What do you tell your child when you autism diagnosis explains everything they have been quietly watching? Tara Neri returns.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Season (Thread): 2
Episode number: 13
Release date: 2026-09-24
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: 00:29:47
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary [AI generated, human edited]: Grief after a late autism diagnosis is not linear, and it doesn’t end — it resurfaces in parking lots, in jersey logos, in long-term disability claim forms. In this unplanned but urgent episode, Natasha Stavros and Sarah Liebman set aside the meltdown series to sit with the word neither of them expected to land so hard: betrayal. They map three distinct layers — the existential betrayal of a lifetime framed as personal failure rather than neurobiological difference; the workplace and institutional betrayal of systems that demanded loyalty while offering none; and the safety net betrayal of disability and social support systems designed to be inaccessible precisely when you need them most. They close with practical and philosophical frameworks for working with grief — from cultural mourning rituals to the yogic concept of aparigraha — and a diary excerpt from After the Masquerade that is one of the series’ most raw and quietly devastating pieces of writing yet.
Key takeaways about grief and betray with a late diagnosis of autism
Grief after late autism diagnosis is nonlinear and recurring: It doesn’t arrive once and resolve — it resurfaces under new contexts, which means the goal isn’t to complete it on a timeline but to recognize it when it comes and give it somewhere to go.
Betrayal has three layers: The existential betrayal of an identity built on false premises, the workplace and institutional betrayal of systems that punished rather than accommodated, and the safety net betrayal of disability systems designed to reject first and see who comes back.
Working with grief requires ritual, not resolution: Whether that’s sitting with a trusted person, marking an anniversary, taking a walk with rocks that represent each loss, or practicing aparigraha — non-attachment — the point is to feel it, acknowledge it, and let it flow through rather than forcing it to end.
[This section is AI-generated, human edited].
Resources and References
You can read more about the Kübler-Ross model using five stages to describe the process of experiencing grief. You can learn more about the aparigraha from yogic philisophy described in this episode.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on Grief and Betrayal
Today I dropped my daughter off at pre-kindergarten and I saw one of the moms leaving. She was wearing a jersey with a company name on it for a company I used to work for. I asked her if she worked there. She said yes.
I felt overcome with grief. I pressed a smile on my face and said, “I used to work there.”
What was going through my mind was that this was one of three companies that had proved to me not that I was unable to meaningfully participate in society, but that I was unable to do so by the rules and systems that society has in place.
My heart sank.
When I admitted to my therapist that I am cycling through grief. They mentioned anger.
This perplexed me. Yes it is a phase of grief, but I was not angry at that moment. I told them that sometimes I’m angry at the people who uphold these broken systems because the cost is too great for them to take a moral stance.
Aside from my sense of moral justice, they asked if I had feelings of betrayal.
This word stopped me. What did that even mean? It wasn’t a feeling I had ever internalized. We walked through the definition of breaking a person’s trust, confidence, or loyalty.
That’s when the flood gates opened. I couldn’t stop crying. I went through over ten tissues covered in a clear, filmy snot. A slightly salty sting of my tears streaming down my cheeks.
The therapist asked me questions and talked to me, but honestly – I couldn’t make sense of anything she was saying. She was saying words, and they were in sentences, that I presume made sense – but it was as if everything was so broken into pieces, I couldn’t interpret how the complexity of each word fit together, let alone parse how I felt or what I thought about it.
My dog, Jack – he came over concerned, nudging his head under my hand, making eye contact with me.
Somewhere in all of this, my therapist asked me what it was I felt I had lost.
I felt that I had lost the privilege not to fight to protect myself. I feel like everything I do is four-dimensional chess. I have to constantly calculate how to mitigate the cost of the system response to my natural way of being; not that I could avoid the costs, because the emotional, physical, and financial costs for being different – they are inevitable, and they are immense. It is built into the design of the system. Enough to break a person. Many persons. I have to play that game because if I don’t – I could very well end up unhoused, jobless, and unable to afford food, shower, and shelter, let alone health care.
I am telling you – the financial costs alone of admitting that I am autistic in a system that classifies that as disabled from participating in the system they designed, has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My ego has been stripped. Once revered as a mentor, I am cast aside, reminded that I am no longer worthy of accolades.
And the only reasons I am surviving right now is because I have a support system, and because I am gifted with exceptional quantitative and organizational skills that allow me to play four-dimensional chess.
