Then we finished our session and I unloaded the dishwasher and kept living my life. It was weird, I won’t lie. It felt like everything in my life should be radically different after such a powerful conversation within myself. But it wasn’t. Something I’m coming to learn after more than a decade of therapy is that I am always myself.

Shame is a very common core emotion for folks with trauma, which is hard because it makes feeling any other emotion really hard. Shame is corrosive—it eats away at everything else until there’s nothing left, and we just feel…empty.

Plus, it’s worth noting that both autism and ADHD are highly genetic, and our parents may have experienced childhood emotional neglect as well in response to their own neurodivergence and see it as the norm, and go on to treat us the same way.

And yeah, like I said, this won’t rewrite the past, but it can be incredibly healing for your inner child to hear that you love them. That you’re proud of them. That you understand them. I mean…just picture that for a minute. Imagine ten-year-old you hearing from a trusted adult that they are good enough. How would that feel?

The younger version of you still exists as part of who you are now. In fact, who you are now is a collection of lots of past selves, from childhood to the teenage years and beyond. As we grow up, we don’t cease to be our old selves; we just change, and we carry all the previous versions of ourselves within us.

Laughing at the sensitive characters on TV and calling them silly felt like a way to connect with the people in my life who thought I was too sensitive. Maybe if I made fun of this trait too, I could earn love in ways that I couldn’t by just being my sensitive self.

Want to know one of the quickest shortcuts to making people believe you’re neurotypical? Pick on the neurodivergent kids.

Other AuDHDers, like me, have a hard time realizing that other people can be wrong. I know I didn’t really realize people could lie or that they might present their opinions like facts for a long time, so I just…believed everybody.

regardless, I want you to know how incredibly needed you are in this world. It doesn’t matter if you can’t work a full-time job or if you can’t date or if you can’t fill out paperwork or if you can’t speak.