As per requests, this is my description of auDHD experience. As there is very little research into this, I’m going to draw primarily upon my own personal experience and I’ll draw upon peer experiences and I’ll draw in bits of research through this post here and there. I am diagnosed with both ADHD and autism, both adult diagnoses, and there is treatment history to establish these as being accurate diagnoses. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me with ADHD gave me a diagnosis of primarily-inattentive ADHD but I had come to my own conclusions that I was probably combined-type which has had its hyperactive aspects mostly buried under trauma. My psychiatrist also independently arrived at this same conclusion unprompted. It’s worth noting that being combined-type will colour my experience of auDHD.
As a disclaimer, this is going to be my experience so it will be limited by that fact. This should only be taken as information and not the definitive guide or the be-all end-all of The One True™ auDHD experience.
To start, I think it’s of fundamental importance to understand that my experience of auDHD is one of internal conflict - I have competing sets of needs and desires. This manifests in a lot of internal struggle and it also means that my autistic or ADHD traits can be more prevalent and I can feel “more” autistic or ADHD, depending on my circumstances. (Maybe I’m a Marxist because deep down, at a fundamental level, my ADHD traits exist in a dialectical relationship with my autistic traits lol.) This manifests in a lot of extremes and a lot of bouncing between one extreme to the other.
Ultimately this is why I think I was previously diagnosed with a mood disorder and why it’s very common for late-diagnosed autistic/ADHD/auDHDers to be misdiagnosed with mood disorders.
So what does this look like in practice?
I thrive under most novel situations and under high pressure. I find it exciting and this really engages me. However, I also find that I hit my limit in high pressure situations very rapidly, so there’s a sweet spot where things are just new or high pressure enough that I thrive. Less, I feel pretty bored and checked out. More, I become an anxious wreck.
However this is counterbalanced by my deep and abiding need for stability, routine, and structure. I need enough that I can count on in my life that I feel capable of dealing with high-pressure and novel situations. Too much change, especially unpredicted change, leaves me really rattled and out of sorts (and not just feeling a bit uncomfortable but it can put me into complete disarray). It can take ages for me to cope with too much change or unpredicted change because, although I can be quite adaptable and flexible, if my base circumstances change then the pace at which I find my feet again is truly glacial.
This is also sort of why I find that I am either extremely well organised or I’m an absolute disaster, with little room in between. Without having structure and organisation, my autistic needs aren’t being met so I feel very dysregulated and I am far less capable of relying on this aspect of myself to manage my scatterbrained ADHD traits.
When it comes to socialising, I can be very gregarious. (It’s worth mentioning that I’m pretty high-masking when I want to be, so that may also be a factor here.) I am capable of being the life of the party and of facilitating stuff like group work and educational spaces in an engaging and interactive way, and have done so professionally. But this comes with a high level of social anxiety and an extremely limited social battery. I find that I much prefer facilitating, or better yet public speaking, than I do participating in a group activity especially if it’s unstructured or there are a lack of clear guidelines and expectations. So externally I vacillate between being very social to being extremely introverted, depending on a variety of factors.
Another aspect is that I genuinely do need a lot of time to recharge after socialising, even when it’s great and I’m really enjoying myself. Sometimes days. I feel like this is very much my autistic needs taking the front seat.
With regards to interests, this is a little bit tricky on account of being combined-type but I have very long, stable persistent deep interests (“special interests” but I am loath to apply that term to myself tbh). I also have the classic ADHD sort of brief, intense, transient interests that breeze in and breeze out just as quickly. There are things that I will always be interested in doing or talking about, then there are things that I have a sort of wild fling with before I find that I’ve suddenly wrung all the dopamine out of it and I’m ready to discard it and move on.
I’m capable of bending my deep interests and sorta redirecting them to topics that I need to prioritise but I’m not sure whether this is a me thing, an auDHD thing, a combined-type thing, or something else.
