In this podcast autism speaks about autistic unmasking, self-study, and the path to late diagnosed autism through lived experience, clinical insight, and honest conversation between autistic women.
Show Notes
Episode Details
Season: 1
Episode number: 3
Release date: 2026-04-23
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: 00:29:18
Audience and tone: Educational, conversational, supportive; stigma-free exploration of neurodivergence, diagnosis, and self-understanding using personal experience as a case study
Summary: In this episode of Following the Threads, Natasha Stavros and therapist Sarah Liebman explore how self-study prepares adults for autism assessment. Drawing from Natasha’s late diagnosis, they discuss recognizing patterns like sensory sensitivities, emotional regulation challenges, and masked behaviors. The conversation highlights shifting from self-judgment (“what’s wrong with me?”) to curiosity (“what’s different?”), using tools like journaling, social reflection, and online resources. They emphasize that self-awareness not only improves diagnostic clarity but also builds self-compassion—whether pursuing formal diagnosis or self-identifying as neurodivergent.
Key takeaways to prepare for a late diagnosis autism assessment
Self-study is an important step that includes exploring relevance through social media, reflecting on past experiences (maybe even with a trusted person), reviewing online free resources from trusted sources, or working with a therapist.
Revisiting the transtheoretical model from Episode 2 on the transition to pre-contemplation to contemplation and how it serves to normalize neurodiversity and support vicarious reinforcement without social pressure or judgement.
Self study plants the seeds of the growing momentum to shift the perspective from “why am I bad” to “what’s different. What happens when I look at things from the vantage point of a diagnosis, without shame or judgement.
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.
Organization for Autism Research: Free Guidebooks for Families
ProsperHealth.io specializes in holistic adult autism assessment and resources.
The Unmasking Autism Diary: Memoir Excerpt on Autism Speaks Through Self-Study (Part 2 of 3)
I first started on the path of getting a diagnosis slowly. My friend kept mentioning how certain things that I did aligned with autism. I started creating a list. Now, I would never just make a list, it had to be systematic.
I started with a simple google search, for which the AI reported that people with autism struggled with emotional regulation, repetitive behaviors, unique ability, social communication challenges, sensory sensitivity, learning differences, and special interests.
My immediate reaction was to intellectualize how I may or may not fit into these categories. But, through time, my lists began to fill. I wrote down things as I organically discovered them. As my list of indicators grew, I wondered if I might actually qualify autistic.
That’s when the researcher in me turned on. My friend sent me the diagnostic and statistical manual for mental disorders (DSM), for autism specifically. As I reviewed it, I felt even more confused. By the letter of what was written, I wasn’t sure if I qualified as autistic.
After nearly three months, I decided to schedule an assessment. I felt very strongly that whether or not I was classified as autistic would be a coin toss. I was nervous about what the results might reveal – not because I feared a diagnosis, but I actually feared not getting a diagnosis. If I wasn’t autistic, what could explain all of the challenges I had disproportionately faced compared to my peers?
The evaluation is very matter of fact- it is nothing like therapy. It is important to articulate the distinction between these two activities. In therapy, I feel like a collaboration between me and psychotherapist, in the evaluation, I felt like an object of study.
Throughout the evaluation the psychologist interviewed me against the DSM. They listened to me recall stories of my childhood and present life, used questionnaires from me, my dad, and my husband to translate my experience into the rigid structure of the DSM. I will say that while deeply uncomfortable, I felt safe through this process.
When my evaluation came back qualifying me as autistic, and they read the evidence supporting a designation within each criteria, I noticed that the metrics cited were aligned with how much time I had spent thinking about my experiences.
When it came to repetitive behaviors and stimming, I didn’t qualify. I had never given much active thought to how much I controlled my body to meet expectations.
Fast-forward nearly six weeks after diagnosis, I began to notice that maybe my original evaluation may not have been complete.
My birthday is coming up, but we – my husband and I – couldn’t get a babysitter for that weekend. Instead, we decided to have a date night early. I chose to go to a musical at a local dinner theater. It wasn’t anything fancy, we live in middle America and it was a community theater, so tailor your expectations on skill level, but it was fun, entertaining, and it was just us.
On the way to the event, we talked about my current processing of the diagnosis, what it means for me, my life, my job, and our family. I found myself getting pre-emptively defensive. He remained calm and engaged in the conversation.
Upon getting to the event and being seated at our table, I began shaking my leg. Like a light bulb, I realized that I was stimming.
