Written in September 2025
This is a phrase I started using about 3 years ago to describe the post-diagnostic experience.
Grief vs. relief sums up the conflict of emotions people often feel when they are diagnosed later in life with a neurodivergent condition or neurotype.
Grief
For many late diagnosed neurodivergent adults, there are many experiences or situations in our lives that would have turned out differently, had we known we were neurodivergent at the time.
In some cases, we might have been given the support we needed, but didn’t know (or feel) we could ask for. In many many cases we have left jobs, been bullied, lost friends and worse simply because we didn’t have the support we needed to navigate these situations with the neurotype we have.
In other cases we might have been given some leeway or understanding for why we behaved in a certain way – and I’m thinking here about meltdowns and shutdowns and other involuntary episodes that arise as a result of overwhelm. We’re often punished, ostracised or labelled as attention-seeking and dramatic when we have a meltdown in public. It’s happened to me, causing the loss of a relationship and an entire friendship group. Perhaps if people knew we were autistic and understood that we are easily overwhelmed, especially when we are repeatedly overloaded with no chance of rest, we might have been comforted and helped, not shut out and shunned.
We might also grieve for the career path we could have had with the right support. The innate neurodivergences like autism, dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADHD don’t come with an intellectual disability as standard, yet so often people of these neurotypes are perceived to be intellectually inferior due to a misunderstanding of different learning and information processing styles. People then end up not pursuing qualifications and career paths they would excel in, because they’ve been discounted and discouraged early on in life.
Relief
Relief is a sort of opposite emotion to grief in this context; it can be the feeling we get when we look at the same situations and experiences that may have led to grief.
The relief comes from being able to put down the burden of feeling like a failed human being; of course we struggled in that job, with that friendship group or in that sensory environment because our brains weren’t built to deal with that situation. We can stop punishing ourselves for “not trying hard enough” because it was never a case of effort, it was a case of incompatible brain and situation.
The relief also comes from having an answer (often only the beginning of the answer) to the question of “why am I like this”? I never thought I’d find an answer even after looking at every diagnostic checklist for mental health conditions I could get my hands on. Nothing fit properly until I learned about autism, and even then there were some unanswered bits about why I didn’t have the memory bank skills that many autistic people have, or why I never had a single, narrowly focused interest. Then I realised I’m actually (and officially so) AuDHD. That compounded the relief I felt when I got my autism diagnosis seven years ago.
My experience
For me it was (and still largely is) a case of relief. Getting the answer, and being able to stop comparing myself to the neurotypical expectation was a positive experience and continues to be so. However, as is typical with me and my delayed reactions, the grief is starting to creep in.
I do consider myself fairly lucky though, in that my alexithymia makes it hard for me to feel and name emotions sharply. That has probably insulated me from a lot of mental trauma that I could well have done without (and believe me, I’ve had my share of mental trauma that I have felt). Being able to process things on a delay allows for a degree of detachment.
I think I would have benefitted from working through this experience with a counsellor or coach to help me understand my brain better, and why I function in the ways I do. The counselling I had following a significant meltdown definitely helped, and that came several years after the diagnosis. As a coach, helping people accept and navigate late diagnosis is incredibly rewarding. Contact me if you’re in a post-diagnostic funk and you want some help through the mire.