Neurodivergent Strategies for Late-Diagnosed Adults: The Divergent Paths Podcast

You’ve never needed anyone else to talk you out of your own experience. You’ve been doing it yourself for years. “It’s not that loud in here.” “What's wrong with me?! Everyone else handles this fine.” “Maybe I just fooled the person who did my assessment.” If those scripts sound familiar, you may be dealing with self-gaslighting: dismissing your own perceptions, feelings, and needs so thoroughly that nobody else has to. Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. explores why self-gaslighting runs so deep for late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent adults. Without language describing your neurotype, the only explanations available were character flaws. Mix in masking, quieter interoceptive signals, and internalized ableism, and doubting yourself starts to feel like the safest option. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You’ve spent years being told your memory is unreliable, that you missed a significant social cue, that you’re too sensitive. So when somebody tells you the thing you saw didn’t happen, part of you already believes them. Dr. Regina McMenomy and co-host Russ dig into gaslighting: where the term comes from, what separates deliberate manipulation from careless invalidation, and why late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults are so often on the receiving end. They unpack how working memory differences, years of masking, and rejection sensitivity can make someone else’s version of reality feel more trustworthy than your own, and how manipulators use power dynamics to exploit that gap. Regina also shares her own experience in a relationship where gaslighting showed up as a steady stream of small corrections, laying the groundwork for bigger moments where her perception was supposed to give way. The good news: recognizing the pattern is where rebuilding self-trust begins. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Someone tells you something you said didn’t bother them but their face said something different. Days later, maybe years later, you’re still replaying that moment, trying to figure it out. That isn’t you being too sensitive. It’s your brain trying to close a loop that never got closed. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. explores why late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent adults experience more moments of misattunement and why so many of them become moments we can't let go. High-resolution perception, the double empathy problem, and masking all raise the odds of a miss. Many of us also never learned repair growing up, so those moments stay open. The goal isn’t to stop noticing. It’s to build relationships, including the one with yourself, where missteps get resolved instead of replayed. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

What happens when everyone in a family is masking, and nobody knows it? Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. and Russ explore how late diagnosis reveals patterns of behavior that run through generations. Neurodivergence is highly heritable, so when you look to your family to figure out what’s “normal,” you may be comparing yourself to people who are masking the same traits. Children learn to mask by watching the adults around them and attachment built between two masks is compromised from the start. This episode covers how masking gets passed down, why gender expectations kept so many women from being diagnosed, how fawning and contingent love take root, and why loving someone isn’t the same as seeing them. It also makes clear that this is not about blaming parents. Most were doing their best without the understanding to do otherwise. Most importantly, it’s about cycle breaking: what repair looks like, how small shifts change what the next generation inherits, and why understanding your neurotype is part of that work. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You can be loved, cared for, and in a relationship that functions well... and still feel like no one quite gets you. If that sounds familiar, masking may be part of the reason. Attunement means being perceived accurately and responded to in real time. It is the "you get me" feeling that builds safety and belonging. But attunement only works when there is a genuine signal to tune into. When you have spent years presenting a masked version of yourself, the people around you are attuning to the performance. Their care is real. It is just aimed at someone who isn't fully you. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. explores how masking disrupts attunement in both directions, why near-misses can hurt more than obvious rejection, and how you can start resyncing your relationships without burning everything down. The client story shared in this episode was shared with permission. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You can tell your boss is irritated before they say a word. You know when your partner is off, what your kids need, and which comment will set off the meeting. But when someone asks how you're doing, you go blank. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. launches a series on psychological attunement, the experience of feeling seen and how a late diagnosis shapes it. Many late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent adults are highly attuned to other people. But much of that watching grew out of hypervigilance: years of getting things wrong without knowing why turned reading people into a safety system. From the outside, scanning for threats and connecting through curiosity can look the same. From the inside, one connects you and the other drains you. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You said yes to fun social plans on Monday. Then Saturday night arrives and the version of you who has to follow through has nothing left in the tank. Welcome to something Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. likes to call capacity optimism: the confident belief that future you will have the resources to keep the promises present you makes. In this episode, Dr. Regina explores why neurodivergent adults are especially prone to overcommitting. She draws on behavioral economist George Loewenstein's empathy gap, the finding that people in one physical or emotional state struggle to predict how they'll think, feel, or act in another. For late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent folks, that gap gets wider based on several factors. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Can't stop overthinking a conversation you had? For a lot of late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults, rumination works like a quest that never registers as complete. You've done everything you can but the marker won't clear, so your brain keeps replaying the conversation and searching for the step you missed. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. and Russ break down effortful thinking, how it collides with rumination, and why masking and rejection sensitivity make the loop so much harder to close. If your brain grabs moments like this and refuses to let go, it isn't malfunctioning. It's doing exactly what it was built to do, just without an exit. Neurodivergent minds tend to love effortful thinking: the deep, gritty, deliberate kind of cognition that digs into how and why things happen. That kind of thinking is designed to sprint toward a conclusion and then rest. The trouble starts when there's no end to the effort. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

