of do with this information? How important or not important is this to me? But yeah, a lot of that within the first year, let's say, roughly speaking,

a lot of that happens early on. So being patient and self compassionate during that process, I think I would say is advisable. But I suppose I'll just say I would encourage you to try to be so. This brings us to the topic of self acceptance. And in my experience personally and professionally, the largest outcome is the opportunity for increased self acceptance. I think it just gives people such a helpful and realistic way of reprocessing and coming to understand themselves quite differently. I think a lot of autistic people, especially with that very high masking presentation, we

can feel kind of adrift or lost in our identity or very sort of this sense of being a chameleon. So we can really take on things from the people and environments around us. And if we're doing that a lot, for many years or decades, that can get kind of confusing. And so, for many autistic people, it can be actually very grounding and helpful for them in that sense to find out that they're autistic and really provide a stable sense of foundation as they come to understand who they are and have a just firmer sense on

that. So self acceptance, I think, plays a huge role here. I often explain this process to people as a three step model. And these three steps are recursive as in they sort of fold into one another over and over and over. And so you don't finish step one and move to step two firmly and never go back to step one, you keep doing them. So at the highest level, step one is about knowledge, step two is about acceptance, and step three is about change or accommodation. In a little more detail, step one is not just

learning about autism in general, it's learning as much as possible about your experience of being autistic in particular, which is going to be different than other people's. As you read and watch videos and all these different things, of course, you can maybe pick up pieces here and there. And if you're lucky, you'll come across someone with quite a bit of content who maybe shares a nice chunk of experience with you. So you can really learn a lot from those kinds of people, which is wonderful. And it reminds me of that classic saying, standing on the

shoulders of giants. There's many, many, many autistic people out there over the decades or centuries. And some of those people were really, really insightful. And some of those insightful people wrote those things down or made videos or whatever into the future. So we can really benefit from those people and we don't have to reinvent the entire wheel ourselves. But especially at first, a lot of the time people are very interested, very excited about it. So they do a lot of that learning upfront, which I certainly did as well. That leads, I think, very naturally to

step two, which is self-acceptance. And so we are using the information gathered through step one to change how we see our past and present and I suppose future. You could perhaps imagine another way to think about reprocessing, not to be distracting, but if a child is living their life and then their parents get divorced when that kid is, let's say, six years old. The way a six-year-old understands what a divorce is and where it came from and why it happened and these kinds of things is very different than how their parents understand it. And it's

not as simple or disjointed as this, but when that child is 10 or 15, the way they understand that divorce is going to be quite different than in the past. So they reprocess the experience over time. And again, when they're 20, and again, when they have their own first significant romantic relationship end, and to come full circle, you might imagine that child being 32 and getting divorced themselves. And so I think, again, they would, at least if they wanted to, they could reprocess that past experience of theirs and come to understand it quite differently at

many different points in their life. So this is what I mean by reprocessing. As we gain more information, we can understand our past experiences quite differently. So I think that the idea of finding out later in life that we're autistic allows for a ton of reprocessing if you want to. And so I imagine if you've learned quite a bit about autism, there have been moments as you're reading along or watching something or whatever, some specific idea gets mentioned. And it just really strikes you and brings up a specific memory or a series of memories or

something like that. And you think, "Whoa, I did not think that that could be autism as well, or that that experience of mine happened because I was autistic." And I had mentioned this earlier, but whatever story we had to explain to ourselves why that happened, which probably was fairly negative, we can look at it differently and think, "Well, what if I was trying to understand why that happened to a 17-year-old who I now know is autistic?" And I'll talk more about this later, but it really is very difficult to take effective care of oneself when

we're autistic and we don't know. And so we can often--we might not be doing that well. We can at least feel overwhelmed or confused or burned out or these kinds of things, which is going to make most situations feel worse, at the very least, in addition to what else might be going on. So as we reprocess these past and present experiences, one at a time, there's a real specific opportunity there in each one to come to understand ourselves quite differently. And I would suggest, or at least the ideal would be that the result of that