I am grieving the loss of the ignorance that I could navigate this world of broken systems and casually not care because they don’t affect me enough personally.
I am grieving betrayal.
I cannot trust the system to provide me any relief.
I am deeply saddened that the system has cost me a lifetime of fighting.
I resent that others can complacently acquiesce and choose not to fight in an unjust, immoral system.
I lack confidence that the system will change, and that the only way to find peace will be for me to radically accept what is, stop fighting to fit into the system, and choose a life outside of the system as much as I can possibly manage.
I am grieving that my ability and desire to give and contribute is being stifled.
What loyalty could I have to a system with no loyalty to the well-intentioned.
I am grieving an immense betrayal.
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: Something Happened That Couldn’t Wait
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:01:25]`
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 about grief and betrayal. I know we said we’d start the mini-series on meltdowns and shutdowns, and we certainly will — but something happened in my current autistic burnout that can’t wait to be talked about. Yesterday, I dropped my daughter off at pre-K and saw one of the moms wearing a jersey with a logo from a company I used to work for — a company where I was, quote, successful: making nearly $200K a year, making tens-of-millions-of-dollars decisions worth hundreds of millions to the company, with titles and invitations celebrating my journey to leadership. As I walked away, my heart sank and I felt an immense sadness wash over me. I will likely never walk on that path again. Processing your diagnosis and moving toward autistic burnout recovery is nonlinear. It’s not like you get your diagnosis, feel a bunch of things, go into burnout, and then just stop feeling. Often, you revisit feelings under new contexts. So today I want to get down and dirty with what it means to grieve loss and truly feel the betrayal of a late autism diagnosis.
What Is Grief? Why Western Culture Gets It Wrong
*Grief is a relatively new concept in Western culture — and the expectation that it is linear, time-limited, and tidy is itself a form of betrayal for anyone navigating a late autism diagnosis.*
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:03:06]`
Grief is a relatively new concept in our culture to talk about openly — and the reason I want to start there is that when we don’t know that grief is allowed to be had about something, we don’t expect the layers of it: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. And it was initially framed as linear — you start with denial and end with acceptance. But especially when something is not a discrete event, you re-encounter your grief. It hits you out of the blue. When grief is not addressed, it comes out in destructive ways: a deepening of addiction, withdrawing from community or profession, splitting yourself into pieces — showing the world “I’m fine” while going home and playing video games for hours or lying in a dark room in a fetal position. Anger and irritability too — that’s grief squashed down and coming out sideways. Like too much mayo in your sandwich.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:07:14]`
So our understanding of grief in Western Eurocentric culture has a time limit built in. Oh, you gave birth? Go back to work tomorrow. There’s a theme. And before Kübler-Ross gave us language for the phases, people were just expected to put a scab over it and get on. After a certain point in the DSM — I’m not sure if it’s still this way — grief that lasted longer than a few weeks became “complicated bereavement.” Golly, thanks for telling me how to feel.
The Three Layers of Betrayal in Late Autism Diagnosis
*”Betrayal” was a word Natasha couldn’t initially connect with — until she unpacked what it actually meant. Once she did, the floodgates opened.*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:07:44]`
In talking with my therapist and with Sarah, both of you separately used a word I actually struggled to identify with: betrayal. Who betrayed me? What’s the betrayal? And then I started to really unpack what that was — and to realize there were different layers of betrayal I was experiencing as a late-diagnosed autistic person.
Layer One: The Existential Betrayal of Identity
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:08:49]`
The first layer is the existential betrayal of the late-diagnosed community. Everything attributed to not fitting in — not trying hard enough, being fundamentally wrong — was just never the whole picture. That’s a betrayal of identity. And what I’m learning now is there’s this whole community of people discovering this betrayal simultaneously. The framing of their difference was a lie, told by systems that didn’t know or didn’t care about neurodivergence.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:09:02]`
And those systems defined neurodivergence so narrowly that if you weren’t that exact small boy — no speech — then you were just a bad person. Somewhere between “not disabled enough” and “a person who will never work hard enough to fit in.”