There's a version of you that commuted, worked, volunteered, and kept every plate spinning. You look at that version now and wonder where she went. The comparison runs automatically and it always ends with you coming up short. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. provides the reframe: that capacity was never actually yours. You were borrowing against your future self and no one told you the interest rate. The crashes, the crabby moods, the drained feeling that never fully lifts between recovery cycles, all of that was the bill coming due. Masking doesn't create surplus. It runs a constant cycle of compensation and when you finally crash there's nothing underneath you because it was already spent. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

If masking is the thing that kept you safe, how do you feel safe while you unmask? That question came from a client this week and it sits at the center of this episode. Masking was never a flaw. It was a survival strategy that worked, one you built without realizing it to reduce rejection and help you belong. So when you start taking it off, your nervous system reacts like you are removing armor while you are still on the battlefield. That fear is not a sign you are doing it wrong. It is your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You rested. You took the break everyone swore would fix it. So why can't you do the thing you used to be so good at? In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. and co-host Russ return to one of their earliest topics, neurodivergent burnout, with a harder and more honest update. The first time around, recovery sounded almost simple: rest, learn your capacity, come back. This time they get into what that framing left out. Neurodivergent burnout is not a bad week or a skipped vacation. It is your nervous system shutting down after a long mismatch between what your environment demands and what your brain can actually sustain. And sometimes the skills you were using to survive that mismatch do not fully come back. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Ever stare down a five-minute task for three weeks straight and wonder what's wrong with you? Nothing is wrong with you. Your brain is just running more background processes than anyone ever taught you to account for. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. breaks down why "simple" tasks so often feel disproportionately hard for late diagnosed neurodivergent adults, and introduces the concept of discernment: the skill of accurately pricing what a task costs you, instead of what you think it should cost. Listen to learn a some strategies to stop "should-ing" on yourself. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You were probably told your impulsivity was selfish. That you jumped in, overshared, or said yes too fast because you weren't thinking about anyone but yourself. This episode makes the case, with the research to back it up, that the opposite was usually true. Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. talks about the science behind how impulsivity has different motivations than we assumed. For a lot of late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults, impulsivity got filed under "character flaw" early and somewhere along the way you decided you were the problem and built a mask to manage it. But the science tells a different story about what that impulse was actually reaching for: connection. 2013 study: Low Self-Control Promotes the Willingness to Sacrifice in Close Relationships Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Nobody sat you down and taught you to mask. It just switched on one day, quietly, without asking, and most of the time you don't even catch it happening. So what would it mean to actually get your hands on the switch? In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. and co-host Russ dig into intentional masking: the difference between the mask that flips on automatically, without your permission, and the one you choose to wear because you've read the room and done the math on what it will cost you. The heart of the conversation is your capacity, and why it's a moving target. We reframe this as a masking budget: your high-cost events (the dentist, the family visit, the party you're dreading) get planned around, not powered through. Because unmasking was never meant to be all or nothing, and treating it that way is its own kind of trap. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You already know masking changes what other people see. What gets talked about far less is what it does on the inside. When you spend years suppressing emotion to keep a smooth, friction-free version of yourself running, you slowly lose access to the emotional data your brain uses to file memories away. And for a lot of neurodivergent people, especially those with ADHD, emotion is exactly how memory gets encoded in the first place. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. walks through a concept she calls delayed encoding. The event happened, the memory happened, but the feelings attached to it were locked out at the time. Unmasking can hand them back to you, sometimes weeks later, sometimes decades. She uses a memory of her own to show how a moment you thought you understood can return with completely new emotional information once you can finally feel it. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Calm water isn't the same thing as safe water. It just feels that way when you've spent years wanting to keep things smooth. Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. breaks down the concept of productive friction: the discomfort that shows up whenever you're actually growing, versus the discomfort that shows up when you're staying small to avoid rocking the boat. Drawing on her own swimming practice, she unpacks why so many late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent adults have learned to mistake stillness for safety, and what it costs you when you do. If you've been feeling the friction in your own late-diagnosed or late-identified journey, that's not a sign something's wrong. It might be a sign something's finally moving. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Ever laughed off the moment you gave yourself away? Maybe it was a joke that landed wrong, or eye contact that came a beat too late. Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. unpacks a kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much sleep you got: instead, it's from the constant tension of monitoring your own performance while reading everyone else's reactions in real time. In this episode, you'll learn: What people-pleasing actually feels like from the inside for a lot of late-diagnosed adults How people-pleasing and masking are linked, with people-pleasing acting as the mechanism through which a masked version of yourself earns approval What changes in your relationships when you stop crafting every sentence for maximum smoothness and start just saying the thing If you've spent years dismissing this tension as anxiety or "just how you are," this episode offers a different lens, and a path toward relationships that don't drain you to maintain. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