reprocessing would lead to at least more neutral feelings about the experience, but really, I would hope it would lead to more self-acceptance and self-compassion. And then very naturally, those, I think, lead to step three, which is change or accommodation. And so you can imagine a lot of people who are autistic before they knew that. Even so, they would probably have been making some intuitive changes or accommodations for themselves, especially in environments where they have a lot of autonomy, hopefully at home. So this might involve things like getting a white noise machine or wearing earplugs sometimes

or preferring to wear headphones or active noise canceling headphones or these kinds of things, perhaps changing the light bulbs or fixtures or something. And even things like having a weighted blanket have come up with a lot of the things around the autistic experience without fully putting that together, which is normal and okay. However, once we know we're autistic, it opens this door to the specific set of information we need or we could benefit greatly from thinking about. Instead of piecemeal, intuiting here and there, the things that might help us, you can just look at the

established set of, "Here's all the kinds of things that tend to be really different or to really benefit people who are autistic." So not everything on that list is going to be right for you, but you should carefully consider everything on that list because it's likely to be relevant to you. So that's where step one relates to step three. If we don't even know what changes to be considering, then how are we going to know what changes to make, those unknown unknowns. But even once we know what those changes are that we might wish for,

if we don't believe that we deserve them, we're probably also not going to make them. So that's where step two influences this step three for change. So an example might be that a friend invites you to come to some thing like, "Hey, why don't we meet for lunch?" or "Why don't you come out with us?" or something. And you recognize the name of the place they're inviting you to and you've been there and you know that it's really noisy or something. Your past experience tells you that it's very likely to cause sensory overstimulation. And just

the idea of going can seem like immediately very overwhelming and like, "You just don't want to do it." But then we might have these thoughts and you might recognize these from the past thinking things like, "Why do I have to be so weird about stuff like this? Everybody else can go to lunch with their friend and have a good time and I just can't do it. I can never do it. It's exhausting for me. What's wrong with me? Why am I like this? Why can't I just go and enjoy myself? This is why I keep

having trouble making friends, keeping friends. Why am I such a fuck up?" or whatever you're thinking to yourself. And obviously, that would be an example of internalized ableism and self-criticism. We may have many times perhaps had that kind of experience thinking like that and then drag ourselves to go to this situation that we know is not going to be a great fit for us because it's like, "My friend might not like me or they might not. They might stop inviting me to things or I should be able to do things like this. Everyone else can.

I should be able to. I'm just going to make myself go and do it regardless of how it feels." So that I think is really tragic and I've certainly been there myself many times in my youth. Once we understand where that sort of difficulty is coming from for us, whatever it happens to be about the situation in question, that's kind of step one. And then once we believe we deserve to alter things so it's a better fit for us, step two, we can actually do something about that. So in this case, I might just ask

my friend to meet somewhere else or to meet at a different time. So some alteration to the plan that I think is probably very reasonable. And frankly, with my close friends, I would just talk to them about this and be like, "Hey, I don't do well in noisy environments or whatever the difficulty is." So then in future, they might suggest things that are a better fit. And even if they sort of forget for a second, they would be much more open to my adjusted or suggestion to alter the plan, which can be really nice as

well. I mentioned internalized ableism. I should define that briefly. So at a high level, internalized ableism is a form of discrimination against oneself or other people with disabilities rooted in the view that disability is a source of shame, something to be concealed, or something to avoid, refuse, not support, not make space for. And it can really look like that thinking of why can't I do this? Why can't everyone else can do it? In fact, it seems easy and enjoyable for them. And I just can't do it. I'm the only one. What's wrong with me? Why

am I like this? Those kinds of unhelpful ways of thinking or just painful ways of thinking. It's this broader idea of ableism, which shows up in all kinds of different contexts. But then over the decades, we've internalized that we've brought that inside of ourselves. And now no one else is in the room necessarily. And we find ourselves doing it to ourselves privately. And so I think that that's really tragic and kind of insidious and something to keep an eye on and try to root out of ourselves. It's sort of easier said than done. I still

find myself noticing these kinds of moments periodically. I try, of course, to be gentle with myself, sort of not to use or to catch it when there's internalized ableism, or I'm noticing thoughts or feelings related to shame. And I would say that more broadly of any kind, shame is fascinating in oneself. And for me, at least, I'm very passionate about emotional health. So if I notice shame, I'm always going to try to investigate it. But in this case, the internalized ableism, I think that what really matters, it's not that we just stop doing it. I

