Explore the first step in preparing for an adult autism evaluation: self-acceptance. Learn how surrendering to your neurodivergent truth leads to self-advocacy.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Episode number: 2
Release date: 2026-04-06
Hosts:
Natasha Stavros, PhD — author of The Unmasking Diary and Burning Inside Out (coming to a bookstore near you in December 2026)
Sarah Liebman — licensed marriage and family therapist, ADHD-diagnosed, special interests all things neurodiverse.
Audio Engineer and Composer: Noah Smith
Director: Linda Highfield
Duration: 29:31 minutes
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary: After Episode 1 focused on signs of adult autism misdiagnosis, Episode 2 of Following the Threads, Dr. Natasha Stavros and psychotherapist Sarah Liebman discuss the crucial first step in preparing for an adult autism evaluation: self-acceptance. Utilizing the transtheoretical model of change, they explore the transition from recognizing autistic traits to seeking a formal late diagnosis. Dr. Stavros shares her personal unmasking journey, highlighting how surrendering the pressure to meet neurotypical expectations is the foundation of neurodivergent self-advocacy.
Key insights to prepare to get an adult autism evaluation
The moment of change for Natasha was when she stopped fighting that she was inherently wrong as a change maker, and instead started asking what is wrong? In the survival guide for change makers, Burning Inside Out, Natasha struggled with the internal conflict of never belonging. Something explains these patterns, and the truth that she was fundamentally wrong, couldn’t be right. That’s when she could begin to ask what could explain her reality – her true intentions. Without that turning point from fighting the truth, to surrendering to a truth, not the idea that she was inherently bad, but a truth, was the moment she could entertain the idea that an assessment was not just worth doing, but even something to be considered.
There are many change models for different scales of change, for today we are focused on the ones that are within the self. The change from non-thought to thought.
There is victory in surrender, as Anaïs Nin said, “ and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud, is more painful than the risk to blossom”.
Resources and References
The 5-stages of change and what they mean to you describes the transtheoretical model of change from non-thought to thought by Prochoska and DiClimente.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on Preparing to Get an Autism Evaluation (Part 1 of 3)
In 39 years, I never once identified as different. I was conditioned to comply. I identified as outside, and that something was different for me than for others, but never once did I think that I was different. Instead, I believed that I was a problem.
The therapists, and there were probably at least a dozen, I had seen for nearly twenty years diagnosed me with depression, anxiety, symptoms of agoraphobia, insomnia, obsessive compulsive tendencies, and complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD). I believed that it was those traumas that made me different. It had never occurred to me that maybe the reason those traumas happened in the first place, was because- my brain didn’t process things the same way as others, that I am autistic.
Never did anyone question my understanding of social reciprocity, non-verbal communication, or the expectations of maintaining relationships. Instead, I was malignant, manipulative, abrasive, direct, rude, outspoken, and arrogant.
Never did it occur to me that my hyper-organization or compulsive behaviors were really just coping skills to soothe the anxiety that stemmed from hyper-stimulation and sensitivity to sensory input.
Not once did anyone question that my insatiable appetite to learn was a special interest in how the brain collected and processed information into knowledge and wisdom. When I excelled at school, sport, or really anything that captured my attention, no one thought to question why I was so driven by the routine and structure of practice, repetition, and focus to hone my craft.
With success and accolades came waning mental health, a spiral into loneliness and despair. No one could stand to be around me day in and day out. Until my husband, no boyfriend lasted more than a year. Most friendships were short and sweet or they were so distant and sporadic that they didn’t take a daily toll. Friends that lasted weren’t without turbulence. Well, that’s not even really being honest. Turbulence would imply some rocky bits, when in fact- most of my friendships nose dived.
In 2020 I left a job that had me questioning my value and worth on a quarterly basis for a job that fed that same insecurity while devouring my social capital. That job took away my entire research portfolio, everything I had worked for. It stripped me of the joy and passion that fueled me. To protect my family, I abandoned my research and took another job.
Not long after, that job also questioned my judgement navigating social dynamics. This became the sole metric by which my work was judged – how well my colleagues liked and trusted me. It didn’t matter that my work was thorough, that my productivity surpassed my peers, or that I solved complex problems with solutions that took others months to realize was the right path forward. My peers thought I was inconsistent, my emotions dysregulated, and my social behaviors strange.
Tirelessly, I questioned, what could have gone wrong? I tried to do it differently this time. I tried to do everything that was expected, and yet – I still could not meet social expectations. I had taken classes and read books – despite my ability to learn just about anything, I couldn’t seem to do this – at least not well enough to stop the train wreck from happening again.
I applied for another job. I got this job. I thought, “l’ll do it differently this time.” I convinced myself that if I was open and transparent about what was hard for me or that my impact on people often didn’t align with my intention, that maybe – just maybe, it would be different.
Three months into the job, there was an incident, and I knew – in my core, the fear erupted through my being. I broke down. All my past experiences pulsed through me, running through my mind on repeat.
