What’s different? 

Someone asked me what I’m doing differently in my business this time that made the difference so that I can work without burnout now. And the answer is pretty much everything, and not a lot at the same time.

Hi, I’m Heather of Autism Chrysalis, and I want to share the answer to this question and also let you know that I’m putting on a course starting soon—May 2nd—on how to do this: How to structure a business that is neurodivergent-friendly and sustainable, so that you can keep working for as long as you choose to without burnout.

Okay, so I’ve run five businesses over the last 20 years, and I’ve learned more each time about making it more sustainable, but this one was a significant improvement. Not just an incremental, less terrible version. 

This time I’ve worked for myself for six years without even getting close to burnout, and there were two really critical things that changed everything for me.

Thing #1: Making things work for me

The first is that I prioritized figuring out how to make it work in a way that works for me, over following standard advice.

When I first started this business, I thought of that as prioritizing my health, both my physical health and my mental health. But over time, I realized that what I was really doing was figuring out how I worked, and what created positive outcomes for my body, my mind, and the life that I liked.

It doesn’t matter what other people say should work for you, or whether it works for other people. Whether to-do lists work for them or they don’t. Which project tracking tools work for them. What marketing strategies work for them. What statistics to track on your YouTube channel. 

What matters is what works for you. 

What matters to me now is that I do things in a way that I care about, in a way that is healthy for me and healthy for my clients, and that doesn’t have to look like what a lot of mainstream business advice says it should look like.

And at the same time, it’s not really *that* far off. It’s not like I’m doing something completely foreign to humanity or modern business. It’s more that I’ve let go of a lot of the guilt and the blame and the shoulds and the shame and the comparisons–that I should use subconscious triggers to close more sales. Or that I should create a false sense of urgency or scarcity to drive faster (and incidentally less well-thought out) decisions. Or that I should be charging more money (I have had that conversation with so many business advisors, and yes, I am charging less than other coaches with my experience and training and the results that I get for my clients, and they think that I’m devaluing myself, but I’m not, it’s a strategic decision).

Like, all of that–I don’t need to do that, and I still get plenty of clients who are very happy with my style.

How I make things work

Another example is: I don’t have to present myself in a particular way. I don’t have to dress like a therapist. I don’t have to wear makeup. I thought I did at the beginning, and I tried, and it was just like I wanted to claw my face off all the time.

I want to wear clothes that I’m comfortable in. And I want my environment to be comfortable for me, because I’m spending a lot of time here. It doesn’t have to look like a magazine, and interestingly, it actually does look quite pretty, and I get a lot of compliments about my painted trees. But it doesn’t have to. I’m not doing it because of some image–it’s just what I like. And I like pretty things. I like comfortable spaces. I like earth tones. I like spaces that make me sigh in relief. I like soft knits.

Another example, I don’t see clients before 10am, because I am not a morning person. I gave up years ago trying to force myself into standard business hours–eight to five or whatever. Screw that. Who cares, right?

You can’t schedule with me before 10am my time, because I will be up about an hour before that at the earliest. My body naturally wakes up around eight, and then it takes me about an hour to wake up enough to willingly get out of bed. Around nine, nine-thirty-ish, I’m actually awake enough—my body has done its hour-long wake-up process—and I’m happy to get out of bed and do things. I don’t set an alarm clock either. I haven’t set one in years, except maybe one time I needed to take someone to the airport, but beyond that, I won’t set an alarm clock, and I don’t need to anymore. 

Because my body is naturally ready to get up about that time. And then I don’t have to drag myself out of bed. And I’ve arranged my life to make that possible, not something that I’m trying to force myself to do that is against my nature.

Okay, so a lot of this is about getting rid of the internalized “I should do it this way,” or “I should be better at this,” or “I should be farther along,” or “I need to do this thing in order to have some particular outcome that I don’t even really care about, just because some people in my life, or general cultural messaging, says that I should want this.” 

So an important part of the way out of responding to those shoulds, and that messaging, is getting really clear on what you do actually want, what is actually important to you, and then make a beeline for that and chuck the rest. I know it’s not as easy as just doing that, but that’s basically the idea. And I’m going to get into how to do that in excessive detail in my course on self-employment without burnout.

Thing #2: Teaching my nervous system

Here’s another critical thing that I did differently in this business.

And the first couple of years were very much like that. That was very intentionally my purpose. It wasn’t really about making money, although that was important, of course. But it was really about creating the systems, creating the foundation, being okay with working a little bit and not diving into working full time.

The first couple of years were really, really part time.

The first year, I was probably working 10 hours a week max, and I literally capped it at three hours of client time a week. That was an intentional cap. I set up my scheduling limits on my scheduling calendar to do that because I needed it, and I refused to go over that.

The second year I was working maybe 20 hours a week, and only half of that was client-facing. Because the point wasn’t to get more clients. The point was to prove to myself that I could do this in a different way. That I could work and not burn out for the first time in my life.

Because I knew that if I was ever going to be able to work continuously, that it would take that. I gave myself the grace to take some time for the first year or two to not actually make a whole lot of money or not work very much, because my project was a long-term project. I knew that if I was ever going to be able to continue working, it would take doing this. It would take teaching my nervous system that I could do this in a different way.

And that was more important to me long-term than making the money short-term.

The money helped. Money was important. But I was already living on so little that I knew I could keep doing that. Even if it sucked, even if it was really, really hard (and it was). But I could keep doing that because I had been doing that.

And if it took a little bit longer of living like that in order to teach myself that I could work differently, that would pay off for the rest of my life. And it was worth it to me.

Building up trust

So I slowly built up that capacity. It took a while, but I built up the capacity, I built up the trust in myself, and I got better at learning how to pay attention to myself and how to respond to my needs.

How to notice my body signals when I was deep in a project, when I was tunnel-visioned and hyperfocused on something. And how to actually pay attention to: “Oh, I’m getting kind of tired.” Or often it was more like, “I’m noticing I’m rubbing my eyes a lot. Maybe my eyes hurt. Oh, maybe I’m tired. Maybe I should stop.”

