Dr. Rachel Moseley

That's devastating.

That's really devastating.

So we know that I have done some related research and I know of a lot of research in this area.

So we know that autistic people who are undiagnosed and hence who are late diagnosed, they tend to experience a lot of complex chronic trauma and mental health difficulties, physical health difficulties, employment problems, relationship difficulties and so forth and so forth, education difficulties.

They often blame themselves for these things or they're labeled by other people as weird or broken or so forth.

So what sometimes happens when a person gets diagnosed is it's a huge torrent of emotions, including some really complex ones.

There might be grief and resentment there because, you know, they'd gone through all this suffering that was needless.

Why weren't they picked up sooner?

What kind of life could they have had?

So there's a lot of complex emotions, but there's also often a lot of relief.

And there's a sense of, often a sense of validation that actually I'm not a bad person.

I'm actually just autistic.

I can give the analogy of one of our menopause research participants.

She talked about how her whole life she'd felt like a broken horse.

But then when she discovered she was autistic, she realized she was a beautifully functioning zebra.

so strongly.

What we hear from people is that realizing they're autistic allows them to be so much more self-compassionate.

They're often such fierce critics of themselves and then understanding that they're autistic really validates their difficulties and just allows them to be much more self-compassionate.

This is an interesting question.

So the thing that I think comes to my mind in terms of how, as you say, research can kind of be telling one story and autistic people can be telling another.