don't know how you manage that. What really matters is how we treat ourselves when we notice that these thoughts have happened. From a sort of meditation or mindfulness lens, you might notice this idea, or the parallel of this idea that we don't stop having thoughts completely. If we're meditating, when you have the thought, it's like, what do you do? How do you respond in that moment? And so these occurrences sometimes are called the gym equipment of the mindfulness world. So I don't mean to be toxically positive about it. It's not good to have an internalized

ableism type thought, but it can become an opportunity to practice responding compassionately. And it doesn't matter if you notice it as it's happening or 10 seconds later or days later, it's always worth revisiting that moment and practicing some self-compassion. I'll admit that it took me a very long time to recognize that self-compassion is not merely the absence of self-criticism, that in fact, it's an active process, like a regular, ongoing, active process to show oneself patience, care, love, compassion. I always just thought, "Yeah, of course I'm nice to myself because I'm not mean to myself." So

I had really a mistake in that neutrality for self-compassion. So the initial kick for me there was reading Kristin Neff's book, Self-Compassion. She's got all kinds of things to that end, as does--well, as do many people, but Tara Brack, Jack Kornfield, and so on. You may have heard this idea before and it's a cliche really, but this is a question of when something difficult happens or you make a mistake or whatever it is to ask yourself, "How would I treat someone else if they had had this experience?" It can be more poignant even to consider

if you have a child or if you have a niece or nephew or just somebody younger than you who you feel quite protective towards and you care about. If they had made a mistake like this, how would you speak to them? How would you act towards them? And I imagine for most people, it wouldn't be the same as what you say to yourself. It wouldn't be like, "You're so stupid. You do shit like this all the time. I hate you. You don't deserve whatever good things." Probably, hopefully, you'd feel--hearing that or contemplating saying that to

this person you care about makes you pull back and think like, "Wow, I would never do that to somebody else." And I guess I would hope over time you can come to see that that's the level of surprise or that's the level of response that I aspire to feeling towards myself. I think that it's good and healthy to have a realistic view on the world and our experience, but that overly self-critical way of talking to ourselves is not accurate and it's not how we treat anybody else. It tends to be very disproportionate to what happened

and certainly to connect this back to the idea of finding out that we're autistic or processing that early on or later. But when we have some social experience or emotional experience or what have you, that didn't go very well maybe. And we decide that part of what motivated that not going well is an autistic trait. It's okay to think that, but I think we want to be very careful how we treat ourselves in the quality of our thinking about that kind of thing. As a brief example, which isn't perfectly related to autism, sorry, is that

in the summer of 2019, I got a concussion, which was very unfortunate. It didn't really go away and I developed post-concussion syndrome and that didn't really go away. And it made everything very difficult for a long time, for years. I very distinctly remember this moment. It was probably in 2021 and I had been very frustrated with this sort of concussed way of being that I was experiencing every day. It just reduced my cognitive endurance. I just had to be very thoughtful and careful all the time, like anything I was going to go and do. I

had to think, "How is this going to affect my brain?" which is very sensitive right now. It just felt very limiting and I was very frustrated with that over time and some days extremely so. And so I remember very distinctly one day I was halfway up this particular flight of stairs that I go up all the time. I don't know what I was thinking about something probably with work that I needed to do, but then realizing like, "I can't do that today even though I need to. I just can't. My brain can't do it." And

then thinking like, "I'm so sick of feeling this way." I was speaking directly internally to that part of myself and just berating it and criticizing it, beating it up. At some point, some particularly vicious comment made me pause on the stairs and realize like, "Whoa, this is so vicious and negative. Generally, I'm a very sweet person. It's hard enough for me to give feedback, let alone criticism to anybody." And I would certainly never speak to someone the way I was just speaking to myself. So it really stood out to me. I had been thinking a

lot about self-compassion through those years and somehow this one had just eluded me. I realized this part of me that was experiencing these concussion symptoms, if you separate out parts work like internal family systems kind of thing, that part of me was wounded and hurting and needed help and needed support. Look how I was treating it instead and just being awful to this very vulnerable part of myself. And so that was a really emotionally affecting thing for me to realize. I worked on that for a long time and it was a huge turning point in