Doing that over and over slowly built trust that it would be okay and that I could do that. And the anxiety reduced.

About my course

This is what I’m going to be teaching how to do in my self-employment course, AuDHD Alchemy–how to teach your nervous system that it’s safe to work, and how to structure things that actually work for your brain, your nervous system, your body, your health needs, your values, and the life that you want to have. The things that you actually care about, whether or not they overlap in any way with normative ideals.

For more info on that course, go to autismchrysalis.com/alchemy, and there’s a post here describing it. And either way, I hope that some part of this answer was useful to you.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post 2 Things That Transformed My Business (6 Years Burnout-Free) appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Are you headed for burnout—or sustainable success? This 12-question business health check is designed specifically for self-employed Autistic and AuDHD entrepreneurs. Discover whether your business systems are setting you up for sustainability or exhaustion.

Take the quiz

The post Is Your AuDHD Business Headed for Burnout? Take the Quiz appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Why does this hurt?

The clinical term for autism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is autism spectrum disorder, yet many autistic people prefer autism spectrum differences, largely on the grounds that calling one neurotype normal and another disordered is a biased judgment. I’ve made this and other arguments plenty of times myself, but right now I want to skip past all those arguments and get far more personal.

Here’s what really underlies my aversion to that particular word.

Deep breath. OK, here we go.

I have been called weird all my life. Strange. Odd. Abnormal. I’ve been the one no one wanted to play with, the one no one picked for teams, the one the other kids teased for not understanding their social intrigues and, ironically, for being far too smart as well.

The teachers weren’t much better, singling me out for everything from how I talked and played to how slowly I ate my sandwich at lunch — I was watching the other kids to try to understand them. I often had the right answer faster than the other kids, yet my teachers, while praising how smart I was, could not believe I wasn’t somehow cheating. They made me write assignments at a secluded desk, do math problems their way instead of in my head, and “show my work” to prove compliance. They actually invested a lot of effort into forcing me to think more sluggishly.

My sensory experience of the world is far more intense than for most neurotypicals, yet long before I was able to articulate that I was in pain, and not just acting out, I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that my pain was no excuse for behaving differently, and differences would not be tolerated. So by the time I could have explained myself, I had already stopped trying.

My daily experience from infancy, through 12 years of public education, and not infrequently in adult life as well, has been a continual process of being told what I was not allowed to feel, how I was not allowed to think, that I was not allowed to react naturally to pain. Of labeling me as wrong.

Learning to like myself

Many years of therapy later, I have worked through a lot of these old wounds and have begun to heal from the thousands of experiences, from tiny to traumatic, that formed my self-identity as weird and strange and abnormal.

In the process, I learned many painful truths about myself. For instance, it hurt too much to admit (even to myself) until only a few years ago, that for a very long time, I did not like myself. How could I like myself when the message I was getting the most was that I was not likable?

Undoing that damage has been a long journey, one I am still on, yet I have finally come to accept myself, to know in my heart that I am worthwhile, and to like who I am. I’m learning to accept that the challenges that come with my autism don’t have to define me. I am also learning to recognize and value the gifts of my autism, which are many.

Still being seen as “wrong”

But then I go online, or read an article, pick up a book, flip on the news, or take a professional development course, and encounter supposed experts, professionals, and scientists describing autism as a “disorder.” Describing me as disordered. Going on and on about our “deficiencies.” And it triggers every one of those not-entirely-healed wounds.

I hear it too in the mouths of friends and family who, to their credit, try very hard to understand me, and it tells me this is something they do not understand.

I even see it in the writings of neurotypicals who say they celebrate neurodiversity. Sometimes that D doesn’t land well for them, either, so they use the abbreviation ASD instead, thinking that makes it better, or disguises it, but it doesn’t.

People think “disorder” is just a word. Maybe not a kind word on its own, but in this context, it’s just part of the clinical name, so that makes it OK. They don’t get how it brings back all those times I’ve been ridiculed and excluded and made to feel that other people’s rejection of me was my fault for not being normal enough.

This is yet another case in which someone can use a word they don’t intend to be hurtful or offensive in any way, yet the word is loaded with history, and that history matters.

The post Why I Won’t Call Autism a ‘Disorder’ appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Standard business advice that’s awful for self-employed Autistics and AuDHDers, part 2:
“Network, network, network.”

Why this is crap

Ugh, I hate this one. Especially when you don’t want to be perceived, when you hate small talk, and when social interaction is, at best, a chore. The advice to “network” probably produces an immediate gut clenching reaction. Every avoidance technique your subconscious can come up with will kick into gear, and given the choice, you might prefer a migraine.

But let’s look for a minute at what the purpose of networking is, and then we can find a way to fulfill that purpose without actually having to network, in the mainstream sense.

What is networking?

The idea of networking is usually one of two things. One, a way to find people in business who can support you in either some aspect of your business, or some aspect of spreading your message. Like partnering with people who have a similar client base but are not actually in competition with you. So you two can recommend each other to your clients. Or work on a project together that helps you both.

Or, the second purpose is more directly a way to get clients, by talking with people who may themselves become clients, or who may refer you to people that they know.

How networking is usually done is through going to mixers of people who are either in the same industry as you, or just happen to own a business in the same community, or might be loosely related in some way, and mingling, either in person or online, and more or less just hoping that you’ll find someone that might be relevant to fulfilling either of those two purposes.

This is like reaching into a bag of 1000 marbles, and hoping you’ll pull out one of the two purple ones. It’s a waste of time, energy, stress, executive function, cognitive load, and you can use all of those things much more efficiently in your business by doing other things.

This is why a lot of us hate networking, and when we do it, it sucks and just reinforces our preconceived notion that it’s a waste of time, because usually it is.

What can you do instead?

But let’s look at those two purposes again.

To get clients: honestly, you shouldn’t be using networking to get clients. That’s what marketing is for. So write that one off. It can sometimes lead to a client, but that’s not a good use of networking energy.

If it is something that would actually be useful for you at this point in your business, great, useful for what? Get really clear on what it is you want to get out of it, and then make a beeline for actually doing that. Not random networking events, not meeting random people hoping something good might come out of it.