Layer Two: The Workplace and Institutional Betrayal
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:09:27]`
I have dedicated my entire life to self-improvement. I have read more self-help books than almost anyone I’ve talked to. I’ve taken classes on how to be a better teammate, how to work productively on teams, how to lead, how to communicate across styles, how to have difficult conversations. I used all of those tools in the toolbox. And it didn’t matter — because the story was still: you’re a bad person. You’re someone we can’t work with. You need to be on a performance improvement plan. We all want to shelter and hide from your destructive personality. I’ve taken leadership courses, implemented every recommendation, and what I discovered is: once you’re outside the circle, it wouldn’t matter if you improved or not — they’ve already put you there.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:10:23]`
And that’s a betrayal in itself — “go learn this thing and maybe it’ll help you,” and then you come back and they say: it wouldn’t matter if it helped or not, because we’ve already made our decision. In technical fields especially, you’d think the most important thing would be the product or the process — but actually, no. Natasha would bring people back to a deadline, a deliverable, a risk — and the response would be: well, now you’ve made everybody feel bad. You’re on two different screens entirely. And when you try to ask what the actual rule is, you’ve just shown everyone that you’re on the outside.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:15:14]`
And it hurts because you tried to participate. You tried to contribute something meaningful. I was genuinely concerned about the bears — the habituation risk, the safety issue. I wasn’t even thinking about raccoons. But when I tried to meaningfully participate, it was shut down and rejected. And there’s a betrayal in that.
Layer Three: The Safety Net Betrayal
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:15:51]`
The third layer is the safety net betrayal. Right now I’m navigating a long-term disability claim while incapacitated for hours every single day. The systems that exist are designed to be inaccessible — and even for someone who is highly organized with extreme documentation, one misstep in an already precarious system means total annihilation. The assumption built into the default response is still that you’re milking the system. We’re going to reject you first and see if you come back. I really tried to do all the things. I’m in a desperate state. And the cost of admitting I am autistic in a system that classifies that as disabled from participating in the system they designed has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:16:19]`
And there’s not even a misstep required — just trying to access the system gets you a first-line rejection to see if you’ll come back. That’s the design.
How to Work With Grief After a Late Autism Diagnosis: Practical and Philosophical Approaches
*The goal is not to force grief through a linear timeline — it’s to give it a container, name it, and let it move through you.*
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:16:55]`
So how do you actually work with this grief? The first thing is just recognizing it. Oh, this is anger. And: maybe I actually do have grief right now, and my grief is connected to the disappointment of the betrayal. We also talked about cultural mourning traditions as a model — not to appropriate them, but to draw on the wisdom that grief is a real, named, held experience deserving of ritual and time.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:17:29]`
One of the things Natasha mentioned is sitting Shiva — the Jewish mourning tradition — and the idea isn’t the specific ritual, it’s what it represents: talking about the loss in a space of safety, with people who care about what happened. Similarly, I often recommend to clients with anniversaries of significant losses: put it on the calendar, give yourself a warning, it’s coming. There’s a before and an after, and you can hold that. In the Yarzeit tradition, you light a candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s death — not to wallow, but to acknowledge. Something like: I’m going to mark this day, because this was real. And I think about clients using images of themselves — a picture of yourself at four years old, hands on your hips, fierceness in your face. When you’re deep in grief and you’ve had to set that fierceness at a distance because it wasn’t welcomed, sometimes bringing that image back to your desk is an act of reclamation. You can let things sit, dissipate, and integrate. You don’t have to let go — letting go comes when you’re ready.
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:18:47]`
One tradition I remember reading about — and I sincerely apologize that I can’t recall which culture it was from — involved being very physical about grief. As you go for a walk, with every sad thought, you pick up a rock or a stick, or write something on a piece of paper. You collect these feelings. Then you physically burn them, release them into a river, or place them along the path — physically acknowledging each feeling and then physically letting it go. That can be way in the future. Sometimes we need little altars for a while. And in yogic philosophy, the concept is *aparigraha* — non-attachment. The idea that feelings are fluid as time is fluid. Now is now, is now, is now, constantly moving. And so are your feelings. You feel the sadness, experience it, recognize it — but you let it flow through you without holding on. You let the cycles of grief flow through you with acknowledgment, not with a deadline.
Closing: Grief Is Not Linear — and That’s the Point
**Natasha Stavros** `[00:22:47]`
In your path to burnout recovery — and in your processing from a late diagnosis — you will experience grief. It will come in different phases, different representations of emotions, and they may all be linked to the same grief, cycling through in a nonlinear way. In this, there is a recognition that there is a betrayal. What is that betrayal? How do you feel it? Where do you feel let down? Subscribe to the podcast to hear next week’s episode and the start of our mini-series on shutdowns and meltdowns. Please like, share, or comment. We look forward to getting to know you.
**Sarah Liebman** `[00:23:45]`
See you next time.