Apologies for the title, but I did not now how to formulate myself shortly, haha, and English is not my first language.
We are a family of 4, and autism has suddenly become very salient in our daily life.
My wife and I are both in our mid thirties, and we both got diagnosed with ADHD within the last two years, and now the suspicion of a autism diagnose suddenly came lurking as well. I think it’s a quite normal progression, as the ADHD medication have had a lot of positive effects, and made us more calm, which might have given more space for our autistic traits to stand more out.
We’ve suspected our daughter of having ADHD since she was a toddler and perhaps also being gifted. She’s blowing our minds all the time by her reasoning capabilities.
It’s a bit unrelated to my post, but my daughter is stubborn as hell, and has always been like that. Her speach development as delayed quite a bit, but when she was two years old, she got angry with my wife and said to her: “If your mom, when you was little, did not listen to what you said, you would also have gotten angry”. While she was complete red in her face, both feet solid placed in the ground, and her arms in her sides and tears falling down her face. Mind. blown… That was so impressive of her. In general she seems more emotional intelligent than many of the adults I know. We’ve also taught her a lot about emotions, to help her navigate her intense inner-self.
My wife is kind of the same way, and every day my wife have this mirror put up in front of her, and it’s quite intense.
We “blamed” our daughter’s intelligence for her intensity, her repetitive role plays, her justice sensitivity and insane memory. But we are now seing that many of her traits are more likely to be caused by autism.
My wife is in a study group where there are others with autism and one day they got to talk about it, and they were surprised that she did not think she had autism. I started reading up on autism, and I read this AuDHD book that compared many of the shared traits between ADHD and autism, and it became clear that my wife’s challenges are much more related to autism than ADHD.
I might also have autism, but I don’t think I am as far out on the spectrum, and it is not really affecting my life I same negative way, as my wife. She’s always had issues with anxiety, depression, burnout, low self-esteem, more burnout, sensory overload and she fears she will never be able to hold a job, which she has not done in the last 6 years.
We are not in a financial situation where we have the option to get professional help, but I’ve always been good at education myself on topics we’ve been struggling with, but somehow I’m kinda of overwhelmed, as I think it is really difficult to find reliable materials on autism in girls.
What I’m looking for is advise on books, educational material, your experiences, kind words, that everything will be alright, and what to do from here.
We are in the process of involving professionals for our daughter. Our municipality have this free service where you can talk with a psychologist about your children and they can help with support in kindergarten and later on when she starts in school. But, I prefer to also find out as much as possible about autism myself, and also in order to help my wife and our everyday life. We are stressed and kind of burned out all the time, and we need to do something to help ourselves, as this does not seem sustainable.
Hope it all makes sense. I’m sleep deprived and my brain is not really functioning at the moment.
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Look for books by Devon Price and Megan Anna Neff. Neff also has a YouTube channel, I think it’s called neurodivergent insights or something similar. They are both academic psychologists and Autistic / ADHD themselves I believe.
Giftedness is not really a well defined thing, and different contexts mean different things with them. What is common though is the overlap of ASD, ADHD and giftedness traits, as well as the wrongful diagnosing of giftedness as the other.
An absurd simplification of how these differ can be that ASD have lower filtering of input, ADHD can’t always choose their activation, and gifted people have two or more intensities.
Where someone with ASD might be overwhelmed by emotions, and ADHD person might feel it deeply and/or suddenly fall out of it, a gifted person will often be able to express great intensity, depth and often nuance, especially with expressive training (which the others typically don’t).
Or another example: Where an ASD person might be physically uncomfortable with a wrong color matching, an ADHD person might not be able to avert their focus from it, a gifted person will be upset that the nuance is wrong. Close, but hopefully I managed to convey some nuance.
Whereas the gifted person might benefit from some of the same strategies as ASD/ADHD, there is much that they won’t. Early development of intelligences, arboreal/branching thinking, high complexity thinking, high intensity (especially in their sensitivities: emotional, relational, verbal, intellectual, physical, and others not as well studied), and high perception of detail, need a bit more care to not become self destructive (perfectionism, burnout, poor confidence) or maladaptive (outsidership, manipulative, trouble with authorities).
