The Inauthentic Life: The High Cost of Masking
Neurodivergent women (including those with Autism and ADHD) often spend their lives masking, suppressing natural traits like stimming, unique communication styles, or sensory needs to fit into a neurotypical world. This constant performance is a direct path to an inauthentic life, resulting in chronic exhaustion, high anxiety, and severe burnout.
Joseph’s model exposes the cost of this mask:
- Failure to “Know Yourself”: The mask creates self-alienation. By constantly trying to perceive and respond like others, ND women lose touch with their own genuine needs, sensory input, and emotional state. They become strangers to themselves.
- Failure to “Own Yourself”: Fear of rejection and past trauma teach them that their true self is unsafe or unacceptable. They cannot take responsibility for their needs when they feel those needs are fundamentally flawed. Boundaries become impossible.
- Failure to “Be Yourself”: The behaviour (the mask) is entirely incongruent with the internal reality. This emotional and behavioural split prevents the genuine connection and transparent living that Joseph identifies as key to well-being.
The Authentic Roadmap: A Path to Healing and Flourishing
For the ND woman, Joseph’s three pillars become a powerful recovery roadmap, turning authenticity into a survival strategy rather than just a virtue:
1. Know Yourself: Reclaiming the Truth.
This is the process of unmasking and sense-making—often beginning with a diagnosis. It involves identifying genuine sensory needs, communication styles, and strengths, and finally understanding past struggles through a neurodivergent-affirming lens. Your needs are valid.
2. Own Yourself: Setting the Boundaries.
This means making choices based on internal needs, not external demands. It’s the radical act of self-advocacy, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, prioritising rest, saying ‘no’ to social situations that lead to shut down, and embracing stimming as a necessary self-regulation tool. Your choices are autonomous.
3. Be Yourself: Congruence in Action.
This is allowing your outward expression to finally align with your inner self. When a ND woman embraces her intensity, her focused passions, and her unique ways of connecting, she achieves the congruence that reduces distress and unlocks Joseph’s goal of human flourishing. Your existence is enough.
Conclusion: Your Authenticity is Essential
For neurodivergent women, authenticity is not a luxury or a performance, it is the foundation of mental health and the only way to move from chronic survival into a life of peace and meaning. Dropping the mask is a process, but the rewards are profound: a life where you are finally seen, understood, and truly accepted—starting with yourself.
Ready to begin your journey toward unmasking and self-acceptance?