If you’re looking for people to share an audience, scope out people like that and reach out individually to make contacts, and know that only a portion of those are going to bear fruit, and that’s okay. That’s normal and expected in business and in human relationships. That’s not necessarily you being terrible at people-ing.

If you want more help on how to actually do that, in a way that’s made for Autistics and AuDHDers, I’m teaching a course that’ll cover how to find and connect with the right people, and to market authentically and ethically, in ways that actually work for your divergent brain, and actually produce the results that you want. As well as many other aspects on how to be self-employed as an Autistic or AuDHDer without burning yourself out. We start on May 2nd. If you want more info, here’s an overview, or go to: https://www.autismchrysalis.com/alchemy

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post I Hate Networking (And You Don’t Actually Need to Do It) — Autistic Business Advice #2 appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

How are they related?

Social stuff and sensory stuff might seem like two unrelated topics, but in my experience, they’re more closely linked than they’re usually given credit for.

In all fairness, it might seem strange to start with noticing sensations in your body if your goal is to make friends. Or to identify the extent of your own sensory differences if you’re trying to understand, or become more comfortable with, school or work social dynamics. But it can make a difference. Here are three big reasons to start working on sensory stuff if you want to get more comfortable socially.

1. Sensory processing struggles take a lot out of you

When your energy is being used up dealing with your sensory needs, you don’t have any left to be pleasant to potential friends.

2. Your sensory stuff is probably affecting you more than you realize

Which you can only find out if you start actively paying attention to how your body feels.

How your body feels is something that most of us on the spectrum, and with other sensory differences, often learn to ignore as children. Which makes complete sense. If you’re constantly being hurt by something, and have no idea what to do about it, and the people around you don’t know what to do about it, your options are either to suffer or numb your feelings.

Many people unconsciously default to numbing, at least to some degree, so you may not even know how much sensory stuff is affecting you, or alternately, how useful it can be.

This brings me to reason three.

3. Your body has a wealth of knowledge, but you can’t tap into it until you practice using it

Our senses take in approximately 11 million bits of information per second. That’s a vast quantity of data that is being processed by different parts of your body, and that you’ve been collecting for years, decades, your entire life. However, we can only consciously process roughly 50 to 120 bits of information per second. That’s millions less than what we are taking in!

Your body has been gathering and storing that information away, categorizing it and making sense out of patterns, and yet only a tiny bit of it is available to your conscious awareness. You can access the rest, but only if you get in touch with how your body feels at any given moment.

Some people, like those of us on the autism spectrum, HSPs, trauma survivors, and plenty of others, tend to be either overly trusting or overly skeptical, either getting ourselves into bad situations or avoiding every possible situation. Neither extreme is particularly helpful, and using an integrated body-mind approach is a great way to balance the extreme reactions that come from using only our minds to make judgments.

I hope this helps as a brief overview of what sensory stuff has to do with making friends.

What do you think?

The post 3 Reasons Sensory Processing Challenges Can Contribute to Social Awkwardness appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Standard business advice that’s awful for Autistics and AuDHDers, part 1:
“Just show up consistently.”

Why this is crap

No living thing in nature is absolutely consistent day in and day out. There are variable cycles of energy from day to day, across seasons and years and times of life. Expecting consistency from any living thing is not reasonable, and neurodivergent brains even more so beat to the tune of our own drums.

You know what consistency is good for? Factories, production lines, and bureaucracy. That’s where we get most of our messaging from, originally, that consistency is even a thing to be desired.

And I don’t mean from the factory workers, but the factory systems itself are built for consistency. Production lines can carry on unendingly, even when the workers can’t. Bureaucracy needs consistency to be able to check the same boxes and fill out the same forms and make the exact same decisions every time. Not the people in the system, or affected by the system, but the system itself. So these kinds of systems try to make people consistent, to fit the system, but we’re not.

In real life, there are going to be ebbs and flows. Not being absolutely consistent isn’t your failure. It’s not because you’re not good enough, or you haven’t tried hard enough, or haven’t managed to discipline yourself enough.

This is not all or nothing

If you want more business advice, made for Autistics and AuDHDers, I’m teaching a course that’ll cover how to make systems that actually work for your neurodivergent brain, as well as many other aspects on how to be self-employed as an Autistic or AuDHDer without burning yourself out. We start on May 2nd. If you want more info, here’s an overview, or go to: https://www.autismchrysalis.com/alchemy

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post Stop Trying to Be Consistent — Business Advice for Autistic & AuDHD Business Owners appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Working for yourself

If you’re Autistic or AuDHD and work for yourself, and are exhausted from trying to make your business work when your brain, energy, or health doesn’t always cooperate with what you want—this is for you.

I’ve created a program called Alchemy that teaches you how to build a sustainable, burnout-resistant business that works WITH your brain—without sacrificing your health, integrity, or profit.

The problem

Here’s what I see in just about all of my self-employed clients: they’re stressed, exhausted, and blaming themselves for not being able to do all the things required to run a business.

Which particularly hurts, because they weren’t cut out for “normal” jobs, either, which is why they started working for themselves, or are in the process right now of starting a business that they hope will someday replace other income. 

In some ways it is better, and they love working for themselves, but in some ways, it’s also really, really hard. And they’re wondering if they’re fundamentally not cut out for…working at all. Or even if there’s no place in this world for them.

And I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve worked for myself for almost 20 years, and run five businesses. And I’ve learned from each one, and this one, finally, has kept me out of burnout, while working full-time, for six years now. And I have more energy now than when I started.

But not by following standard business advice. In fact, I’ve had to unlearn a lot of that. It’s no wonder that you’re struggling, because everything we’ve ever been taught about business, both standard self-employment advice, and all the businesses you’ve ever worked for, tells you to be consistent, network constantly, hustle harder, put yourself out there, just sell.

But for neurodivergent brains? That advice creates a predictable cycle: push hard → burn out → guilt → self-blame → repeat.

The translation

Let me translate what that advice really means for us:

“Be consistent” actually means setting unrealistic goals that our irregular capacity makes impossible, which creates shame and the stress of it makes executive dysfunction worse.