my concussion recovery as well, which I think is interesting. Anyway, I don't mean to be self-indulgent by sharing that story. My point is that I think that it's pretty easy to do this kind of thing and not notice it to a part of ourselves that we've often or like for a long time been frustrated with or annoyed by or disliked or had criticized by other people and then by ourselves often as well. And so if we spend a couple of decades being autistic and not knowing and having associated difficult social experiences, it wouldn't be unusual

for people to have had this kind of self-critical experience that I'm talking about and to be pretty hard on this part of ourselves that actually just needs support. And so I'm not saying autistic people are fragile and vulnerable, but if we're just mentally flaying ourselves or beating ourselves up all the time or this part of ourselves, I think that it's very worth noticing that and acting quite differently towards it. All of this in a way can relate to what's called the social model of disability, which basically is describing that people are disabled by barriers in

society, not by their impairment or difference. I mean, those barriers can be all kinds of things like a physical barrier. In the case of autism, a lot of it's going to be caused more by people's attitudes to the differences. This is an interesting one. A lot of people have strong feelings about whether they would consider autism a disability or not. Generally, I think of autism as a difference, not a deficit. But it's really a lot of the social model of disability is a really, I think, useful way of thinking about our experience because in a

lot of ways, most societies that I think at least the people I talk to and myself engage in aren't really set up very well for somebody who's got autistic differences. So a lot of us feel that we have to or have to engage with those systems. And in doing so, we can feel like we don't fit in or it's just not well set up for us often can be quite exhausting and make us feel like we have to do a lot of masking and just feel really bad about ourselves and often leads to like, you

know, burnout and those kinds of things. So a different way of putting this is that our environment or context matters very greatly. And so I think we think about that three step process, knowledge, acceptance and change. Over time, we can really employ that to great benefit to change our environment to suit us better and better and better. And sure, in the first week, you might not make that many changes, but every time you face a decision in the future, you can include in your decision making process, what you know about your experience of being autistic.

So when you're thinking like when those large, especially larger decisions come up, like should I, if I'm going to move, like live somewhere else, you know, would this place be a better fit for me? Or would that place be a better fit for me if we're considering changing jobs or if we're offered a promotion or something like that? You know, is this really going to be a fit for me versus in the past, we might just think like, oh, this is more money so they get deaf, of course, why wouldn't I pick this? So it

can just give us another dimension to consider how to take care of ourselves. And so fortunately, I guess I've tried to be very consistent with this kind of thinking and have been able to suit my environment more and more over the years. So it's a better fit for me. And I mean that like my living environment and the work that I do and how I approach that work and my social time, my friends, my hobbies and whatever to just be a, I think, pretty great fit for me, which I'm very lucky to be able to

be in that position. Regardless though, setting that environment up, so it's sort of like the opposite of the social model of disability. It's like if you think about the setting that might be like really bad for you and make you feel really shitty and like aggravates all these things that you struggle with, the opposite would be an environment that is well set up for you. And if you think about your differences that can really be strengths for you, what would a context include that not only allowed for those, but highlighted them and highlighted a lot

of them. And of course, there are still things I'm not great at, like everybody. Some of those relate to my autistic differences, some of them don't. But again, in the environment that I have sort of created, there's a lot of space for like mitigating those things that I'm not so good at. And I do that through many different means, but roughly speaking, it's like different systems and routines and things like that. So I just think we'll talk about hope more in a minute. But this is one of the reasons I think to feel hopeful over

time that we can use this information to take better care of ourselves. So the last thing I want to talk about today is hope. I wouldn't tell anyone how to feel about being autistic or finding out that you're autistic or anything like that. My opinion is, I talked a lot about the processing and some of it might be complicated and include unpleasant emotions and so on. That's fine. I think it's important to keep or to try at some point to have some perspective about that. That initial emotional processing needs to happen for most people in

this process. But in the sort of zoomed out perspective of your lifetime, it's not that much. It's a couple of weeks, a couple of months, might be six months, but even six or eight months is not that long. And so perhaps if you're listening to this at the time when I would like most intended to be listened to, you might be in that period and I feel for you. I was in that period. Mine lasted more like 18 months and it was hard for me. But now being well past it, I can recognize that it's

