The Rise of a Name for a Life We Already Lived - "AuDHD"

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It took me most of my life to realize I wasn’t broken.

Like so many others with AuDHD — a blend of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) — I lived decades without a proper diagnosis, stumbling through school, work, relationships, and even therapy, often hearing versions of the same unhelpful messages: Try harder. Be more consistent. Why can’t you just stick with something? I tried. Desperately. But trying harder doesn’t fix what was never laziness to begin with. It wasn’t until I was well into midlife that I received the dual diagnosis that changed everything.

The term AuDHD isn’t officially in the DSM yet, but it lives and breathes in the real lives of thousands of people like me who are finally finding language for their contradiction. And there’s growing scientific and clinical support for it. Studies suggest that over 40% of people diagnosed with Autism also meet the criteria for ADHD, and the reverse overlap is equally compelling. These aren’t two completely separate conditions; they’re neurological siblings that often show up hand-in-hand, tugging in different directions.

As I often say when working with coaching clients now:

"My brain is a room with two very different DJs. One wants to spin soothing ambient tracks at a predictable rhythm. The other is blasting a remix at triple speed and demanding everyone dance. And I’m just trying to get through the day without blowing the speakers."

Life at the Crossroads: Structure Meets Spontaneity

The most challenging aspect of AuDHD is that the traits of autism and ADHD are often in direct conflict. Autism pulls toward structure, sameness, and predictability. It’s about reducing surprises, maintaining control, and regulating sensory input. ADHD, on the other hand, thrives on novelty, thrives on motion, and becomes easily bored with repetition.

Here’s how that plays out in my day-to-day:

I plan out my entire week on a computer calendar. Color-coded. Everything has a time and place. That’s my autistic need for external predictability. But then, my ADHD brain wakes up one morning and says: Let’s scrap all that and go work from a new coffee shop and write a blog post about something you just thought of 20 seconds ago.

Or I’ll spend two days hyperfocused on organizing my kitchen, reworking the flow of cabinets and drawers with the precision of an engineer, completely immersed and regulated. But on the third day, I’ll stare at the dishes in the sink and feel paralyzed, because the novelty has worn off and now my ADHD brain wants nothing to do with it.

Relationships? That’s a whole other layer. I need deep, consistent connection (thank you, autism), but also crave spontaneous banter and surprise intellectual rabbit holes (hello, ADHD). When someone is unpredictable in the wrong way — like emotionally inconsistent or uncommunicative — my autistic nervous system spirals. But when someone is too rigid, too same-same, my ADHD gets bored and restless.

The contradiction doesn’t stop at what I want. It’s in how I think. I crave stability, but I can’t do monotony. I need freedom, but chaos overwhelms me. I want novelty, but I need advance notice. I get overstimulated, but I seek stimulation. And living inside that paradox is more than exhausting. It’s disorienting.

"Every decision feels like a negotiation between two internal board members who fundamentally disagree on what success looks like."

The Road to Self-Understanding

Before I knew what AuDHD was, I just thought I was failing at being human. I cycled through careers, projects, relationships. I had bursts of brilliance and months of burnout. My nervous system lived on high alert. I tried all the wrong solutions: people-pleasing, perfectionism, addiction. I thought I had a motivation problem. What I had was a wiring issue.

It wasn’t until I spent a year in residential treatment for addiction and trauma that I began to see the pattern clearly. I wasn’t broken. I was misnamed, miscategorized, misunderstood. When I began learning about neurodivergence, everything clicked: the sensory overwhelm, the rejection sensitivity, the hyperfocus followed by executive paralysis, the emotional meltdowns, the near-obsessive need for routine that I also resented.

Autism explained so much of my sensory and social patterns. ADHD explained my impulse control, my energy fluctuations, my creative bursts and my chaos. But neither label, on its own, captured the whole picture. AuDHD did.

Coaching Others: A Mirror, Not a Map

Today, through Like Minds Alliance, I help others walk the path I wish I had known decades ago. Most of the people I coach are late-diagnosed, just like me. They are successful on paper but deeply exhausted. They are bright, compassionate, talented, and secretly ashamed of their inconsistencies. They’re doing the best they can with brains that were never given the right user manual.

What I offer them isn’t a fix. It’s a mirror. It’s a language for their experience. And it’s the freedom to stop fighting themselves.

Because understanding AuDHD isn’t just about diagnosis. It’s about reclaiming your identity. It’s about understanding that when you spent your childhood being called lazy, disruptive, anxious, or overly sensitive, what you actually were was unsupported. It’s about developing tools that work for your brain, not against it.

I work with people to develop flexible routines. We use visuals instead of clocks. We build in transition rituals. We create low-stakes novelty and high-trust relationships. We stop punishing ourselves for inconsistency and start noticing our natural rhythms.

Where Science Meets the Self

More and more researchers are pointing to the need for a distinct classification like AuDHD in future editions of the DSM. Some experts argue that while the DSM-5 finally allows for dual diagnosis, it doesn’t yet offer clinical guidance for treating the combined presentation, which can be vastly different from either ADHD or Autism alone. Articles from publications like Spectrum News, Psychology Today, and Neurodivergent Insights point to this growing awareness and the emerging body of research supporting it.

But those of us living it? We already know.

"I don’t need a label to make my brain real. I need a label to make my experience visible, so others stop misjudging what they don’t understand."

Toward a More Neuro-Compassionate World

We are in the middle of a paradigm shift. Not just in how we diagnose neurodivergence, but in how we live with it. How we build environments that support it. How we educate, employ, and care for people who think differently.

Understanding AuDHD isn’t niche. It’s essential. Because every time someone goes undiagnosed, they are left to believe they are the problem. And every time someone is correctly diagnosed but not supported, they continue to struggle in silence.

I want more for us. I want frameworks that honor contradiction. I want families who understand meltdowns aren’t tantrums. I want employers who recognize that an employee who zones out in meetings might also invent your next breakthrough. I want a world where AuDHD isn’t hidden or punished. It’s understood.

Because when we stop pathologizing difference and start listening to it, we begin to see what’s possible: not just survival, but joy. Not just coping, but thriving.

And maybe, finally, wholeness.