“Network” means exhausting yourself with masking, followed by either shame at wasting your time or dread of the work that you just created for yourself.

“Hustle” means pushing past body signals, making it harder to rest, and making sensory overwhelm worse.

“Put yourself out there” means triggering complex relationship traumas, and not wanting to be perceived, leading to resistance and avoidance.

And “just sell” means rationalizing your qualms about pushy sales tactics, until you feel stuck, overwhelmed, and just want to hide.

Now ask yourself: is anyone in that state going to build a successful business?

Of course not.

The solution

But there is another way.

There are 7 key elements to building a burnout-resistant business. And when you set up systems that work, and structure them in a specific order, each one supports and leads to the next.

So you’re not relying on willpower to rest, or values to avoid desperate sales, or brain fog to make good decisions.

The system itself prevents burnout—because it’s built that way from the beginning.

When you design your business model to fit your real capacity and goals → you can build in the executive function supports that will lead to that outcome → which frees up your cognitive load, so your brain feels better → so you can notice what’s in your environment that’s sucking your energy, and create a sensory-friendly workspace → which gives you energy back so you can have a better sense of your realistic capacity → which lets you price based upon hard data → so you can market authentically → which attracts the right clients and builds trust with them, so client communication and boundaries get easier.

Each element supports the next. This is the alchemy.

The program

I’m teaching this in a 7-week program, starting May 2nd.

You’ll learn: Business Model Design, Supporting Executive Function, Workspace Design, Capacity Planning, Values-Based Pricing, Authentic Marketing, and Healthy Communication.

Plus you get lifetime access to recordings, human-edited transcripts, templates, spreadsheets, and behind-the-scenes access to my actual business systems—so that you can see what this looks like in a real neurodivergent-run business. And there’s a way to ask questions asynchronously if the live meeting times don’t work for you.

And if you want extra support, I’m offering an optional, eight month long incubator, where you can bring your actual business questions and get answers. It’s the “yeah, sounds good, but what about my situation?” part.

Building your business

The post How to Build a Burnout-Resistant Business as a self-employed Autistic/AuDHD appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

How do you make friends?

Living on the autism spectrum can be wonderful. And a challenge. While we are all unique, one thing that describes almost all of us is that we usually have a harder time making friends then the neuromajority.

That doesn’t mean we don’t want friends. In fact, the number one question I get asked by other autistics is how to make friends.

Although it takes more work for us, we are certainly able to master this magic, and when we do, other people are lucky to have us as friends.

So here’s my plan to making friends when you’re on the autism spectrum, in 10 (not at all easy) steps:

1. Notice where your social anxieties are coming from.

But those incidents weren’t your fault, and they don’t mean that you are broken, or wrong, or deficient. They are indications of other people’s fears and insecurities. Believing that won’t make your anxieties evaporate, but it is a start to healing.

2. Make friends with yourself.

When we are anxious around other people, they may pick up on that and become anxious around us. We end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which we expect to be rejected, and therefore we are.

This is the hardest step, but the most critical. It starts with digging deep inside yourself and letting out all of the anger and hurt from the past, and finding a way to forgive or feel compassion toward yourself and others for what happened.

That frees up an amazing amount of energy and opens new possibilities for liking, and even loving, who you are. When you genuinely love yourself, it shows. People like being around people who like themselves. Even when those people are different.

3. Acknowledge that you’re going to have to do something differently if you want a different result.

What you did before to make friends probably wasn’t a winning method, or you wouldn’t be reading this now. So just repeating that isn’t going to work. But if you actually go through steps one and two, you’ll be ready to try different tactics.

4. Before going into a social situation, set yourself up for success, physically and sensory-wise and in every other way.

Doing those first three steps, the hardest, doesn’t mean that the rest of these are going to be simple. So plan in advance how to make your new forays into the social world a better experience.

What time of day or week are you at your best? Get some good sleep and take care of yourself before going out. Would it help to bring something that calms your sensory sensitivities? Plan your outing well.

5. Go where you are likely to find people who like the same things that you do.

Going to a bar to pick up girls means you will meet girls who like going to bars. If that’s what you want, great. If you want girls who will talk to you about astronomy, try a star party instead. If you want a friend who is into Renaissance reenactments, or anime, or speaking Swedish, find groups — in person or online — where those things happen.

6. Get curious about others. Assume everyone has something fascinating about them, and that your job is to find that. But don’t come on too strong.

When you meet people, ask about them, but be careful not to rattle off a list of questions like you’re interviewing them.

Talk about your common interests, occasionally ask about them, and occasionally intersperse some information about yourself. A mixture of the three is good, but the best way is for a lot of that information to unfold naturally in conversation over time.

7. Build relationships slowly. Build trust slowly.

You don’t need to find out everything about your potential friend(s) the first time you meet. If you’re going to a recurring group, you’ll have opportunities to get to know them more in the future. If it’s a one-time event, you could exchange contact information as a way to keep in touch and get to know them over time.

If the other person doesn’t want to exchange contact info, and you’re not going to see them again, that’s not a failure. Consider it a trial run for the next time. And remember, sometimes you can have a good time with someone for one day and that’s the entire extent of the relationship.

8. Invest in others if you want them to invest in you.

All relationships take time and effort. When you don’t engage with people, relationships wither. This means keeping in touch once in a while. Talking about things besides your common interests. Asking about their family or things that are going on in their lives that they mention. Recognize upfront this is going to take some work, but you don’t have to do all of it right away.

9. When things go awry, learn to repair the relationship.

A misunderstanding, disagreement, or hurt feelings don’t have to be the end of a relationship. Apologizing is the best way to repair a relationship. Even if it isn’t all your fault, you can apologize for the part of it that is your fault. Even if it’s just one percent. That can go a long way towards helping others apologize for their part, repairing the relationship, and moving on.

10. Adjust as necessary.

The post The Autistic 10-Step Plan for Making Friends appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Are you lonely?

