Perhaps you’ve tried to explain why something upset you and been told you’re overreacting. Maybe you’ve attempted to set a perfectly reasonable boundary and found yourself having to defend it. Or you’ve replayed a conversation afterwards, searching for the point at which what you said somehow became something you didn’t mean.
For many autistic people, being misunderstood isn’t an occasional frustration. It can become a recurring feature of life.
And when other people’s interpretations of you repeatedly conflict with your own understanding of yourself, it can become increasingly difficult to trust your own judgement.
What happens when other people repeatedly misread you?
Communication isn’t simply about the words we use. People make rapid judgements about one another based on facial expression, tone of voice, eye contact, body language and countless other social cues.
The difficulty is that autistic and non-autistic people don’t necessarily use or interpret those signals in the same way.
Research by Lim, Young and Brewer (2021) found that autistic adults could be perceived as more deceptive and less credible than non-autistic adults, despite being truthful. The researchers concluded that differences in autistic people’s behaviour and presentation could affect judgements about their credibility.
That’s significant.
It suggests that an autistic person can communicate truthfully and authentically and still be interpreted inaccurately by the person listening.
The experience of being misunderstood can extend into healthcare too.
Research involving more than 1,200 autistic adults found that 24.6% reported having received at least one psychiatric diagnosis before their autism diagnosis which they believed had been a misdiagnosis. Among autistic women, the figure was 31.7% – almost one in three (Kentrou et al., 2024).
For some late-diagnosed autistic adults, receiving a diagnosis therefore involves looking back over years – sometimes decades – in which their experiences were understood through a very different lens.
When other people’s voices become your inner voice
Long before an autistic person has language such as masking, sensory overwhelm or neurodivergence, they may already have received plenty of other explanations for why they’re struggling.
“You’re too sensitive.”
“You’re making a fuss.”
“You need to try harder.”
“Why is this such a big deal?”
“Everyone else manages.”
A child doesn’t necessarily have the ability to think: Perhaps the people around me don’t understand how I experience the world.
Instead, it’s very easy for the conclusion to become:
There must be something wrong with me.
Over time, criticism doesn’t necessarily need to come from somebody else anymore. We learn to do it ourselves.
We push harder.
We question whether we’re entitled to feel upset.
We explain and over-explain ourselves.
We tolerate situations that don’t feel right because we’re no longer certain whether we can trust our own reaction.
And we become extraordinarily good at looking as though we’re coping.
The exhausting work of proving yourself
This is one reason I think the psychological impact of being repeatedly misunderstood deserves more attention.
Imagine constantly having to provide evidence for your own experience.
You don’t simply say you’re overwhelmed; you feel you need to demonstrate why.
You don’t simply say no; you construct a watertight argument explaining why your no is reasonable.
You don’t simply trust that something has hurt you; you analyse whether you’re “allowed” to be hurt.
That is an enormous amount of mental work.
For some autistic adults, patterns such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, masking, chronic self-criticism and over-explaining can become ways of protecting themselves from further criticism or misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, those strategies can also be exhausting.
By the time people reach therapy, they may describe themselves as anxious, overwhelmed or burnt out without recognising just how much energy they have spent monitoring themselves and adapting to other people’s expectations.
A different question to ask yourself
One of the shifts that can happen in therapy is moving away from:
“What’s wrong with me?”
and becoming curious about:
“What has happened that taught me not to trust myself?”
That doesn’t mean assuming you’re always right and everybody else is wrong.
It means recognising that your thoughts, feelings, sensory experiences and boundaries are information worth listening to.
For somebody who has spent decades questioning themselves, that can be surprisingly difficult.
How therapy can help rebuild self-trust
Neuroaffirming therapy can provide a relationship in which your experiences don’t automatically need to be defended or translated into something more acceptable.
Over time, therapy may help you:
- recognise where chronic self-doubt originated;
- understand the effects of masking and prolonged stress;
- distinguish your own beliefs about yourself from messages you’ve absorbed from other people;
- recognise and communicate your boundaries;
- reduce shame and harsh self-criticism;
- process grief or anger about years spent feeling misunderstood;
- become more confident advocating for your needs; and
- develop relationships in which you feel able to be more fully yourself.
For late-diagnosed autistic adults in particular, this can involve revisiting the story they’ve previously told themselves about their life.
Events once remembered as evidence of being difficult, inadequate or “too sensitive” may begin to make considerably more sense when viewed through the lens of neurodivergence.
You don’t have to keep putting yourself on trial
If you’ve spent much of your life being questioned or misunderstood, learning to trust yourself isn’t necessarily as simple as deciding to “be more confident”.
There may be years of experiences sitting underneath that self-doubt.
Therapy can’t undo those experiences, and recognising what you needed but didn’t receive can bring its own grief.
But it can give you somewhere to examine the story you’ve learned about yourself and decide which parts genuinely belong to you.
You may discover that some of the things you’ve spent years trying to correct about yourself were never evidence that you were failing.
Sometimes, you were simply being understood through the wrong lens.
References
Kentrou, V., Livingston, L.A., Grove, R., Hoekstra, R.A. and Begeer, S. (2024). Perceived misdiagnosis of psychiatric conditions in autistic adults. EClinicalMedicine, 71, 102586. doi:10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102586.
Lim, A., Young, R.L. and Brewer, N. (2021). Autistic adults may be erroneously perceived as deceptive and lacking credibility. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52(2). doi:10.1007/s10803-021-04963-4.
