Who do you tell? When? And how much? A practical framework for disclosing your autism diagnosis to friends — and what you gain by doing it.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Season (Thread): 7
Episode number: 10
Release date: 2026-08-13
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: 00:28:10
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary: Disclosing an autism or ADHD diagnosis to friends is messier than disclosing to a partner — there are more people, more dynamics, and no linear roadmap. Natasha Stavros and Sarah Liebman offer a three-question self-study framework to run before any disclosure: Is this person safe? Do I have the emotional capacity for their reaction? And what do I actually hope to accomplish? Drawing on an adaptation of the AA disclosure model, they argue for building a trusted support base before disclosing widely — so that no single reaction has the power to derail you. The episode closes with a diary excerpt from After the Masquerade in which Natasha sits in her garage for 45 minutes, unable to go inside, and finally arrives at the truth: she really is disabled — and proactive self-care means something far deeper than a spa day; it may mean letting some friendships go.
Key takeaways about disclosing a neurodivergent diagnosis to friends
Self-study before disclosure: The relief of diagnosis can make you want to shout it from the rooftop before you’re ready for what comes back. Before telling a friend, ask three question: 1) is this person safe? 2) do I have the emotional capacity for their reaction? and, what do I actually hope to accomplish?
Build your base first: Establishing at least one trusted support person (a therapist, peer group, or online community) before disclosing widely means you’re not depending on every friend to get it right, and research confirms this reduces the toll of the adjustments that follow.
The silver lining: Disclosure reveals which friendships are built on mutual care and which are transactional. While losing friends is genuinely painful, the depth and richness of what comes after is one of the unexpected gifts of unmasking.
Resources and References
While not exactly the same disability as neurodivergence, there have been multiple – albeit qualitative – studies on the effect of chronic conditions (e.g., pain) on friendship. In this open access article, Moensted et al. (2023) found that “significant personal labour and performative identity work [is] required to maintain connectedness within friendships. Normative expectations about able-bodiedness may hinder the continuation of friendships by limiting opportunities for social participation for those living with chronic conditions. Participants discussed both the emotional and physical ‘work’ necessary to maintain even tenuous social connections, hampering one’s ability to cultivate emergent friendships. This work included having to trade authenticity for other desirable social gains, such as a desire for social inclusion.”
Yang and Grol-Prokopczyk (2021) found that what happens with friends depends on the severity of your chronic condition, and Bernardes et al. (2023) found that including adult friends in interventions could help reduce the negative effect of chronic conditions and helped to make adjustments for chronic condition management.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on disclosing your adult autism, ADHD, or AuDHD diagnosis to friends
I’ve been having a really hard time. I am just very disabled from… existing as I once did.
I’m very overwhelmed by absolutely everything. When I flex and try to take on more, or return to normal, I crash with exhaustion. This last week I had to pull myself together to make a deadline. I didn’t even work the equivalent of a full time job, but I worked with intense focus on executive functioning, and it wiped me out. The deadline passed, the work got done, I slept it off, lived a full day thinking, “maybe I am just faking this whole disability thing. Maybe it’s just in my head. I can totally go back to work.”
Then…
The next day – I woke up, walked the dogs, got my daughter to school, drove home, and sat in the car in the garage for 45 minutes. I wasn’t on my phone. I wasn’t listening to music, or on a call. I just sat there. My feet were lead weights. Finally, I mustered the energy, pulled myself from the car, walked in the door to the house, all of about 20 strides, collapsed on my bed laying on my back, staring at the ceiling, with my black out curtains drawn. My dog lay on my chest.
That’s when it hit me. I really am disabled. It’s not something I’m saying to get a longer vacation – this isn’t living, I am not able to live and function right now.
To help with my recovery, my therapist gave me the assignment of proactive self-care.
Proactive self-care.
What does that even mean?!
We automatically assume that it is taking care of your basic needs, but I think it is so much more than that. Especially if we are talking about being proactive.
Sure – I can plan a spa day, but that’s not holistic. That’s a band-aid for a broken system.
Beyond the superficial, what does it mean to truly care for something?
I think about my four-year old daughter and what it means to care for her? And I really truly believe it is to love her. Sure, it is to support her in meeting her needs, but it is also to accept her for who she is, to create a safe space, and to trust in her inherent goodness.
