How to know if Supported Self-Assessment for Autism/ADHD is right for you?
Before I knew I was ADHD, I thought I must be a careless, bumbling idiot. Before I knew I was Autistic, I thought I was a neurotic hypochondriac, and “a bad friend.” And I’m not alone. For reasons I’ll explain, many undiagnosed Autistic ADHDers are extremely self-critical, dismissive of their own struggles, and suffer profoundly throughout their lives in ways that are not only unnecessary but tragic, because undiagnosed neurodivergence may be a risk factor for suicide and other health risks. Supported Self-Assessment (SSA) can help, but it can be hard to know if it’s the best choice for you.
1. When NOT to seek an SSA:
Understanding your own neurotype can be incredibly helpful and healthful. It can provide validation and self-awareness of your lived experiences, and bring descriptive language to experiences that have long gone unacknowledged. Clients who have sought SSA with us at ND Friendly Life tell us that the experience was validating, freeing, and healing. But it’s a profound experience to come face to face with yourself, and seeking an SSA is not always easy, or the right choice.
There’s relief, and there’s grief:
As much as there’s relief to finally understand yourself and have concrete reasons for the ways you struggle, or have been misunderstood, there’s grief that comes up, too. Grief about the past, wondering if you’d known sooner, might things have worked out better for you? Would you not have wasted so much time reading self-help articles and trying to “improve” things that are not changeable? And grief about the future, because acknowledging your true needs and limits is a deeply existential process, and it’s hard to let go of that hope that we could one day read a book or find a workout or a superfood that would let us be who we desperately think we ought to be. If you don’t have the emotional space in your life to do some deep soul searching and personal exploration, this is not the time for SSA.
Identifying leads to Unmasking:
One of the most meaningful aspects of SSA is how validating it is, particularly when you’re working with a neuro-affirming coach who is a late-identified neurodivergent (ND) themselves. Through the intimate process of going over the assessments and diving deep into the clinical interview, there’s a lot of laughing, and sometimes a few tears are shed as well. You learn that it’s OK to be exactly who you are. And often that means that high-cost self-protective strategies like masking start to let up. In the room with Amy Noyes or me, your nervous system understands that it is safe to be you. It can feel like layer after layer of armor begins to fall away. While that is a beautiful thing to experience, being unmasked is a luxury of a safe-enough space. If your home, work, or neighborhood is not a safe place to unmask, this could draw unwanted negative attention and could even be dangerous. It’s important to look at your life before you seek SSA, and make sure that your environment is safe enough for you to do this work.
When you need a professional diagnosis:
I get how hard it can be to seek a professional diagnosis. So many late-identifying ND’s have already got a long list of diagnoses from providers that made them feel othered, self-conscious, or defective. Historically, neurodivergence has been seen as “less than,” and we’ve all felt that, and most of us have feared it. Moreover, official diagnosis is a gamble. It can be hard to find providers who are trained to diagnose masked adults, and often it is more expensive and has a longer wait time than SSA does. However, if you are seeking disability benefits or accommodations that specifically require a medical diagnosis, you will need to seek that out from a physician, psychologist, or other medical provider who is licensed in your state to provide an Autism or ADHD diagnosis.
2. Why SSA might be the perfect thing for you now:
If you’ve already started to self-identify while you were engaging with actually Autistic people through their writing, podcasting, or social media content, and you’re craving a deeper dive into neurodivergence. . . If you have a safe enough environment, enough emotional bandwidth to do some deep personal exploration, and can engage tenderly with the thoughts and emotions that come up for you during and after the process. . . And if you don’t need or want an official medical diagnosis. . . then SSA could be just what you’re looking for.
Nothing feels better than knowing and loving yourself:
“I finally feel seen.”
“It’s so easy to be myself around you.”
“For the first time, I feel like I have a right to exist.”
These are the sentiments that our late-identifying ND clients express when they work with us. We’ve put countless hours into our own personal work to understand ourselves and to combat internalized ableism. It’s that grounded self-knowledge and radical self-acceptance that creates the safe-enough space for our clients to start to see themselves with neurodivergent-affirming eyes.