There's a moment after diagnosis where you think the hard part is over. You have the language now, the explanation, the "why." Then you go back to your same job, same relationships, same life, and realize none of it changed just because you understand it better. In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. and Russ Catanach dig into that specific, disorienting stretch: the gap between knowing you're neurodivergent and actually living like it. They talk through why this phase can feel so much harder than understanding the diagnosis itself, what masking feels like once you're aware you're doing it, and why intentional unmasking (even though it's exhausting) gives you agency that burnout never will. If you're in that in-between space right now, not who you were before your diagnosis but not sure who you're becoming either, this episode will make you feel a lot less alone in it. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Most neurodivergent coaching will sell you a three-month transformation and a tidy finish line. For late diagnosed adults doing genuine unmasking work, that promise can do real harm. This episode is about why your path is divergent by design, and why curiosity about yourself matters more than any checklist. Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. describes the people she loves working with: late diagnosed, late identified, late realized neurodivergent adults who are approaching their neurodivergence with genuine curiosity, not just collecting a label. These are people who are done outsourcing their self-concept to their work, their hobbies, or relationships that never really supported them. She also gets honest about why her coaching looks nothing like the tidy three-month transformation arc most of the industry sells, and why that framing can actively harm someone doing real unmasking work. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

You started doing the work. You've begun understanding how your brain actually works, and you began peeling back the mask you built to survive. So why is everything suddenly harder with the people closest to you? Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. shares in this episode the part nobody warns you about: what happens to your relationships after you start unmasking. When you cancel plans without guilt, hold firmer boundaries, and stop spending your executive function smoothing every sharp edge, people notice. Some read it as you becoming mean or distant. That tension isn't proof your relationships are broken. It usually means they need renegotiation. Unmasking isn't about becoming someone new. It's about becoming visible, including to yourself, and not everyone will be ready for that. You're not the villain here. You might just be the antagonist to someone else's comfort, and you're allowed to be okay with that. Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights! Chat with Regina on Instagram @drreginaphd Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.