Disclosing Your Autism Diagnosis to Family is fraught with revert-ego and emotions entanglement. Learn to navigate it and why you don't need them to believe your story.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Season (Thread): 9
Episode number: 11
Release date: 2026-08-27
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: 00:31:59
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary: Disclosing a late autism diagnosis to family is uniquely fraught because, unlike friends or a partner, you didn’t choose these people – and they carry their own unnamed neurodivergence whether they know it or not. Natasha Stavros and Sarah Liebman draw on Bowen Family Systems theory to explain why disclosure disrupts the family ego mass and triggers “revert-ego” – the disorienting pull back into old relational roles. They offer concrete tactics for surviving extended family exposure: identifying an ally, building in de-stimulation time, transporting regulation routines, and using gray rocking to stay “unhookable” without cutting anyone off. The episode closes with a diary excerpt from After the Masquerade in which Natasha, mid-family vacation and deep in autistic burnout, reaches the most liberating realization of the series: she doesn’t need to change their story – she only needs to change her own.
Key takeaways about disclosing your late diagnosis to family:
Prepare the system instead of only preparing yourself. Disclosing to family affects the entire family system. Identify an ally, schedule time to de-stimulate, and establish portable regulation routines before you speak. The disclosure is only one component of a larger sensory and emotional experience.
Keep your statements short, factual, and non-negotiable. The most effective disclosures are brief scientific facts mentioned casually during a conversation. Do not use personal appeals, confessions, or invitations to debate. This approach prevents the family system from finding points to oppose.
You do not need them to believe you. The most significant change after disclosure is realizing that you only need to change your own narrative rather than theirs. Cutoff is a continuum instead of a binary choice. You can choose to stop responding to emotional baiting without removing people from your life completely.
Resources and References
In this article we reference the Bowen Family Systems Theory. You can learn more about this in this Psychology Today article. We also reference “gray rocking”, you can learn more in this YouTube video explanation by Dr. Ramani.
Unfortunately, research on the dynamic of a grown adult getting a diagnosis and their relationship with their parents is quite sparse, and often representative of a very specific demographic. Please keep this in mind so that appropriate modifications of their findings can be made to understand the nuances of an individual’s unique identity. To make inferences or extrapolation beyond these demographics will require personalized understanding of each identity within the context of a larger more diverse ecosystem of experiences and perspectives.
In this free, open access article from 2022 in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Lilley et al. found that across 27 scientific interviews, conceptualizing the autistic family was one of three common themes. An important caveat to this finding is that it was only a sample size of 27 and that is not sufficient to cover the diversity of gradients of variation such as ethnic, national, first-generation, gender, etc. that exist.
Similarly, in this free, open access article from 2023 in the Journal of AUtism and Developmental Disorders, Legg et al. interviewed eleven parents of late diagnosed adults and created a thematic map of the experiences. Notably, this study recognizes that this thematic experience represents the common experiences of “biological parents, and the majority of their adult children were male (91%). Almost all participants identified as White British (82%) with two being from another ethnic group. Most were married (73%) whilst the others were divorced (18%) or widowed (9%).”
Here is a resource about being diagnosed with ADHD and being black written by a Tamara Holmes. Another resource includes Autism in Black or VOICE for Neurodiversity.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on disclosing your late autism diagnosis to family
“You are not the parent.”
These are the words I heard so many times in my life from my parents when I stood up for myself, when I tried to be seen, when I tried to say that I think there has been a great misunderstanding. I think that this misunderstanding is hurting me, it is causing me pain and I want an apology. They would say, “You are not the parent. You don’t get to parent here.”
We just got back from Austria, which was a 10 year family reunion. My Russian family meets every 10 years. I’ve never heard of another family that does this. It is extremely costly, but it is something you plan for. My parents were so helpful to make it affordable for us this year and I am forever grateful and indebted to them for giving me that experience.
During that experience, I spent a week with them in autistic burnout, knowing that my whole life I have tried to be heard and I never was. I never felt seen. I never felt acknowledged for my story or my perspective. That was a source of a lot of pain for me throughout my whole life. So much so that I have learned my trauma trigger is when I don’t feel seen, heard, or understood.
A lot of that roots back to being autistic – living in a world and not understanding why people are responding to me the way that people are responding to me, in ways that hurt me over and over again, despite every effort to exist different, to be different, to not have an impact incongruent with my intention.
Over this trip, I tried to share my story with them, it’s partly why I created the podcast — to express what I cannot in person. I talked to my family about listening to the podcast and they said with hollow words, an empty sentiment, “maybe I should listen to it.”
They were generally more receptive, when I could without consequence, throw into conversation at relevant times, “well, you know that’s autism.” I could give short facts that they couldn’t really dispute. It wasn’t about anything in the past, not about my experience as a person greatly misunderstood as a child and for my entire life, just slow and steady exposure to science.
There was one incident that sums up the entirety of my experience on this family vacation.