I don’t know of good resources for children, but some books that helped me as an adult are:
The Rainforest Mind - Paula Prober
The Gifted Adult - Mary Elaine Jacobs
Living with intensity - Daniels & Piechowski
The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You - Elaine N Person (also good for ASD)
Your daughter sounds just like a little me
If she is a huge good memory type like I am please teach her to not expect that in others, let her know it’s special, I struggled a lot with people “not caring” because they actually don’t remember and I expected them to be able to remember basically everything the way I do
I don’t have any advice for you, but I understand your situation absolutely and completely.
All three of my children were noted as “gifted” at school. All three were different to their peers, bullied by other children and teachers. I and my wife were also noted as “gifted” at school when we were young and were also bullied by other children and teachers throughout school.
My wife has been formally diagnosed with AuDHD. My children are now adults and also didn’t realise or get a diagnosis until the last few years. I’ve only just recently (last year) realised and self diagnosed with the same.
Now that I realise, it’s obvious why this and that happened, and why I reacted this way and that way, to events and situations during my life; and it’s also obvious why my children have had such a difficult life mentally and socially.
I feel so much guilt and shame that I’ve passed this curse onto my children and caused them to have similar problems during their lives. All I can say is that I’m honestly glad that they have all chosen not to have kids, and I’m honestly glad that the family name and family curse will die out with them.
I’ve had the book Unmasking Autism recommended to me and have just started reading it. I’m only one chapter in, so I don’t know if it’s any good.
(Your English is as good or better than many native speakers that I know. I wouldn’t have realised it’s not your first language if you hadn’t pointed it out.)
Your story seems a lot like ours, except that we never got noted as gifted, instead we were noted as lazy and if only we put in the effort, we could do anything that we set our minds to. We got bullied as well and both hated school. We were also different than our peers, and in some settings much more mature than our peers, and in other way more immature than our peers.
My wife and I only recently realised that we might were gifted children as well. Both of us never put any work into school, and still we ended up getting a master’s degree, without putting much effort into it. And now we are seeing both our kids being extremely intelligent in some areas, which got me worried that they would end up hating school as we did.
We are comforting ourselves, that we are discovering this while the kids are pre-school age, but, right now, we don’t really know what to do about it. We are though, hopeful and optimistic about the future, because we believe we can give our kids a better life than we have had ourselves. We both appreciate our current lives a lot, but we did not get here without a lot of scars - depression, anxiety, addiction to drugs and alcohol, etc…
Unmasking Autism is actually also on my reading list, but the reviews are really mixed about this book, but I think it might help me and my wife a lot, we have developed a lot of strategies to get through life, which obviously are draining us a lot.
But, thank you for your reply, even though you did not have any advise. It is always nice to hear about others with similar experiences.
I was a gifted AuDHD kid who failed hard (in year 8) when I couldn’t blow through everything with low effiort any more, and truly hated school because I had taken my ability for granted, didn’t know about burnout, executive dysfunction, and all these lovely things we cope with.
When I learned to read at age 2, my parents figured I was smart enough to sort myself out academically. They were wrong.
I am so glad you have the information you have about yourself and your child. You have a great chance to help her through some of the things you and I and your wife had to deal with on your own.
Not because she isn’t smart, quite the opposite, but because she doesn’t know the right way to approach things yet. But she will! You will help her find out!
And let her know that school is important, but not for showing how smart you are, but for learning how to learn.
She will know the facts really quickly, but she needs to know lots of ways to learn the facts, not just one.
How to decide which facts are true, not just believing them if they seem true.
How to decide when someone knows what they are talking about, and are worth listening to. Even if they get a few things wrong, or they don’t listen, or they know nothing about your favourite topic, they probably know something about different topics, and they might give you different views on things you thought you knew perfectly.
If I had known to be more patient with many teachers, psychologists, etc (and been medicated or done therapy enough to learn how to be patient) I would have had a different life.
Sorry, just venting on my own failed dreams, I guess. Everyone is different. I am just very glad that your kid has a better chance.
This podcast might be helpful: https://www.audhdflourishing.com/podcast
It’s by someone that was diagnosed with autism and adhd. There are a lot of episodes and some deal with parenting or giftedness and other things you’ve referenced. It’s probably also available in podcast apps.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try, sounds exactly like what I need.