When we place self-care in that context, just brushing your teeth and taking a shower, that’s just meeting your needs, that’s not necessarily extending acceptance to yourself or creating safety for yourself to just be in that moment as you are. It is not trusting that this is what you need and that it doesn’t make you a bad person; it is trusting that you will get back to what you need to do, but for right now – you need to just do this, and just because you’re doing this, for this moment – doesn’t mean that you are a lazy person.
All that it means is that, in this moment, you are doing the best you can, and maybe that capacity isn’t the same as it was, or what others expect it to be. It just is.
On the backdrop of this, I had to decline a friend of mine’s birthday party. I wanted to go. It was a big one. The big 4-0, and they were floating down the river. How fun is that?
But – when I think about proactive self-care, this does not actually sound fun to me. The one-hour drive in both directions (for which my husband would have to do), the uncertainty of where we enter and end, the sensory dysregulation from a cold river in and out of sun, a water-loving 4-year old, strangers, alcohol, the list goes on.
As proactive self-care, I had to embarrassingly withdraw my RSVP to attend. Both my friend and their partner were concerned. They called to check in with me. It was very sweet. They don’t really understand what’s going on for me, but they cared and they understood. They accepted me at that moment for what I could give. And that was wonderful.
I recently spoke to another friend of mine who has been chronically ill for about a year and half now. She told me that getting sick was a blessing in disguise.
After disclosing to friends about being on long-term disability and explaining the cause was autistic burnout, stemming from recent autism spectrum disorder level 1 diagnosis, I think I know what she means.
Disclosing to friends reveals which relationships are of mutual care, and which – are transactional?
AI-generated Show Transcript
Disclaimer
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.*
Introduction: The Full Spectrum of Reactions When You Disclose an Autism Diagnosis to Friends
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:01:26]`
Welcome to Following the Threads. I’m Natasha Stavros.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:01:29]`
And I’m Sarah Liebman.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:01:31]`
Today’s episode is the second in our disclosure series, focused on disclosing to friends. I’ve had the full spectrum of reactions when disclosing both my diagnosis and current disability to friends: denial, rejection, apathy, discomfort, fear, and also support — sometimes appropriate and sometimes well-intentioned but completely missing the mark. The point is, you will eventually have to disclose to anyone who knows you more than in passing, because it’s really a part of who you are. What you need to learn is how much to tell, when, and to whom. Masking is an important part of survival, and in some ways it will continue to be. Not everyone will get it — and for those people, good riddance. But getting to that point is eye-opening. Unlike last week’s episode about disclosing in romantic relationships, which had clear phases, friendships are much more vast — many more people, many more dynamics, and they don’t follow a linear progression.
The Twice Exceptional Problem: Why “But You Seem Fine” Is the Wrong Response
*For late-diagnosed autistic adults who are high-masking or twice exceptional, the most common friend reaction — minimization — can be one of the most invalidating.*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:03:21]`
Sometimes even very well-intentioned friends minimize you. “Oh, you’re not that bad.” And it comes up a lot because people see me as highly functional and very capable — I’m twice exceptional. My whole life I haven’t seen myself that way. I’ve always been like: you’re giving me acknowledgment for doing that, but I am completely failing socially. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give me some grace in my process of learning that? But the expectation is that because I’m functioning with schedules, getting high-capacity jobs, I am expected to have the exact same level of social capacity. And that’s just not how it works.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:04:47]`
Right — and even the things people put in the exceptional category are actually compensatory strategies. You schedule everything tightly because that’s how you manage working memory deficits. So even your strengths, when you look underneath, you can see: that’s not a character virtue — that’s an adaptation. And there’s such a bias in the psychology world around twice exceptional people. How many kids get referred for an IEP or a 504 and are told “he’s doing fine in school” — but he’s spending an hour and a half a day in the bathroom, or he’s in the nurse’s office. If you’re not dead yet, you must be fine. That tends to be the finish line.
