Often Autistic folks and ADHD’ers have the same social experiences over and over where we feel we are either too much or not enough in relationships. We attribute our experience of rejection as something being wrong who we are as human beings. To date, in my clinical experience, this has never been the case. WHO we are and HOW we are are not the same. What I see most frequently among AuDHD brains in this area is:

1) Our self-critical assumptions take over bigger-picture thinking.
2) We question our character rather than our expectations.
3) We think we are supposed to be able to connect with everyone.


Self-Critical Assumption

The jargon-y psychology word I try to stay away from here is ego-centrism. Lay-people will misattribute this term as “self-centered” and take shame from it. In truth, though, everyone experiences ego-centrism. It’s a normal part of human development, most common – or at least most obvious – in adolescence because that is when most of us are trying to figure out who we are. If we have what we need through this period, we emerge as confident young adults who have a sense of what sort of a person we are and what matters to us.

What do we need in adolescence? On the most basic level, we need a safe and reliable living space with access to food and water. At school we need safety, care, and understanding from our teachers. We need emotional support and advocacy from our family when we are struggling. We need friends who can reflect ourselves back at us so we understand how our behaviour is received and decide if that’s how we want to be. We need a “third space” that isn’t work or school that helps us understand who we are outside of our most frequent life contexts.

In 2026 now, I have to add that we need to understand HOW OUR BRAIN WORKS.

And what if we don’t have what we need?

What if the messages we receive are that we don’t deserve any of the above? What if we never found a community? What if we never had a “third space”? What if we never knew, for our whole lives, that our brain worked a little differently than most and we couldn’t do things the way others were instructing us to do them?

This is where the “I’m inherently bad/wrong/broken” core beliefs come from. However, this is a not a belief that we want or thrive in, so we experience natural inner conflict. The “unstable sense of self”. When we are not grounded in our sense of self, nothing separate from it us considered in active formulations of “what is happening here in this social context”

In short: for no fault of our own, we get stuck in the ego-centric period of our lives.

Conceptualized this way it MAKES TOTAL SENSE that we attribute the reciprocity of others, or lack there of, as a function of our own “success” or “failure” as a human being.

When we are able to zoom out, however, we can see that we’re missing at least half of the formulation: There’s a whole other human on the other side, with a whole life’s worth of context that we don’t have access to. We can begin to recognize that we may be missing important pieces. So, no, it’s not just you. It takes TWO people to build a friendship. You could never have done it by yourself to begin with.

You Are Not Your Expectations

I think this is a big one. I didn’t even begin to grasp this idea until I was a parent- an AuDHD mama with an AuDHD kid.

All-or-nothing brains, common to both ADHD and Autism, have a very hard time with community social pacing. On some subconscious level we think friendship means the always-available ride-or-die deep-meaningful-convo friends who will spend hours and hours talking to us and be there for us every time we’re in an emotional crisis.

To put it bluntly: These are completely overwhelming and unrealistic expectations of any one human, neurodivergent or not. It is WAY too much pressure. And we almost never think of ourselves being the ones asking or expecting too much.

We Can’t Connect With Everyone

You meet all kinds of people as a therapist. When you’re a new therapist you take on every client while you quietly panic out all the sweat in your body trying to show up as they need. A few years in you figure out that there are ALL kinds of reasons why people don’t keep you as their therapist, but rarely is the reason that you’re doing everything wrong.

Maybe they’re not ready for therapy.
Maybe the kind of therapy you do doesn’t work for them.
Maybe something you said hurt their feelings and they’re not able to approach that conversation yet.
Maybe something happened in their life that had nothing to do with you at all.
Maybe they needed something else.
Maybe you reminded them of someone in their family they have an unresolved conflict with.
Maybe they ran out of benefits.
Maybe they we’re ready to be challenged yet.
Maybe they moved on.

It’s always about their needs. It’s never about being a horrible person.

This is not you being too much for people, this is your expectations being too much for people. This is you expecting community from a single person. That is not possible. If this is what we’re looking for, no wonder we can’t find it.