Most masked ND’s developed a strong inner critic to police their communications and body language. As children, we tend to get a lot more negative social feedback than neurotypicals do, as Anita Robertson beautifully describes in her book, ADHD & Us. So it makes sense that that inner critic, trying to protect us, can pull us into perfectionism, people-pleasing, and masking. Over time, we can lose track of our own identity and desires because we’re so focused on trying to perform our role correctly, or keep everyone happy, to keep ourselves and our relationships safe.
The SSA process is a way to reconnect with that innate, authentic self that is hiding inside you. To hear your own voice, and to honor all you’ve been through.
Creating a blueprint for a life that works for you:
If you are exhausted by your day-to-day, or suspect you’ve been skating in and out of burnout your whole life, SSA can help you develop a framework for how to live in a way that supports your unique needs and honors your limits. Understanding your sensory profile, what brings you energy, and what drains you, is essential for a sustainable lifestyle.
Putting accommodations and supports in place can make all the difference at home, at work, and in relationships. When you acknowledge that texting doesn’t work for you, it frees you up to start having conversations with the people you want and need to stay connected to. Maybe you can plan on short video chats to catch up on things, keep notes in a shared file or app, or have regular in-person coffee dates to get the kind of connection that works best for you.
Protecting your health:
Neurodivergent people have lots of aspects of their physical health that they need to be aware of. If you don’t know you’re Autistic or ADHD, you may also be unaware of some other important information about your collagen (think skin, digestive tract, and joints), your immune system (think allergies, inflammation, and brain fog), and your nervous system (think trouble regulating body temperature, frequent dizzy spells, panic attacks, blood sugar crashes). Understanding your neurotype can help you seek out the medical attention to keep you feeling good throughout your lifetime.
3. Can I trust the SSA process?
While it’s perfectly accepted in the Autistic community to self-identify, many ND’s want a proven method and process to make sure they’re making an accurate, informed decision. I’ve noticed that there’s a common experience of imposter syndrome for people who have gone undiagnosed for decades. Sometimes people worry that they’re making it up, or exaggerating their experience, or that they might be taking away from someone else’s neurodivergent identity by embracing it themselves. Because symptoms can fluctuate, it’s easy to dismiss them. That’s why SSA can help you get a solid, informed perspective on your own experience.
Equally rigorous as a diagnosis, but affirming to the ND lived experience:
We use the exact same process in the SSA as we did to provide Master’s level diagnoses when we worked within the medical field. It’s the same assessments, the same clinical interview, and you still get our perspective on the diagnostic criteria (from the DSM) and whether or not the examples from your lived experience would count for those criteria.
We lay it all out for you and walk through it together, asking and answering questions all along the way. We share from our own lived experience, and talk about how things feel from the inside, instead of just how they look to an outside observer.
When all is said and done, you get to decide, based on the evidence we’ve gathered and gone through together, if you identify as Autistic, ADHD, or both. It doesn’t cancel out any of your other identities, but it expresses a unique layer of self that feels so good to finally understand!
The unique late-identified experience
One of the reasons so many ND’s get missed or misdiagnosed in a traditional evaluation is that the way it shows up in adults can look very different from how it does in a child. The understanding of how neurodivergence presents in women, gender non-conforming people, and people of color has also grown tremendously in recent years, and unless the provider has made a point of taking specialized continuing education courses in this topic, they may unwittingly miss the cues.
As late-identified AuDHDers ourselves, we know what matters most is how things feel to you on the inside, not how your behavior appears to others. We can help you see the ways you have been accommodating your neurodivergence without even realizing it, and help you take it to the next level once you understand the neurology behind your preferences.
In addition to living it, we’ve done special-interest level study on the late-identified experience, taken specialized courses, and continue to consult with other ND coaches, therapists, and doctors regularly. Now you get to reap the benefits!
The Report:
It’s not necessary for everyone, but if you would like it, we can provide a detailed report of the entire assessment process on completion. It goes into depth on each of the criteria, and what specific experiences in your childhood and adulthood met those criteria. It goes through what your scores on each of the assessments indicate, and points of interest about how to interpret those scores. That way, when imposter syndrome flares up, you can go back to the report and remind yourself of why you identify as you do, of who you are, and who you’ve always been.
If you think SSA is right for you, reach out to us through our website: ND Friendly Life.