Self-Study Before Disclosure: Three Questions to Ask Before You Tell a Friend
*Natasha disclosed her diagnosis to everyone at once — and learned the hard way why self-study first matters.*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:06:07]`
Before you disclose your diagnosis and disability, there’s an element of self-study you should do — and I am not saying this from a glass house. Full disclosure: I got my diagnosis and I just blasted everyone who knew me on any level. I felt so relieved and so seen that I went up on the rooftop and sang it without thinking about who might actually hear it or have opinions about it. So the self-study questions to ask first are: Is this person safe? Do I have the emotional capacity right now for whatever their reaction may be? And are they open and receptive? For example, a well-intentioned friend is safe — you trust them on some level. But you could have the emotional capacity to handle their safety and still not have the capacity for what follows. Because they could respond with “what does that mean? Teach me about autism spectrum disorder.” And if you’re not at the capacity to explain that right now, maybe this isn’t the right time — not that this isn’t the right person, but maybe not the right time. Research also shows that including at least one friend in whatever intervention you take after your diagnosis can really help reduce the negative toll of the adjustments you need to make.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:08:06]`
One thing to remember as an autistic or ADHD person is that we frequently use more and more words to try to clear up misunderstandings — and that is often a role we’ve taken on to maintain relationships. So the question “do I actually have the capacity?” is really about: can I not deal with something right now? Because for a lot of us, the default is “I’ll just deal with everything until I run myself into the ground.” And the thing that’s really important about building a support base before wide disclosure — whether that’s a therapist, a peer support group, or an online community — is that you’re not left needing every person you disclose to to do it perfectly. You have a place to process when it goes sideways. Sometimes the safest person is also someone who has lived the specific experience — just like with infertility, when you talk to someone who hasn’t been through it, you can feel rage and shame. Discernment takes time. And it’s also okay to just tell everyone and learn as you go — there’s no perfect way. We’re just trying to give you a leg up.
A Framework for Telling Friends
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:11:29]`
In thinking about a framework for disclosing to friends, we linked this to an adaptation of the AA disclosure model from the 12-step program — it’s a completely different objective, but the structure is useful. The first step is establishing support before disclosing widely. The next self-study question before you even approach someone is: what do I hope to accomplish? Am I doing this to offer an explanation? To repair something? To explain my disappearances? Because you may not get what you’re hoping for even if your objective is clear. The best people to approach first are those where you genuinely feel the conversation could lead to mutual repair — where both parties get something out of it, rather than a one-sided confession. I want to know that when I melt down, we both know what’s at the root. We know it’s not that I’m a bad person — and we can find a path to repair.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:15:01]`
And that mirrors what often happens in friendships where one or both people are neurodivergent — birds of a feather, mutual meltdowns. The goal isn’t the meltdown. The goal is coming to a place where you yourself — the neurodivergent person — know: I actually always come from a good place. I am not inherently evil. Most people who think they’re terrible and awful are not, because they think about it. Building that sense of yourself does happen in relationships — new ones, old ones, online ones — where you can finally say: that situation didn’t fail because I’m a bad person. It failed because I was put in a social situation where I never had a chance.
Losing Friends After an Autism Diagnosis: The Silver Lining Is Real
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:16:44]`
I want to make sure we have enough time to talk about the fact that this sounds scary — because you could lose friends. Not every relationship needs to be saved. Some cannot accommodate more of a whole version of who you are. And that’s okay — the research supports this; you’re not alone in this experience. Some friends may not be able, or willing, or want to make the kinds of accommodations you’re asking for. That’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because of what they carry for themselves. The research also shows that the severity of accommodation you need affects how your disclosure lands differently with different people. But there is a silver lining. The blessing behind all of this is learning the difference between transactional and real relationships. For me in particular, I’ve always found everything socially weird — so I genuinely don’t know when something is abnormally weird or toxically weird. I’m always guessing. What I’m learning now is that the people willing to actually see the whole me, without judgment, are the ones worth finding.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:18:12]`
I want to add a little ballast here, because when we struggle with social emotional stuff, we may have a very hodgepodge sense of “how do I even know what a friend is?” You called them a friend; you think that’s a friend. And you don’t really see something as a blessing until quite a lot later, because all the change is so painful. But the richness and depth of the friendships that come after this kind of self-study — not just about disclosure, but the whole unmasking process — can be genuinely life-changing. When we’re more vulnerable to social exploitation, we can become service providers in our friendships. Not seeing our worth and value, we use the differences we have as the only things we offer — and then people get used to us being their service provider. That’s exactly what we’re dismantling here. The mutual versus the transactional is the whole thing.
Closing: What We Covered and What’s Coming Next
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:21:07]`
That’s a wrap for today. Subscribe to hear next week’s episode — the next in our mini-series on disclosure — specifically discussing your diagnosis with your family.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:21:23]`
Dun, dun, dun.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:21:25]`
Please like, share, or comment. We look forward to getting to know you.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:21:29]`
All right. See you next time.