a discrete event. I'm not saying it's easy, but it certainly will pass. And during and certainly after, I think there's a ton of practical reasons to feel hopeful. It's incredibly useful to know you are autistic. Because if you're autistic today and let's say I diagnosed you or something, I didn't make you autistic. You've always been autistic. And so it's, I think, extremely useful to know that about oneself for all the reasons I've been discussing. But the main ones being that basically, the better we understand ourselves, the better we can take care of ourselves. And I've

mentioned this a couple of times, kind of, but to speak about it at length a little, it tends to be very difficult to take care of oneself consistently over a long term if we're autistic and we don't know. And it's because that layer of our needs and differences is just not being considered or not thoroughly enough because we don't know about all of them. It's kind of different if you know about some of them because you've intuited them or learned them over time through experience. They tend to seem like some disparate set of experiences. Like,

"Oh, I really struggle with busy restaurants and I don't like these kinds of clothes." And it's like, that's good stuff to know, but it's just different when you collect all of them and then learn about some more and then realize like, "Oh, wow, these things all group together and that group of experience has a name and that name, of course, is autism." And so just that knowledge makes it, I think, so much easier to make decisions, big or small, and help us take good care of ourselves. And so I think that this is why I

think there's so much practical reason to feel hopeful about finding out that you're autistic. Sometimes in therapy, one of the things we, on the therapist side of things, we think about a lot is, "How do I help my client feel hopeful about what they're... Not what they're going through, but how they're going to get through this? There's a path here." And I think that fortunately, in this kind of situation, finding out you're autistic, I think there's a ton of practical stuff that's easy to be hopeful about. I don't have to... There's not a lot of

convincing involved because it's like, "Yeah, but you can just take way better care of yourself. You can use this information to make your home and your work and your relationships and so on such a better fit for you. And you can reprocess stuff so you aren't beating yourself up and you have an accurate way." It's not just hypnotize yourself into liking who you are. And when you experience difficult situations, just lie yourself and find ways to think that it's fine, that that happened. That's not what we're saying. It's like you have a legitimate way of

understanding that experience and why it happened. And it's these autistic differences. So it's, again, I think just a lot of room for self-acceptance and so on. Finding out that we're autistic can be a pretty significant journey in a person's self-discovery and that's great, but it is only one piece of that sort of lifelong experience. There's a study from 2020 that I'll link to in the notes, but what's titled "Looking Good, But Feeling Bad." And they look into social experiences of autistic women and they conclude, "Cammaflauging autistic traits was associated with distress, suicidal ideation, and functioning

difficulties regardless of the extent or variation of those traits." They go on to talk about how they suggest and in a lot of ways I agree, it's not the inherent experience of autism that triggers stress, but the ongoing endeavor to mask one's true identity that causes the majority of distress. And sensory sensitivities can also contribute. So they're suggesting that that's highlighting the necessity of self-acceptance for neurodivergent people and the considerable benefits of support from individuals and community. They circle back to this idea that I was just talking about as we understand ourselves more, we can

modify our environment, career, relationships, home, and so on to fulfill our unique needs and differences, which can considerably increase quality of life, which of course can be challenging. I'm not saying it's not challenging. I'm saying it's worth doing. And then as our self-understanding increases, our acceptance increases, the way we understand ourselves and our needs will continue to evolve. But our capacity to take care of ourselves will also continue to evolve. I sometimes talk to people about this image of two boats in the ocean and they're parallel to each other. And imagine you turn that one

of the boats turns like one degree to the side, like away. And of course, 10 minutes later, two hours later, those boats really aren't going to be very far away from each other, but a week, a month, a year, a decade, it's going to be a massive, massive difference. So I don't think that finding out your autistic is a one degree shift. I think it's more than that. And within reason as best as we can over time, if we continue making those positive changes, things can sort of, this is cheesy, but that idea of it

becomes a virtuous cycle because as we start to feel better, it's easier to think clearly and to make even better choices for ourselves, which turns the ship even further. And it just sort of cycles upwards, which I think is a really wonderful thing and can lead to a lot of change for people. I just want to read you a couple of paragraphs briefly here from somebody who got diagnosed a couple of years ago, what it has meant to them over time. So they said, "Since my diagnosis in 2021, I've allowed myself to be more realistic

