Understanding Autism

Key takeaways

• Autism is a neurological difference—a different way of processing the world, not a disorder to be fixed
• Many adults, especially women and those who learned to mask, weren't diagnosed as children because they didn't fit the outdated stereotype
• The autistic brain processes sensory information, social interaction, and interests differently—not worse, just differently
• Late diagnosis often brings a complex mix of relief, grief, and the need to re-examine your entire life story
• Counselling can help you unmask safely, process the emotional weight of late discovery, and build a life that actually fits how your brain works

If you're reading this, chances are you've spent years—maybe decades—feeling like you're performing a role that everyone else seems to play naturally. You've probably wondered why social situations leave you drained in ways they don't seem to drain others. Why you notice things nobody else notices. Why the world sometimes feels too loud, too bright, too much.

Maybe you stumbled across something online that made you pause. A list of traits. A video. Someone else's story that felt uncomfortably like your own. Or maybe someone in your life suggested it, and you're not sure whether to feel seen or defensive.

Wherever you are with this, you're welcome here. Let's explore it together.

What autism actually is

Autism is a neurotype—a fundamentally different way your brain processes information, sensory input, and the social world. It's not a disease. It's not something that needs curing. It's not the collection of deficits that older clinical descriptions made it sound like.

The diagnostic criteria were built by observing autistic people from the outside, cataloguing behaviours without understanding what was happening internally. That's why so much of the language around autism feels wrong to autistic people themselves. The experience from the inside is often quite different from how it looks from the outside.

Modern neurodiversity research offers better frameworks. One of the most useful is Monotropism—the idea that autistic brains are "interest-based." While neurotypical brains tend to spread attention across many things at once (polytropism), autistic brains tend to focus deeply on fewer things. This allows for incredible depth of knowledge and flow states, but it also means that being pulled away from a focus—or having to divide attention—can feel genuinely painful.

This isn't a quirk. It's a fundamental difference in how attention, processing, and energy work.

Why you might have been missed as a child

For decades, autism was understood as something that affected young boys who couldn't make eye contact, lined up their toys, and struggled obviously in social situations. That narrow picture left out enormous numbers of people.

You might have been overlooked because you learned early to watch others and copy what they did. You figured out the "rules" through observation and logic rather than intuition—and because you could follow them, nobody realised how much effort it took. This is called masking, and it's exhausting in ways that are hard to explain to people who've never had to do it.

If you were socialised as female, you were even more likely to be missed. Autism often presents differently in women and girls—less external disruption, more internal struggle. You might have been called "shy" or "sensitive" or "anxious" rather than recognised as autistic.

If you're intelligent, you probably used that intelligence to compensate. You logically deduced social rules that others seemed to know instinctively. You got through school. You held down jobs. From the outside, you looked fine—but inside, you were working twice as hard as everyone else to achieve the same results.

And if you did seek help, you might have been treated for the consequences of undiagnosed autism—anxiety, depression, OCD, eating disorders—without anyone looking at what was underneath. The real issue stayed hidden while you collected diagnoses that never quite fit.

The sensory world

This is often where autistic experience diverges most sharply from neurotypical experience. It's not just about finding loud noises unpleasant. It's about how your entire nervous system filters—or fails to filter—the world around you.

You might be hypersensitive: hearing the electrical hum of lights that others insist are silent, finding clothing tags unbearable, smelling someone's perfume from across the room, or feeling overwhelmed in environments that others find perfectly comfortable.

Or you might be hyposensitive in some areas: needing deep pressure to feel grounded, seeking out intense sensory input, or not noticing hunger or thirst until you're genuinely unwell.

Most autistic people have a complex sensory profile—hypersensitive to some things, hyposensitive to others, and it can shift depending on stress levels and how depleted you are.

And then there's the crash. After a day of sensory input—office lighting, background chatter, the commute, all of it—you might need absolute silence and darkness to recover. This isn't antisocial behaviour or being difficult. It's your nervous system requiring time to regulate after being overwhelmed.

Social interaction and the double empathy problem

For years, autistic people were told they lacked empathy and social skills. This always felt wrong to autistic people themselves, and research now supports what they've been saying all along.

The Double Empathy Problem reframes the so-called "social deficit." It points out that autistic people communicate perfectly well with other autistic people, and neurotypical people communicate well with each other. The difficulty only emerges when these two different communication styles try to interact. It's a mismatch, not a deficit—and the responsibility for bridging it doesn't fall solely on autistic people.

You might prefer direct, honest communication and struggle with subtext, hints, and "reading between the lines." You might find small talk draining and pointless, but you could talk for hours about something that genuinely interests you. You might mentally rehearse conversations before having them, scripting what to say to make sure you get it right.

None of this means you don't care about people. Many autistic people care deeply—sometimes too deeply, feeling others' emotions so intensely that it becomes overwhelming.

Routine and the need for predictability

Routine isn't about being rigid or inflexible for its own sake. It's about energy conservation in a world that's inherently unpredictable and overwhelming.

When you're constantly processing more sensory information than others, when social interaction requires conscious effort, when your nervous system is working overtime just to get through the day—routine provides an anchor. It reduces the number of decisions and unknowns your brain has to process, freeing up resources for everything else.