Have you noticed an epidemic of loneliness among autistic adults? So many of my clients struggle with loneliness, even while they ache for positive relationships in their life, and I see this all over the autistic corners of the Internet as well. But why?

Hi, this is Heather from Autism Chrysalis.

Let me see if I can encapsulate this.

As an autistic coach, I see this pattern all the time, (as well as having lived through it myself as an Autistic person).

Disclaimer, this is going to be over-generalized, and not everyone is going to fit all of these specifics, but the pattern is pretty consistent, allowing for variations among individuals.

Here goes:

Growing up unaccepted

Most of us grew up in a less than 100% unconditionally accepting environment, and were taught, explicitly or implicitly, that we needed to suppress some of our natural traits, or to conform in order to gain acceptance, teaching us to mask or camouflage parts of ourselves. Sometimes that was autistic traits, sometimes other parts of personality or special interests.

(To be fair, there’s a certain amount of learning to fit a culture’s expectations and societal norms for politeness that is reasonable and healthy for people living in groups to get along. But we tend to get more than the usual dosage.)

So when we did make some friends as kids, it wasn’t us being fully genuine, or to the extent that we were, it was only with a very limited set of people, and often friendships ended in painful and confusing circumstances.

This leads to a complex and painful history with relationships, and means that we often didn’t have more than a few experiences of genuine friendship, and so we have very little basis for what a healthy interpersonal relationship is like. So we don’t develop comfort with healthy relationship skills, like how to make friends (which takes repeated, frequent practice to get good at, just like any other skill).

And because our senses and attention and interests tend to be more intense than the perceived norm, things like attending college, or holding down a job, parenting, or pursuing a personal project, tend to be all-consuming. We don’t have a whole lot of capacity left for more than one major focus in our life at a time. And relationships get sacrificed.

Finding yourself alone

But at some point, often at several points throughout life, we look up from our all-consuming daily routine and notice that we don’t have the kind of close connections that people talk about, and that we’re really pretty lonely. And yet the thought of spending the energy to go out of our way to take a chance on maybe finding a new friend at some social gathering, seems like a huge gamble of our limited energy for very low chances of success.

And even if we do take the gamble, and get lucky and find someone who we might be friends with, we don’t have a lot of experience with starting new friendships, and so have poor skills in that area. We tend to either come on too strong, or misinterpret things, like how long it takes them to return a text, or grant them the benefit of every possible doubt, explaining why it makes sense that they did or said whatever, and ignore red flags. Either way, we don’t have a great experience, and it reinforces the belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us, or that people can’t handle us.

We may even form part of our identity around being a loner, a maverick, an introvert, someone who doesn’t need many people. Which I believe is at least in part a defense mechanism to comfort the pain of loneliness by trying to make it out as a virtue.

And at some point, we may try unmasking, hoping that, counter to our lived experience, the Autistics on the Internet who say that it’s so wonderful to be accepted for who you are might be right, but despite attempts at therapy over the years, we still have all of these old trauma responses, and when we’re unmasking, it’s not unmasking a healthy and healed and quirk-ily wonderful version of ourselves, it’s unmasking a whole mess of trauma responses, and we end up spewing our pain onto the unsuspecting potential friend. So of course it goes badly and reinforces the belief that it’s not OK for us to unmask.

And so it feels safer and easier to stay home and be lonely and complain about being lonely, and how unfair the world is to Autistics, and that people will never accept us, and to fill online autistic groups with this kind of negativity, because it’s the only place where you find other people agreeing with you, but it also reinforces these beliefs that it’s just the way it is and it’s never going to change and we’re doomed to be lonely forever.

I’m curious, how much of this resonates with your experience?

Finding acceptance

And yet, I do want to end with a word of hope.

The way I see it, the real problem is not that we are “weird” or different from the perceived norm, or even that there are a lot of people who won’t accept us for who we are (that is true, and will probably always be true, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t find people who will accept us and have close and supportive friends).

I think what most gets in the way of forming those relationships is that, because we have this complex and painful relationship history, and the associated trauma responses, and because it’s so painful to look straight at that trauma and deal with it, it’s so much easier to avoid it and to blame then to do the work of healing.

Here’s another post I made that gets into that idea in more depth, it’s called “Why Finding Your Autistic Community Didn’t Fix Your Loneliness (The Truth No One Talks About)”.

But when you do that hard work (and yes, it sucks, but usually not as much as you expect it will), it becomes possible to start to learn healthier relationship skills, and to be able to unmask in healthy ways, to the right people, and then when you do encounter people who have also done their own healing and have the capacity to accept and enjoy people with your flavor of differences, there’s a real possibility for a healthy relationship to start and to build, and it works so much better than it ever has before.

And this is where you get those positive stories of people who have unmasked and it’s been a good experience.

If you want more on that idea, here’s a post on that: Don’t Look For New Friends Until You Do This.

I hope this helps understand what’s going on. What are your thoughts?

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post Why Autistics Are Lonely appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Do you spend weeks putting off phone calls? Or avoid replying to emails for so long that it gets extra weird, and then it’s even harder to do it? Do you start projects, get overwhelmed by all the steps, shut down, and then emotionally beat yourself up about how you never finish anything, and can’t follow through, and what’s wrong with you, everyone else manages this?

Maybe things that other people consider simple—like cooking, cleaning up, making an appointment, deciding whether you want to go to an event—feel so overwhelming that even thinking about them triggers so much anxiety, you spend hours on your phone, or binge Netflix, or do everything else on your to do list but the thing that you really need to do.

What if you had skills to dissolve these anxieties when they come up? That actually work for our Autistic and AuDHD brains. Not make them magically disappear forever—let’s be realistic—but reduce their intensity, so they’re not as overwhelming? So your brain has capacity left over to think other things, like finding actual solutions to the real situations you’re dealing with?

The problem

Hi, this is Heather from Autism Chrysalis. And here’s the thing. If you’re Autistic or AuDHD, you probably struggle with anxiety in ways that other people just don’t get. Maybe you’ve been accused of procrastinating, being a perfectionist, overthinking, or being lazy. Maybe you’ve heard this so often you’ve internalized these messages and accused yourself of the same things.