My daughter – she might be autistic, like me, I see so much of myself in her – had a tantrum. Now, let me stop right here to say she was amazing. I am so overwhelmed with gratitude and love because my daughter, my husband, and me – we were a team. For so much of this trip, it was adult time, not four-year-old time, and she was a trooper through 95% of it.
In preparation for this, we told her weeks in advance about how hard it would be to have to do a lot of adult time, and that she would have to do things that she didn’t always want to do, like being in a crowded, loud space. I told her that if it was ever too much, she could let me know and that we would work with her to find a solution. We practiced seeing her. That was a conscious parenting choice.
Going back to this incident, my daughter was trying to go with the flow with everything, and she was being rushed, which is stressful for her, and she wanted to say, I want to sit with mommy, but she couldn’t find the words fast enough. She started crying.
Everyone jumped in demanding that she stop crying.
I said, “Hey– you are not the parent. I am the parent. You parented me the way you want to, I parent the way I want to.”
A member of the family couldn’t handle it. They quickly exited the car. It was moving, not fast – but it was moving. I think they were overstimulated by her crying.
At that moment, it was revert-ego. I was my daughter. I was my parent. I could understand all of it, and the differences of what happens when someone doesn’t get diagnosed. They respond the way they were trained — through shame and pain.
That is the power of the diagnosis. It gives you the information to choose interventions to the challenge that are helpful. You can use the science to pick a life that doesn’t result in 70 years of pain and shame for being misunderstood, because that – that’s a hard load to carry.
I can change that story for myself, and I can change that story for my daughter.
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: Why Disclosing to Family Hits Differently
**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 third in our five-part series on disclosing your late autism or ADHD diagnosis — this part focuses on disclosing to family, which is very different from disclosing to a long-term partner or friends. Unlike disclosing to a lover who made a choice commitment to love you, or to friends who come and go as life ebbs and flows, disclosing to family is deeply personal and often fraught with pain. Before we dive in, we want to acknowledge that we both come from white Eurocentric backgrounds, and that family culture — including what concepts like “cutting off” mean in practice — can vary significantly across ethnic and cultural contexts. Whatever you pull from this, know that it is said from our unique perspective. For context: I recently returned from a family vacation — what my dad always called “forced family fun” when I was growing up. I am currently in autistic burnout, but I had to face the world: I traveled across an ocean, sat in crowded bars, airports, and public transportation with lots of stimulus, and shared accommodations with my closest family. I dissociated for most of it — and I had to disclose my disability diagnosis to some very close family members, and some more distant relatives.
Proactive Self-Care Tactics Before and During Family Disclosure
*Disclosure doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it happens in the middle of a family system, often in someone else’s space, on someone else’s schedule.*
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:03:40]`
One of the most important things when you know you’re about to be in extended family exposure is to identify an ally — hopefully within the family. That might be your partner, a cousin, a sibling. And if there’s not someone inside the family, make sure to set someone up outside it that you can at least send exasperated texts to, to keep yourself from feeling too swept away. It’s also really important to prepare yourself mentally for the reality that by disclosing your diagnosis, you are going to disrupt a family system. Prepare with your knowledge of your family — families are pretty predictable. Build in de-stimulation time, or identify a place where you can go and people aren’t going to barge in. That depends on your family’s boundaries, of course. It might be a walk down the street, a quiet corner of the house, a tree in the backyard, a movie, or even a grocery store run. Whatever signals to you and to them that you need a moment.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:07:51]`
The other thing worth identifying are transportable routines — small things you can bring from your home environment that create regulation. Sarah brings her own tea and honey when she travels. It’s a small thing, but it’s one less point of dysregulation in the middle of everything you’re about to embark on, and something you can return to when things get loud. Beyond physical removal, give yourself permission to mentally remove yourself in the moment too. My favorite expression: “not my monkeys, not my circus.” That internal dissociation — reminding yourself that what’s happening in the family glob is not your entire reality — is a form of self-preservation, not a failure to be present. The shame that can come with dissociation is worth naming: you may feel like you should have been more present. But your brain doesn’t always give you a choice, and sometimes the cost of full presence is simply too high.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:16:11]`
Masking and dissociation are both forms of self-preservation — and it’s not always harmful. The question isn’t whether you’re doing it, but what the cost is, and whether it’s creating a whole other self that feels way too distant from your known self. Our brains are doing us a service when they tamp down intensity to protect us. The goal isn’t to eliminate that ability; it’s to understand when you’re using it and to have more choice over it over time.
