Finding Yourself Beyond the ADHD Diagnosis
After an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood, how to understand your brain, navigate care, align your life with your values and strengths, and build a support network.
Figuring out what I want
You've spent so long being who everyone needed you to be that you're not sure who's under there. You've tried a dozen things you were excited about for a month. People ask what you want out of life, and the honest answer is that you don't know, and that scares you more than you let on, and you see the patterns of judgement from those who don't understand. A lot of late-diagnosed adults hit this exact wall, usually right after the relief of the diagnosis wears off.
That isn't flakiness or a lack of intelligence. Years of masking and adapting to other people's expectations bury your own values, and you can't build a life around values you can't see. Autistic people described masking for years before researchers started studying it, and now it's taken seriously. So we start there, with what actually matters to you and what you're actually good at, and build the plan from that instead of from the list of things you think you should want.
Start with these
Free resource
Get the free Values and Strengths Workbook
The workbook I start coaching with. You figure out what actually matters to you and what you're actually good at, so you can build your life around both instead of around who you think you should be. For adults with ADHD, autism, or AuDHD, diagnosed or wondering.
For more, check out these Resources!
Book
Unmasking Autism
Devon Price, PhD
Devon Price is a social psychologist writing from inside the experience, and this is the book on masking: the lifelong performance of looking normal and what it costs. It covers how masking forms, how to recognize it in yourself, the burnout it produces, and how to start taking it off. For adults who suspect or just learned they are autistic, especially the ones who were told they couldn't be because they seemed fine.
Podcast
ADHD Aha! (Understood.org)
Laura Key
Each episode is one person describing the moment they realized they, or their kid, had ADHD. Laura Key hosts, has ADHD herself, and lets guests tell it their way. It's stories, not instruction. If you're late-diagnosed, newly diagnosed, or still sitting with the question, hearing other people's version of your own moment does something a symptom list doesn't.
YouTube channel
Neurodivergent Insights
Megan Anna Neff, PsyD
The best visual explanations of Autistic and AuDHD experience I've found, and the burnout workbook I hand clients.
Megan Anna Neff is an AuDHD clinical psychologist, and this channel is her on autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD adult life. Burnout, masking, and what AuDHD is as its own thing, not two labels. For AuDHD and autistic adults, late-diagnosed adults, and the clinicians who see them and want a psychologist's framing from inside the experience.