Communication and self-advocacy: being able to say what you need

Between the inner sentence “this cannot go on” and a sentence you can say to a teacher, your supervisor or your parents, there is a whole stretch of ground. Sometimes the words are missing. Sometimes it is clear what you want to say, but not how it will land. Sometimes you only notice that something is wrong.

For a long time the assumption was that autistic people simply have difficulties with communication. In 2012 Damian Milton described the Double Empathy Problem: misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people arise on both sides, because both perceive and communicate differently. That shifts the question from “What is wrong with you?” to “How do we understand each other?”

With ADHD, something else often comes into it. Russell Barkley describes the regulation of emotions as part of executive function. Criticism can therefore land very hard, and in the heat of the moment it is difficult to find the right words. That is not oversensitivity. It is a question of regulation.

And many neurodivergent people learned early on that going along means less trouble. This adapting, often called masking, works. But it costs energy and makes it hard to notice what you actually need. When demands feel like a loss of control, the nervous system switches to protection. That is not defiance either.