I am deeply uncomfortable with emotional intimacy. I know that I need to do it, not just for my husband, but because it’s human nature to need connection. Knowing that, and actually engaging with emotional intimacy are two entirely different things.
As I sat there becoming more conscious of the involuntary movement in my leg, I noticed a chill pass over me. I asked my husband for his jacket and immediately used it to cover myself. I knew that my desire to wear a down jacket twenty-four seven fit somewhere in the diagnostic criteria, but I hadn’t really ever tapped into the circumstances or my internal experience that resulted in me feeling comfort from the coat. I assumed it had to do with sensory stimulus, but I hadn’t identified it as protection from engaging with my emotions.
It’s not that I don’t have emotions. Quite the opposite. My emotions are big and intense, and when I engage with them, bad things happen.
AI-generated Show Transcript
Introduction
**Natasha (00:00:07):**
After the masquerade, the 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 (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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Why Self-Study Matters Before Your Autism Assessment
**Natasha (00:01:25):**
Welcome to Following the Threads. I’m Natasha Stavros. And I’m Sarah Liebman. Today’s episode is about the importance of self-study in preparation for getting an adult autism assessment. For those who have been listening, I recently got my diagnosis at a couple weeks shy of 39. Sarah and I walk every morning, and you were the person who kept saying, “Oh, that’s a little autistic.” And I started writing things down. I wanted to share some of what I wrote.
I wrote about emotional regulation challenges — feeling very emotionally dysregulated when anyone interrupts my intense focus.
**Sarah (00:02:33):**
The hyperfocus.
**Natasha (00:02:36):**
Exactly. And I started learning about rejection-sensitive dysphoria, which we’ll have a whole episode about. I also thought about repetitive behaviors — I have to put everything away before I go to sleep. Everything has a spot within a centimeter, every single night, without fail. I thought that was repetitive behavior. But it turns out it didn’t qualify under the DSM criteria for repetitive behavior. One of the things that came up later though: I recently realized while out on a date with my husband that I do shake my leg — and I’ve learned not to. When I did my evaluation, I hadn’t thought about that, so I didn’t qualify under that criterion because I had masked it so thoroughly. Other things on my list: unique abilities, social communication challenges — like how my husband and I met online, and I came up with 70 criteria with different point systems.
**Sarah (00:04:44):**
But the thing that’s autistic about that is that the criteria were useful — they were thoughtful and you applied them. Someone more on the ADHD end would come up with a list and then go on the date and be like, “oh, whatever.” When you come up with a system, you use it. That’s key to a lot of your success, and it’s also different from how many people approach things. And there were other ones around sensory issues too.
**Natasha (00:05:30):**
Right — I started being like, oh yeah, I really don’t like gloves. I would rather have bare hands in zero-degree weather than wear gloves. I can’t stand to have anything around my fingers. So I started writing down this list, went and did the assessment — and as they were asking questions, I think I was better equipped to have that assessment because I had thought about these things in advance.
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Shifting the Vantage Point: From “Why Am I Bad?” to “What’s Different?”
**Sarah (00:06:42):**
The other thing is that this wasn’t new information. You always knew you struggled with gloves. But it was tilting the frame a little bit and saying: oh, this isn’t just a “me thing” — the intensity with which I feel this might mean something more. It took in a lot of what you already knew about yourself, and some of it had been cast as “this is bad” or “I don’t know why.” Your reorganization of it shifted puzzle pieces.
The list also really reflected a lot of understanding of social and emotional difficulties you were very aware of — but there was this gap between all the work you put in and what would happen. That disconnect between your intentions, the amount of effort you invested, your need to collaborate — and the misses that kept happening.
**Natasha (00:08:37):**
So it’s the shifting of the vantage point. Very often people who are neurodivergent have spent a lot of time thinking about how different they are — either because the outside world has messaged it heavily, or because they’ve internalized it through their own sensations. Changing the vantage point can shift the focus. In the self-study and the preparation, that surrender to the possible truth of diagnosis — like we talked about in the last episode — enables you to change your vantage point. You become able to say: oh, maybe that *is* a sensory difference, not just “I don’t like gloves.”
**Sarah (00:09:43):**
It opens up. There’s more play in the structure. It becomes — to use a physical analogy — more tonic rather than hypo- or hypertonic. When we are white-knuckling it psychologically, there are parts of us that are like “I’m just an anxious person,” and other parts that are loose — something I always seem to miss when it flies past me. In my own diagnostic experience, realizing that my daydreaming wasn’t because I didn’t care, but was indicative of my inattentive ADHD — it wasn’t just a bad habit. We’d been over here in “here’s a bad part of me, people don’t like it” — but it was actually information about how my brain works.