with myself about what I'm capable of and what I can get out of life. I feel a lot better having let go of normal things or expectations, and instead focusing on what I know is healthy for me. I'm cultivating my apartment to be the most comfortable space for myself. I'm putting better boundaries in place, and I'm doing less social stuff. But I'm trying to meet other autistic people who are local. I still value my morning walks to my local cafe to sit and have my tea and scone. I like smiling and saying hi to the

waiter who knows my order. I like little pleasantries like this. I need to be in the world even if it's only these in passing encounters who witness my existence. I can't do without it. So I could never totally isolate myself from society. I just need to keep most of it at bay and partake on my own terms. I'm still learning how to do it." So this is somebody early in the process. And this is a beautiful sentiment. I really like this. I need to partake on my own terms. And that sounds like such an obvious

thing, but I don't know. My experience has been so few people do that. And often, it becomes a question of self-acceptance. In large part, we know what we wish we could let ourselves do, but we don't let ourselves do it. We think it's too strange. We think we don't deserve it. It would take risk in these kinds of things. Again, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying it's worth doing. So that's from somebody fairly early in the process. You've been hearing from me throughout and I'm further along in this process. Obviously, there's people who

are much further along in that process than I am. But if we think a little bit, like this person is talking about acceptance, identity, and so on, I recall certainly when I found out that I'm autistic. I think I was 29. I was a psychologist. My career was started and starting to get more significant for me. And I definitely remember thinking, "What does this mean? Can I be a psychologist and the autistic? That doesn't seem like a good fit. It doesn't seem like it would make sense at all. So do I have to change jobs?

Do I have to change careers? And I hear this from lots of people after they find out they're autistic. It's good to explore and question, but a lot of it ends up being like doubt and worry, which I understand and experienced. Can even people are like, "Is my marriage going to end? Is my life over? What does this mean for me?" Personally, I'm very familiar with the grief and relief that can come along with this kind of self-understanding. I'll just read a little bit from when I give people their reports. This is part of what

I say. This transition can feel akin to letting go of preconceived notions about our own abilities. And I believe that healing is coming to terms with things as they are. This process of letting go can involve releasing some dreams or expectations that we once held dear. And there can be a very real element of grief in this. Over time, however, I've come to understand that what I was shedding were primarily things that mattered more to other people than to myself. And I began to listen more intently to that quiet, overlooked voice within me that advocates

for my needs. I came to understand that this voice was not proclaiming that I was defective or broken, but rather that I was simply different. And years later, I finally feel like I've come home to myself. And I see the strengths and those differences. Everyone's journey is going to be different, but I'm hopeful for anybody on this journey. And I definitely think, as I've said, like 100 times today, the more we understand and accept ourselves, the easier, lighter, and happier that life can become. So to wrap this whole thing up, I could say that the

emotional labor that often accompanies discovering we're autistic later in life takes as long as it takes weeks, months, whatever you need. There's nothing wrong with that. And it may feel quite difficult. And that's normal. And by normal, I don't mean to say that it's easy. I'm just saying that it's worth doing and that you're not alone. I've been through this. In a lot of ways, I still go through this. And I talk to hundreds of autistic people every year who have been or are going through this kind of process. And more broadly, there are millions

of autistic people globally. So you absolutely are not alone. I understand that it at times may have felt that way and may still feel that way, but I assure you, we're out there. So feel free to join me in part two of this little series of considering what to do following a diagnosis. So in the next part of the series, it's going to talk a lot about masking and unmasking, disclosure, accommodations, burnout, and those kinds of things. And then the third part, we'll be talking about community relationships, boundaries, mental health and supports, neurodiversity, and what

these things look like going forward. And then any thoughts on what I wish I knew back then. When I had first found out that I'm autistic. So that's it for today's episode. As a reminder, this is for education and entertainment. It's not clinical advice. I do AMA episodes periodically. So if you have any general questions about autistic experience, feel free to submit them at ndpsych.com/podcast. And I may answer those in an upcoming episode. Anyway, whether you're autistic or not, I hope you're feeling happy and healthy these days.