But I don’t believe any of that. Well, to be fair, sometimes I do want things to be just so, because there’s a good reason for it, and I can think through a lot of the potential issues with something in advance, and sometimes my energy is low, but those are actually different things than what I’ve been accused of. And it’s not just making it sound better, there is a real difference.

The way I see it, there’s always a legitimate reason why you’re not doing something. Sometimes it’s because you have a history of genuinely bad experiences that you’re trying to avoid the pitfalls of. Or you don’t know how to deal with very real problems, and it’s so easy to focus on those, and everything else that could go wrong.

And even when you intellectually know that most of these worries probably won’t happen this time, it’s not so easy to turn off the scenes of disaster playing on endless loop in your head, or the clenching in your gut, or to fall asleep with your mind on overdrive.

The usual advice? “Just let it go.” “Try harder.” “Take a few deep breaths.” Has any of that actually helped you? It never did anything for me.

Talking yourself out of ruminating doesn’t work. Forcing yourself to do things only works for a while, then the resistance grows stronger. Tips for procrastination don’t work, because it’s not really that. And reframing anxieties doesn’t get at the real issue when you have many real experiences of what you’re anxious about coming true.

Can I take a moment to acknowledge that this really is hard? 

But you’re NOT broken, or defective, and there’s nothing wrong with your brain.

The workshop

That’s why I created Anxiety Reduction for Autistics. This is a four-module course—that was originally presented live over four weeks—and is now available to you right now, on demand.

It’s designed to help you learn real skills that are neurodivergent-friendly to reduce anxiety, both the practical, immediate overwhelm, and then how to deconstruct the underlying thought patterns that keep the rumination going, and the guilt, and shame, and negative self-talk.

I’ve been through that myself. I’m Autistic and AuDHD, and lived with moderate to severe anxiety most of my life, until I figured out this framework several years ago. At times the anxiety was so intense that I barely left my house for months or years at a time. The phone taunted me. Having one thing planned meant the whole day was shot. Or the whole week, when it was really bad. I canceled at the last minute so often that I lost friends.

But now? I can deal with last minute changes. I don’t love them, but I can deal with them. I can have difficult conversations and not ruminate for ages when I say something awkward. I can deal with sensory stuff better. I can ask for what I need without my anxiety spiking. I can have a technician come to my house to fix something, and not spend the week beforehand, dreading it. And so much more.

It’s often little day-to-day things, but those add up to real, positive improvements in my life.

This is the same framework, and the same techniques, that I teach my private coaching clients, distilled down to their essence, in a systematic way that’s easy to understand and put into practice in the real life circumstances you’re dealing with.

What’s in the course?

Okay, so what’s actually covered in this course?

1. A framework for understanding anxiety that doesn’t blame or shame you, that doesn’t assume you’re broken or that something’s wrong with you for having anxiety. I make a distinction between the pain of the actual stuff you’ve gone through—the actual traumas, the actual circumstances—and the extra layer of pain that comes from how you’re thinking about those situations. Because that extra layer is where anxiety comes from, and that’s what we can work with.

2. How to tell which part of your pain is from external circumstances, and which part is made worse by how you’re thinking about it. This is tricky, because there’s at least some truth in how you’re thinking, or it’s close enough to the truth that it feels true—you’re not worrying for no good reason. But picking this apart is what I’m good at, and this is what I’d like to show you how to do.

3. Eight practical techniques to deal with those painful thoughts and reduce anxiety. These are the ones that consistently get the best results for my Autistic, ADHD, and highly sensitive clients. They’re not all going to appeal to you, and that’s your failure, or a failure of the curriculum; I don’t actually expect you to like all eight. Because I’m providing a wide enough variety so that everyone will resonate with at least one or two. Because if even one or two are helpful, and you use them, even intermittently, it can make a big difference over time.

4. Each module starts with a physical anti-anxiety technique to help you soothe your nervous system, because we’re doing something that’s unfamiliar and it’s OK for that to feel weird, or to be nervous about that. So we’re going to do a little work regulating the nervous system so that you can take in what’s presented in the rest of the class. That way you get a new technique, and get to experience it working in a real scenario. Then we’ll get into some theory—why anxiety works the way it does, and why these techniques work—and then we’ll put that theory into practice with another technique. There’s Q&A time afterwards, with real questions and examples from other Autistic and AuDHDers, modeling how to put this into practice in your own life.

5. Real examples from an Autistic and AuDHD perspective. This isn’t just abstract theory, or just a few tips and tricks—it’s the combo of understanding what’s going on, and practical tools that actually work for neurodivergent brains, and why they work, from someone who has lived this and worked with hundreds of Autistic adults and teenagers.

Honest expectations

Now, I want to be honest with you.

Will this course completely eliminate your anxiety? No. And I wouldn’t trust any short course that makes that promise.

Your anxiety probably developed gradually over a long period of time. And it’s had a lot of practice doing what it’s doing—trying to protect you in the only way it knows how. A few weeks isn’t going to change all of that. That’s not realistic.

But it can make a real difference. Because, when even one or two of these techniques work for you, and use them, at first, once in a while, inconsistently, when you remember, that will give you genuine experiences that you can deal with the anxiety of doing or saying difficult things. And that will generate a small amount of tentative cautious optimism, that it might be possible for other things. 

Then you try it with those, and find out that you can deal with those hard things too. Even if it doesn’t always turn out the way you want, you can deal with it, however it turns out. And this creates an upward spiral of success, and you build trust in yourself that you can deal with hard things. And uncomfortable things. And that you can break old patterns. 

And you start using this with harder and harder anxieties, and harder circumstances, and that can make a big difference over time. This is what got me from spending an hour wandering the supermarket aimlessly because I couldn’t couldn’t find something and couldn’t bring myself to ask a random stranger (who worked there) where it was, to asking, to taking other risks in my life, speaking up at the doctor, replying to an old text message, and all the other little steps that it took to make my life what it is now. 