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Revisiting the Transtheoretical Model: Pre-Contemplation to Contemplation
**Natasha (00:12:27):**
Connecting this back to last episode — we talked about the transtheoretical model and the transition from pre-contemplation to contemplation. In the context of self-study, this can sometimes mean not even looking at yourself directly, but looking outward at other people who identify as ADHD or autistic or some other neurodivergence. Normalizing neurodiversity that way can actually help you remove your own judgment, so you can show up and see that truth in yourself.
**Sarah (00:13:36):**
That’s vicarious reinforcement. And as one is developing this new vantage point, it’s like — oh, so if I think about how hard it is for me to get out of the house in the morning, and I stop thinking about it as being lazy or stupid, and instead I see someone else saying they don’t brush their teeth for five days in a row because it’s so uncomfortable — the top just comes off. You start to see yourself in other people in a way that helps loosen that perspective. You don’t have to comment, you don’t have to tell anyone — you just start to recognize something. And there’s another useful concept here from identity development: moratorium — making tentative commitments and trying things out without committing yourself. That’s very important when shifting from one identity to another, because you need space to let it sit, let it stick to something in your consciousness.
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Practical Ways to Do Self-Study Before Your Adult Autism Assessment
**Natasha (00:14:42):**
For me, I wrote a list and organized it systematically — that’s how my brain works. But there are other ways. You could have a conversation with a trusted person and reflect on your past experiences with openness and curiosity. If that’s uncomfortable or you don’t have that person, social media is another way. You can follow autism influencers, look at the content, read the comments, and just ask yourself: do I even identify with this? You don’t have to comment or like anything.
**Sarah (00:15:53):**
Social media gives you trusted unknowns — you can watch it again, read the comments without pressure. And you know, say you don’t have a therapist who’s obsessed with neurodivergence like me — sometimes just looking at online surveys can help. Prosper Health has really good surveys that reflect their holistic way of assessing in adulthood, and the privacy of taking something in and thinking about it before you share it with anyone else can be really valuable.
**Natasha (00:17:22):**
There are a lot of trusted resources — the Organization for Autism Research, for example. April is Autism Awareness Month, which is also my birth month — very ironic. Working with a therapist is another option. I have alexithymia — we’ll have a whole episode on that — which means I really struggle to interact with my emotions. They happen in my body, I can sometimes identify emotions in others, but they feel like they’re on a different playing field. For me, I’m almost too outside of myself to know my own internal experiences. So having a friend like Sarah was meaningful. Not everyone has a Sarah — I’m sorry — but working with a therapist who specializes in neurodivergence can be very helpful, especially one who understands that the work isn’t generic. It’s getting the diagnosis, understanding it, shifting how you perceive yourself, and setting up your environment. Many people get an assessment and then go: okay, now what?
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Key Takeaways: Self-Study Prepares You for a More Accurate Assessment
**Natasha (00:19:47):**
To wrap up with today’s key takeaways on self-study as preparation for an autism assessment:
First, self-study is really important *before* you even go get an assessment — the more you do it, the more valuable the assessment becomes in the end.
**Sarah (00:20:17):**
And the more informed and accurate the assessment can be. And the more comfortable you feel going into it. Right up until the morning of the assessment, the fear is: what if I’m not autistic? What if I’m just told I’m a crappy person? But when you have a picture — as clear as it is to you — ready to present, you’re starting to really know yourself, or to know what you’ve already always known.
**Natasha (00:21:02):**
And this leads to the second takeaway: revisiting the transtheoretical model — that transition from pre-contemplative to contemplative.
And the last key point: self-study plants the seeds of growing momentum to shift the perspective from “why am I bad?” to “what’s different?” What happens when I look at things from a slightly different angle — specifically from the vantage point of a possible diagnosis — and do that without shame and without judgment?
**Sarah (00:21:42):**
And from inside the autism community: self-diagnosis is valid. There are many reasons people don’t seek a formal diagnosis from a psychologist — money, access, bad past experiences. Self-study is the yolk that allows everything else to grow. It holds all the nutrient. It’s the seed of the avocado.
**Natasha (00:22:30):**
All right. Thank you all for joining us today on this episode of Following the Threads. Subscribe to hear next week’s episode — the third in the series on getting 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.