That's why unexpected changes can feel so destabilising. It's not that you're being difficult. Your brain genuinely needs time to recalibrate when plans shift without warning. A last-minute change that a neurotypical person might absorb without thinking can send your whole system into overload.

The comfort you find in repetition—watching the same shows, eating the same foods, listening to the same music—isn't childish or boring. It's regulating. These predictable pleasures provide a safe space where your brain can rest.

When it's both: the AuDHD experience

Many people who discover they're autistic later in life also discover they have ADHD—a combination sometimes called "AuDHD." If that's you, you might have felt confused by contradictions in yourself that finally make sense through this lens.

Your autistic side craves routine and predictability. Your ADHD side demands novelty and gets bored instantly. You might be hyper-organised in one area of life while living in chaos in another. The two conditions can mask each other, making both harder to recognise.

If both statements feel partially true and partially wrong, that's worth exploring. The intersection of these two neurotypes creates its own particular experience—and understanding it can be a relief.

But what if I'm not really autistic?

If you're reading this and thinking "I can't be autistic because I have friends" or "I make eye contact" or "I'm not like the autistic people I see in media"—you're battling stereotypes, not reality.

Many autistic people have deep, meaningful friendships. The difference is often in how those friendships work, how much energy they require, and what recovery looks like afterwards. You might be the life of the party on Saturday night—and then need to sleep for most of Sunday. That's not contradiction; that's the social hangover that comes from performing neurotypicality.

You might make eye contact, but you've had to consciously learn how. You count seconds, look at people's noses, or force yourself through it despite it feeling deeply uncomfortable. The ability to do something doesn't mean it comes naturally.

And the autistic people you see represented in media are usually a narrow slice of the spectrum, often portrayed by non-autistic actors working from non-autistic writers' assumptions. Real autistic people look like everyone else, because they are everyone else—just with a different neurological setup running underneath.

The cost of masking

Masking—consciously or unconsciously hiding your autistic traits to fit in—is a survival strategy. You learned to make eye contact when you'd rather not. You suppress your natural movements and responses. You nod and smile when you're confused. You perform a version of yourself that's acceptable to the world around you.

This works, in the sense that it helps you get through situations. But the cost accumulates. Masking takes enormous cognitive and emotional energy. You're essentially running an emulator—pretending to be a different operating system while your real one runs underneath.

The end point, for many people, is autistic burnout. This isn't ordinary tiredness. It's a collapse—a complete exhaustion of your cognitive and physical resources. Skills you used to have may disappear. Speaking might become difficult. Getting through basic tasks might feel impossible. It can look like depression, but rest alone doesn't fix it. What you need is to stop masking, and that requires a safe environment in which to do so.

Navigating diagnosis in the UK

If you're considering a formal diagnosis, you have options:

• Through the NHS: You can ask your GP for a referral to a local autism assessment service. This is free, but waiting times are currently very long—often several years depending on where you live.
• Going private: You can pay for an assessment directly. This is faster (weeks to months rather than years) and typically results in a detailed report. Costs vary but generally range from £1,000 to £2,500.
• Right to Choose (England only): Under NHS England rules, you may have the right to request that your GP refers you to a specific provider (such as Psychiatry UK) who can see you sooner, with the NHS covering the cost. It's worth asking your GP specifically about this option.

Whether or not you pursue formal diagnosis, your experience is valid. Diagnosis can be helpful for accessing support, but it doesn't change who you are. You're already autistic (or not)—the assessment just provides external confirmation.

What late diagnosis feels like

Discovering you're autistic in your 30s, 40s, or later sets off something complicated. There's often profound relief: I'm not broken. There's a reason for all of this. I'm not alone.

But relief rarely comes alone. There's grief too—for the younger version of yourself who struggled without understanding why, who blamed themselves for things that weren't their fault, who might have had an easier time with the right support. There can be anger at the professionals who missed it, at a society that made you mask so hard you lost track of who you really were.

And then there's the strange work of re-examining your entire history through this new lens. Every friendship, every failure, every moment of confusion—all of it looks different now. This can be disorienting even when it's also clarifying.

These responses don't resolve quickly. They take time to work through. And they're often helped by having someone who understands to talk them through with.

How counselling can help

Therapy for autistic adults isn't about teaching you to be more neurotypical or drilling you in social skills you've already exhausted yourself learning. It's about something closer to the opposite: creating a space where you can safely be yourself, perhaps for the first time.

In our sessions, we can work on understanding your sensory profile—what depletes you and what helps you regulate. We can process the grief and trauma that often accompanies a lifetime of being misunderstood. We can explore what unmasking might look like, and how to build a life that actually fits your neurology rather than fighting against it.

This isn't about fixing you. You're not broken. It's about finally getting to meet yourself.

A note to end on

If you've recognised yourself in these words—if something here has clicked into place—I want you to know that whatever you're feeling right now is valid. The relief, the confusion, the grief, the questions: all of it makes sense.

You've been navigating a world that wasn't built for your brain, often without knowing that's what you were doing. That takes enormous strength, even when it doesn't feel like it.

If you'd like a space to explore this further, you don't need to have it all figured out. Most people don't. We can start wherever you are.

About the author

• National Autistic Society: autism.org.uk
• Milton, D. (2012). "On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem'" — Disability & Society
• Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). "Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism" — Autism