And just 20 minutes before I recorded this, I wrote a really difficult email to someone, out of the blue, that was really hard for me and is risking a lot, but I’m trusting that it’ll be OK. And I know I will be OK, no matter how they react. And I can deal with the anxiety enough to send the email, and I can deal with the anxiety of waiting for a response, before knowing how it’s going to go over.  And I can do this, do something else, while I’m waiting for that response. It doesn’t consume my entire life anymore.

This is how it makes a real change in your life, one little bit at a time. Working with the other things that you’re already doing.

Although worries and fears may always come up, that’s life, they won’t be paralyzing anymore. Because you’ll trust yourself that you can deal with them. Because you’ll have experience dealing with them.

The details

Okay, here’s the details:

This is the recorded version of the last time I presented this live in 2025, so you get all four modules as video recordings, an audio-only version, complete transcripts with the slides included, all the slides separately, and all the handouts, worksheets, and bonuses.

Because it’s recorded, you have the freedom to follow along at your own pace. Rewind and rewatch as much as needed. Engage on your own schedule, as your energy allows. With no pressure to show up on someone else’s schedule or feel guilty about missing live meetings. And you can come back months later for a refresher.

You’ll have access for at least a full year, guaranteed, and probably several years. I don’t want to promise “lifetime access”—whose lifetime, yours or mine? Or the lifetime of the website, and how long is that? This is where my mind could get into anxiety spirals, but I’m not going to go there—but I intend to keep this available for the foreseeable future.

This is an inclusive, trauma-sensitive, and BS-free zone. All are welcome, including LGBTQIA+ humans and all gender identities.

And while this course is designed from and for an Autistic and AuDHD perspective, if you’re not Autistic but my approach resonates with you—maybe you’re a highly sensitive person, or neurodivergent in other ways, or questioning whether or not you might be autistic—you’re welcome here too.

And here’s my promise to you: If you give this framework a fair try, try the techniques, implement what’s presented, find and question your painful thoughts, and don’t notice any reduction in your anxiety within six weeks of enrolling, let me know and I’ll refund your money in full. Basically, if you sign up and don’t use the course, that’s on you. But if you give it a fair shot and it doesn’t actually help you, that’s on me. Is that fair?

Invitation

So, here’s my invitation.

If you’re tired of anxiety keeping you from things that you want to do. If you want tools that actually work for your Autistic or AuDHD brain. If you want to understand why you feel this way and what to do about it, this course might be a fit for you.

For more info, and to sign up, go to AutismChrysalis.com/anxiety.

Because you deserve to have skills to manage anxiety. Because it’s okay to need help with this. And it is genuinely possible to make your life more functional and less overwhelming.

If this sounds like what you’re looking for, I’d love to share this framework with you.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post Anxiety Relief for Autistic Adults: Practical Techniques That Work appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Harmful messaging

When prominent government officials make bogus claims about autism, it’s easy to spot that as harmful messaging. But there’s also a more specific name for it: it’s a form of ableism.

It’s essentially saying that only those who fit their particular conception of what an “able-bodied” and “able-minded” person is like are acceptable, and that people who have different minds and bodies—different physical and mental abilities and disabilities—are anything from unacceptable to a drain on resources to needing to be eradicated. It’s a slippery slope from there to eugenics.

When those kinds of wild and bogus claims are made on the public stage, it’s easy to point to that and see it for what it is.

But we’ve been getting a much more subtle, low-key version of this on a daily basis for our entire lives.

What we’re taught

Messages like “just try harder” blame the person having difficulty as the problem, rather than a lack of clear instructions or reasonable expectations.

“You’re too sensitive” or “you’re making a big deal out of nothing” dismisses the valid concerns of living, breathing human beings because they’re inconvenient to other people and would require other people to expend energy to think about those concerns and make adjustments to what they’re doing.

“No one else has a problem with it. It’s just your problem. Deal with it” or “he’s just a jerk” reduces differences in communication style to writing off a person who has a really interesting personality, a different take on things, gifts to share, and a unique perspective on how to make the situation they’re complaining about better.

All of that is bad enough, and it really is bad.

But when we hear these kinds of messages over and over from so many people in our lives, from so many different sources—from home and school and work—and the same refrains get repeated so many times from every direction, it can feel so normal that it seems like it’s just the way that it is, that they’re right, that it’s really me, I’m the one with the problem, and I’m making a big deal out of nothing.

We can go down the self-blame route: “It’s just me. I’m making a big deal out of nothing. I’m the problem. There’s something wrong with me.”

Or we can take the blaming-others route: “Everyone else is the problem. They never listen. Why can’t they just X? The world sucks. Everyone sucks. It’s never gonna get any better. What’s the point?”

And we can do both of these. I’ve definitely spent plenty of time doing both of them, at different times, depending on mood or circumstances or what was driving me nuts at the moment.

Weeding out ableism

Here’s the crux of it:

The self-blame route is a form of internalized ableism—when we take those messages and turn them back on ourselves, and then apply those standards to ourselves and get on our own case before anyone else does, relieving them of the burden of doing it to us because we’ll do it to ourselves.

And that’s when they’ve really won, because then they don’t have to continue harping on us—we do it for them.

I, for one, don’t want to do their dirty work for them.

I’ve spent the last several years gradually weeding out more and more of this internalized ableism from my own thoughts and actions. It’s not completely gone. That is going to be a lifelong process, and I keep noticing new versions of it every now and then.

But I have made huge progress compared to the incredibly ableist version of myself who found out almost ten years ago that I’m Autistic, and started grappling with what that means for me and how that understanding could inform my choices and make my life better.

The post Neuro-Ableism appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.

Examples of autistic internalized ableism: “There’s something fundamentally wrong with me.” “I have to push myself.” “I make problems for others. I’m difficult to be around. I’m a burden.” “I need to mask, or hide who I am, or not honestly tell people when I have a problem, to be acceptable and keep people around.” “Other people manage, and they’ve got a lot more to deal with, so I must be weak, fragile, lazy, or not trying hard enough.” “It’s just me that has a problem with this. So I have to either suppress my needs or be a bother to others.” “I have to make myself small so I won’t drive people away.” “I have to hide what I know to not annoy people.”