I convinced myself I could pretend it was fine, and that eventually it would normalize.
It didn’t.
That’s when my friend had mentioned that I might be autistic.
That’s when I knew – I needed an assessment.
AI-generated Show Transcript
Introduction
**Natasha Stavros (00:00:07):**
After the masquerade, masks come off. Using the Unmasking Diary to explore the everyday process of neurodivergent autistic unmasking, author Natasha Stavros, PhD, speaks with licensed marriage and family therapist Sarah Liebman, diagnosed ADHD with special interests in all things neurodiverse. Join us in this episode of Following the Threads as we explore social, psychological, and spiritual frameworks that empower resilience through change.
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Disclaimer
**Natasha Stavros (00:00:48):**
As a reminder, this podcast is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute counseling, psychotherapy, or mental health services. Listening to this podcast or communicating with the host and guests does not form a therapist-client relationship. The information here is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your own mental health professional with any questions you may have regarding a mental health condition.
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A Note on Our Name Change
**Natasha Stavros (00:01:25):**
Welcome to Following the Threads. I’m Natasha Stavros. And I’m Sarah Liebman. Today’s episode will be about the first step in self-advocacy: victory in surrender.
Before we get started, you may have noticed we changed our name from Spilling the Tea to Following the Threads. After last week’s episode, we were made aware of the origin of “Spilling the T” — capital T for truth — from Black queer culture. As two white women, we want to acknowledge that using that title perpetuates appropriation of Black culture and causes further harm. Following the Threads better aligns with our intent. The basis of this podcast uses my life as a case study to follow the threads of my early unmasking experience. I am offering my experience and story to join the community of late-diagnosed neurodivergent people. Change comes through lived experiences and story, and it is in this wisdom that we grow as a community.
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Step 1 Toward an Adult Autism Assessment: Self-Acceptance
**Natasha Stavros (00:02:30):**
I wanted to build on last week’s episode about when you know you need an assessment, and explore the internal experience of deciding to actually go get one — how that might unfold inside of us. This is the first in a three-part series. Today I want to focus on surrendering to the truth of your lived experience, and when an assessment may offer more relief than the hardship of the stigma.
Surrender is the place of self-acceptance, and it is the beginning of self-advocacy — even if that self-advocacy starts and ends with seeing yourself and stepping into your reality. Self-advocacy is so much more than getting accommodations at work or writing legislation. It includes the transition from accepting others’ story of you as truth to embracing your own experience. None of that other change can actually happen without the change within first.
So I think we talked about this topic and you mentioned it reminded you of contemplation, pre-contemplation — the transtheoretical model of change. I had never heard about this before. Could you give some background?
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The Transtheoretical Model of Change and the Unthought Known
**Sarah Liebman (00:04:22):**
Probably anyone who’s had a job has heard something about change management. We’re going to look at a model that’s been used for over 30 years in the context of substance use disorders — by Prochaska and DiClemente. In their model, there is a stage called pre-contemplation and a stage called contemplation.
Pre-contemplation is when you’re starting to get an inkling that maybe there’s something you might think about. It’s a very conscious and unconscious process, and it can go on forever. My husband and I wanted to make a tuna casserole, but he hates peas — and neither of us could think outside of that for six years, until we finally got to: why don’t we just use green beans? We had been in pre-contemplation of the tuna casserole.
Contemplation is when you start to notice and put together some of the pieces. Like, I do end up feeling kind of stuck at the same point in every job, every project. There’s a breakdown that happens. And if you’re listening to this podcast right now, maybe you or someone you care about has been in pre-contemplation about a struggle, and you’re starting to move into contemplation — is this something more than just “I should try harder”?
The other concept I want to add is Christopher Bollas, a British psychoanalyst with a concept called the “unthought known.” Many of us who are neurodivergent have an unthought known that there’s something more going on, but we only have what’s available in the culture at the time. Our unthought known is: there’s something a little different about me, but I don’t know what it is. People who are adopted or find out they have an unexpected DNA result sometimes say, “Oh, that makes it all come together.” So the unthought known of difference, the pre-contemplation of maybe there’s something connecting all of this — and then contemplation: I think this might be neurodivergence of some flavor.
**Natasha Stavros (00:08:48):**
For me, writing *Burning Inside Out* — my survival guide for changemakers — that book was really my pre-contemplative state. I was fighting to be seen, to be heard, to belong, to feel validated at every single step. I was proving myself, shifting and adapting. And that’s actually where I learned so much about fire science and technology — I kept putting on different hats and constantly flexing my skill to learn.
But the moment when you first told me, “That’s kind of autistic — have you ever thought that maybe you’re autistic?” I had that moment. It was the unthought known. And now it was a thought. That transition from not-thought to thought — that’s when I really felt victory in surrendering to the possibility that it might be true. Not fighting the stigma, not projecting all this badness onto myself. Maybe I’m just autistic. I think different and communicate different. And that’s my truth. In surrendering to that, I stopped fighting as hard all the time.