How to Actually Disclose: Keep It Short, Factual, and Non-Negotiable
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:10:30]`
When I actually disclosed my diagnosis to family, I found I got the best responses when I kept it short, factual, and consistent — about autism in general, and not really about me specifically or about a particular incident or someone’s interaction with me. That approach meant my diagnosis wasn’t up for discussion or debate. It wasn’t a negotiation. It was: “Autism involves poor working memory — research shows there’s a pruning that happens with neurotransmitters around ages three to five that has an effect on that.” A short fact that most people don’t feel comfortable disputing. Calibrate your language to your audience. They were generally more receptive when I could casually drop in, at relevant moments: “Well, you know, that’s autism.” Slow and steady exposure to science, not a confession or a plea.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:11:36]`
And a common response that both of us experienced was acknowledgment followed by quickly moving on. Not moving forward — moving under the rug. “Let’s just keep going.” Sometimes that’s disappointing. Other times it’s actually a relief, because at the very least, if people aren’t trying to dominate the situation, they can come back to it. They may have more sense of it the next time you see them. But it can also be genuinely invalidating — like it was never a problem in the first place.
Revert-ego: When Disclosing Sends You Both Backward
*Autism is heritable. You are almost certainly not the only one in your family system who carries these patterns — named or unnamed.*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:12:25]`
Another thing that can happen when you disclose to family is what I call revertigo — where you go home and suddenly mom still treats you like the four-year-old who spilled the boiling water. Autism is heritable, and it has likely shaped multiple generations in your family. You are already in a system that carries patterns of autism, named or not — and in family settings, it can be really hard to resist reverting to a prior relational role. How their autism was treated by their parents becomes the template for how they’re treating you now.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:13:28]`
And families develop all these accommodations for unspoken, unnamed neurodivergence — “he’s just like that,” or “you know how men are.” There are all these intersections at play. And the Bowen Family Systems concept of the family ego mass — the “family glob,” as I call it — is so useful here. Families that value sameness will attack anyone who differentiates: through exclusion, derision, dismissal. When you are already working on the process of differentiating yourself from the family glob, that is already disruptive. Adding a neurodivergent diagnosis — which implicitly says “this is you too, Dad” — raises the stakes enormously and in both directions. The person being implicated doesn’t want their self-view disrupted. So your differentiation gets labeled the problem.
Gray Rocking, Self-Acknowledgment, and Owning Your Own Truth
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:17:17]`
Something kind of powerful can happen when you disclose — independent of how they respond — because it’s almost your own self-acknowledgment. In that self-acknowledgment, I found I was less inclined to participate in old patterns and more resolved not to. That’s where gray-rocking becomes a really useful tool.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:17:49]`
Gray rocking is making yourself as gray, uninteresting, and unhookable as possible when someone is reacting to you in an old way or trying to provoke you into an old pattern. The way Natasha presented her diagnosis — short facts, no negotiation, no colorful personal appeals — that was gray rocking in action. It’s a way to manage your own expectations while also creating a little more space than people are comfortable giving you to process your new reality. It can escalate some people, but it’s valuable precisely because you’re not trying to convince anyone. Dr. Ramani has a fantastic video on gray rocking that we’ve linked in the show notes.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:19:07]`
For me, what was so clarifying on this trip was arriving at resolution beforehand: I don’t need to convince you. And I don’t need to convince you of the harm that came to me because of this. It is what it is — whether you accept it or not. I don’t have to change your story. I get to change my story. That’s the part that matters most.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:20:04]`
That is differentiation. So much of the focus in difficult family systems becomes: if I can just get them to change, they’ll stop doing this. But their changes happen on their timeline — if they happen at all. The most exciting thing I ever see in therapy is a client settling into themselves: “I’m in the control tower. I know what’s true and what’s not true. It’s complicated, because I love these people and I don’t get to choose my attachment figures. But this isn’t my story anymore.” That moment is the beginning of real freedom.
Cutoff vs. Estrangement: What Pop Culture Gets Wrong
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:21:28]`
One thing worth addressing: this dissociation technique — stepping back from the expected emotional outcome — can be perceived by the family as cutoff. And cutoff is everywhere right now in pop culture. But no one ever just decides to cut someone off. It is wrenching and extremely difficult. The point we’re making is that cutoff comes in very different levels. You can cut off someone’s ability to emotionally entice or bait you into a toxic situation without cutting them out of your life entirely. That distinction matters.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:22:50]`
The research on estrangement shows it’s a continuum. And there’s a place on that continuum that lives entirely on the inside: “I’m going to continue to know what I know. I’m not going to chase you to get you to believe what I believe about me.” Families are made up of other humans, and there’s nothing more complicated than other people. Part of the emerging conversation around adult autism and ADHD diagnosis is recognizing that the diagnosis doesn’t come out of nowhere — it usually arrives in the context of difficulties the family has been living around for years, named or not. And the family itself may go through its own process as a result.
Closing: What We Covered and What’s Coming Next
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:24:32]`
Just to recap: we talked about tactical approaches for proactive self-care when disclosing to family, what actually works when you disclose and the variety of responses you might get, and the silver lining of being able to own your own truth — regardless of how anyone else receives it. Subscribe to hear next week’s episode — part four of five — on disclosing your diagnosis to your child. Please like, share, or comment. We look forward to getting to know you.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:25:06]`
See you next time.