I hear these sentiments a lot from Autistics, and they can feel really true, and they might have some truth to them, or be close to the truth, but they’re not entirely true. And I used to believe every one of them. But not anymore. Because I’ve deconstructed the lies, and have actually experienced what it’s like to live without these getting in the way.

These lies, and others like them, are called internalized ableism. And they are how people in power, people who have it easy because the world is designed for them, keep us blaming ourselves instead of seeing how the system is flawed, because if enough of us did, we would demand changes. 

Like, better working conditions, and education, public spaces, and health care and mental care that responds to our needs. Or little things, like more understanding for direct communication styles. What could be possible for you if ableism didn’t get in the way?

Bringing this a little closer to home, what could you do if internalized ableism didn’t get in your way?

I mean, what if you stopped blaming yourself for things that aren’t actually your fault? What if you stopped pushing yourself so hard, getting on your own case, denying yourself accommodations, discriminating against yourself in ways that have been so normalized you don’t even notice you’re doing it?

What if you could see all the ways you’ve been trained not to notice the ableism embedded in our systems—and in your own thoughts about yourself?

The problem

Here’s the thing. Internalized ableism is a huge factor in negative self-talk and autistic burnout. But it’s so normalized in our culture that of course you should take the blame, and push yourself, and get on your own case for things that you don’t actually need to.

Maybe you tell yourself you should be able to do more. Maybe you push through sensory overload because “everyone else deals with it.” Maybe you feel like your needs are too much, or that asking for accommodations is making excuses. Maybe you’re harder on yourself than you’d ever be on anyone else.

And the thing is, you’ve been trained to do that. The ableism isn’t your fault—but it is affecting you in ways you might not even realize.

The workshop

That’s why I created the Internalized Ableism Workshop and Self-Assessment. This is a two-and-a-half hour recorded workshop, available to you right now, on demand.

The workshop is designed to help you spot internalized ableism in the context of an adult Autistic or AuDHD life. How it’s so pervasive in our society that it’s affecting you in ways you’ve been trained not to notice. Ways that you may be discriminating against yourself, and giving yourself a harder time than you really need to. And understand where this is coming from so you don’t just give yourself the blame, when it doesn’t belong to you.

Plus, I’ve created an in-depth 120-question self-assessment with real examples from real life, so you can see how much this is affecting your daily life and choices, in 14 different areas of life, from your autistic identity, to work, communication, productivity, self-worth, your relationship to autistic stereotypes, and more. I spent over a year working on this, incorporating feedback, refining and fine-tuning it, so you can get a better picture of how you’re doing, how much this is really affecting your life.

Fair warning: it will probably bring up some areas that you hadn’t realized were neuro-ableism, and that might be uncomfortable. But once you notice what’s really going on, you can make intentional choices about if you want to do something about it, and then what.

What you’ll learn

Okay, so what is actually covered in this workshop?

One: Clear definitions of ableism and internalized ableism, with real-life examples from an Autistic and AuDHD perspective—not just abstract concepts.

Two: How ableism is baked into our society and systems in ways we’ve been trained not to see. You can see the normalized expectations, the cultural assumptions, the “that’s just how things are” that actually aren’t neutral at all.

Three: How to spot neuro-ableism in your own life. The patterns of behavior, the self-talk, the normalized expectations that you’ve been carrying around without questioning them.

Four: A 4-step process for how to dismantle your own neuro-ableism. Not shame-based, not more demands on yourself, but a framework for how to start undoing this.

Five: A comprehensive 120-question self-assessment with various real-life scenarios and generalized patterns of behavior. The kind of thing that might make you think, “Oh yeah, I guess I do do that,” or “Oh, I didn’t realize I did that,” or “Ooh, that’s ableism? Huh.”

And six: A foundation for awareness—which is the first step towards making progress. Once you start noticing it, you can choose if you want to take action, and how.

Honest expectation

Now, I want to be honest with you.

Will this workshop completely eliminate your internalized ableism? No. And I wouldn’t trust any short workshop that makes that promise.

Your ableism probably developed gradually over a long period of several decades. A few explanations and strategies aren’t going to change all of that. That’s not realistic.

But it can make a difference. And add on to what you’ve already been doing.

What I’m offering is a way to think about ableism that doesn’t put the blame or shame on you. That shows how you’ve been trained not to see the ableism embedded in our systems. And offers a framework for how to move towards undoing this.

The details

Here’s the details:

This is the recorded version of a live workshop I gave in November of 2025, so you get the video recording, an audio-only version, a complete transcript with slides included, the 120-question self-assessment, and all workshop materials and bonuses.

Because it’s recorded, you have the freedom to follow along at your own pace. Rewind and rewatch as much as needed. Engage on your own schedule, as your energy allows. With no pressure to show up on someone else’s schedule or participate in a live meeting. And you can come back months or years later for a refresher, or to retake the self-assessment and see how you’ve progressed.

You’ll have access for at least a full year, guaranteed, and probably several years. I don’t want to promise “lifetime access”—whose lifetime, yours or mine?—but I intend to keep this available for the foreseeable future.

This is an inclusive, trauma-sensitive, and BS-free zone. All are welcome, including LGBTQIA+ humans and all gender identities.

And while this is designed from and for an Autistic and AuDHD perspective, if you don’t identify as Autistic, but my approach resonates with you—maybe you’re a highly sensitive person, neurodivergent in other ways, or you’re still questioning whether you’re Autistic—you’re welcome here too.

Invitation

So, here’s my invitation.

If you’re tired of being so hard on yourself. If you want to understand how much internalized ableism is affecting your life and start doing something about it, this workshop might be a fit for you.

For more info, or to sign up, go to AutismChrysalis.com/ia.

Because life is so much easier when you’re not discriminating against yourself in addition to all the external discrimination. Because it is okay to have needs, and because it is possible to start undoing the ableism you’ve internalized over the years.

If this sounds like what you’re looking for, I’d love to support you along this journey.

Wishing you a neurowonderful day.

The post Internalized Ableism for Autistics: Workshop & Assessment appeared first on Autism Chrysalis.