**Sarah Liebman (00:11:49):**
Pre-contemplation is very important, because when you wrote that book, you reclaimed yourself. The experiences that led to it were painful, confusing, derailing — they had injured your sense of who you are. In that pre-contemplation, you had come to see yourself in a kind of wholeness: “I am an outsider, and maybe I’m going to do this from the outside. What I have to offer is valuable precisely because it isn’t conventional.” And it’s also a memoir — you tell through story, and that’s really core to how you believe change happens. I’d listened to your suffering and confusion, and in my inimitable way, threw it out while we were walking through a park.
That moment — “why is it I feel this way and intend these things, and this is the outcome?” — it was like: oh, maybe there’s something that comes in between that isn’t just me learning more skills. Surrendering to this truth means a self-acceptance where no one else has to change first. If none of that changes, something inside of you changes. When you can say, “That’s not my reality and I’m going to hold this boundary because my reality is real and worthy” — that’s where you surrender the fight. The fight of: I’m normal, I can be seen, I can keep masking. And instead: I’m surrendering to the truth that I’m not neurotypical, and the way I do things is going to be very different.
What I remember — and I commented on this to Linda — was that in the week or two after the official diagnosis, you just became so soft. Your laugh became really spontaneous. It was like watching genuine self-compassion, not manufactured self-compassion. “I’ve been carrying this, and I’m going to set it down.” That buoyancy, that restoration. And the acceptance of who you are through disengaging ideas of perfectionism — which is really the root of masking, working toward a perfect construct. When you surrendered to the truth, your curiosity got reawakened.
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Victory in Surrender and the Yoga of Self-Acceptance
**Natasha Stavros (00:17:04):**
What I’ve been working on with my therapist is re-engaging in the experience. By surrendering to the truth — or even just the idea that a truth different from your current story could exist — that’s really the moment where you can turn into your experience. When you’re trying to compress yourself into whatever masks you’ve put on, there’s not a lot of information except “I’m a bad person with bad skills and bad intentions.” But when you walk out into that meadow and see people everywhere doing all sorts of things, you can listen here, join a dance over there. If what you come up with from a partial diagnosis is just “I’m an anxious person” or “I’m a depressed person” — those labels are limiting. There’s not a lot of places to go with them. If there’s some freedom that shows up, we’re somewhere.
And that leads to the final point for today: there is victory in surrender. As Anaïs Nin said, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” That risk of exploding out of your bud into a beautiful flower — that’s where you get accommodations, where you start saying “my experience says I need headphones in a loud cinema.” But it’s also where you rediscover joy. I remember reading about the first convention of women with ADHD — people were digging through purses, sitting in corners with eyes closed, and everyone felt comfortable because the thing they do, they’re not the only one. You get the sun, the bees, you pollinate. There’s chance for more growth. Because a bud can also just die — no sun, no bees, no cross-pollination.
**Sarah Liebman (00:21:06):**
This reminds me of a moral principle of yoga — asteya, non-stealing. The idea that when you have enough within, you don’t need to take from other people. When you have enough love to accept yourself as you are — without getting to some perfect construct — you don’t need to take from others. That’s where it spreads. When you can fix it within yourself, you can fix it with the people around you and the community around you. That’s also where you can lead. You live by first accepting and loving yourself, which teaches and demonstrates love and acceptance to everyone around you — and that’s where reasonable accommodations come from. When people love and accept who you are, they’re willing to make small accommodations. And you’re willing to make an accommodation to yourself — to say, “I notice I’m asking a lot of questions and you don’t seem to know why. That’s part of how my brain works. Let’s reset.” But if you can’t open the door into that room, you’re just standing outside going, “What is this door even for?”
And this is all happening before diagnosis — you don’t even need the diagnosis for this. This is just the internal experience of getting there.
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Summary: The First Step Toward Self-Advocacy
**Natasha Stavros (00:23:10):**
So today’s theme on self-advocacy was really recognizing the first step: victory in surrender toward self-acceptance. We talked about the moment of change when I stopped fighting that I was wrong and instead started asking — what *is* wrong? Something explains these patterns, and the story that I’m fundamentally wrong just can’t be right. That’s when I was able to ask: what could explain my reality?
We talked about the many models of change — scaling from within yourself all the way out to how you work with people and systems, across cultures. Today we focused on the transtheoretical model and the transition from not-thought to thought. And we talked about victory in surrender as breaking from your bud and blossoming. Subscribe to hear next week’s episode — part two of this series on how to get ready for an assessment. Please like, share, or comment. We look forward to getting to know you.
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Credits
Thanks for joining us today on this episode of Following the Threads. I’m Natasha Stavros, co-host and executive producer, here with Sarah Liebman, co-host; Linda Highfield, director; and Noah Smith, audio engineer and composer.