With regards to sensory processing, I am a fairly typical autistic scattershot of being mostly sensory-avoiding with some atypically high degrees of sensory-seeking, as per the Dunn Sensory Profile 2 administered to me as an adult. I am acutely sensitive to a lot of sensory input however my ADHD is a countervailing force here and I can be completely oblivious to certain sounds or smells or tactile feelings until suddenly my awareness is drawn to this and it becomes borderline intolerable. This may also be due to me being high-masking, having poor interoception, or experiencing dissociation due to lots of trauma, mostly developmental so keep this in mind.
With regards to trauma and rejection sensitive dysphoria, there’s evidence that ADHDers are more prone to developing PTSD symptoms. In my opinion one of the major factors in this phenomenon is the fundamental emotional reactivity inherent to the ADHD experience, especially if it’s not appropriately medicated. My autistic traits lead me to ruminate a lot and so there’s this unholy alliance that exists within me of my being more prone to traumatisation, having heightened emotional reactivity (even with regards to PTSD triggers that occur well after a particular event), and the classic autistic perseveration meaning that I get into ruts with my thinking that are very difficult to get myself out of. This is on top of the typical experience of PTSD and being emotionally and psychologically “stuck” in the traumatic experience. So it’s a double whammy. Or maybe an exponential whammy idk.
I experience rejection sensitive dysphoria and I respond to treatment for it. I think that RSD in an auDHDer is especially difficult as being autistic means that I am just prone to making more faux pas, I’m going to unintentionally annoy or upset people, I’m going to miss cues, and ultimately that I’m going to face a whole lot more ostracism and social rejection than if I were allistic. So not only do I have a lot of the psychological consequences of trying to exist in a social world that is far from well-suited to an autistic person, I also have very visceral responses in my nervous system when I think I have fucked up or when someone gives me the impression of negative social feedback (whether imagined or real) and this has a pretty major impact on me. I am of the opinion that the ADHD traits that make me inclined to seek out social interaction and push me to be novelty-seeking means that I am much more socially engaged than I would otherwise be and since negative social feedback affects me unusually deeply, I think this is one of the major factors in why I am capable of being very high masking to the point of probably doing quite well at being neurotypical-passing if I care to.
It’s my suspicion that most auDHDers are high-masking, not only because they tend to go undiagnosed and maybe even unaware of this personally for a lot longer and so they naturally develop strategies to compensate but because they tend to be more socially-oriented and I reckon they take knocks harder when socialising, all things being equal, so the end product is a person who is a sort of grizzled veteran who has learnt how to survive in the harsh wilderness that is the allistic social realm.
Moving on from that, I find that I am very extreme in how I experience fine details. I often plunge headlong into the deepest depths of detail but I am also quite careless and I can miss very obvious or critical details. I tend to shift between these two poles. Sometimes this also manifests in being so consumed by one aspect of the details that it’s to the exclusion of all the other details as well, although that’s more of a classic autistic experience imo. This might also be something specific to me but I am a voracious learner. Often I feel like my mind is like an odd-couple where I can get engrossed in a subject for virtually an unlimited period of time and I can be remarkably persistent with learning but I also have intense cravings for instant gratification and novelty which causes me to end up diving into one subject with great depth only to dive into the next soon after, and this pattern repeats itself constantly. It feels like half of my brain is constantly dragging me down one particular rabbit hole and the other half of my brain is desperately and impatiently dragging me to the next rabbit hole. This may also be something specific to me but I find that I’m actually quite a slow learner because of my needs to understand the intricacies of any given topic but, once I really grasp the fundamentals of something I tend to learn very quickly from that point onwards.
With regards to executive dysfunction, my experience is one of constant struggle lol. I feel as though I am constantly juggling too many balls - my need for novelty, my need for certainty and stability, my sensory diet, the need to stay focused and remember things, the need to observe the details so I don’t make simple mistakes and so I don’t find myself getting lost in any one particular detail, my need for routine and my fundamental incapability of maintaining a routine, attending to my interoception as I am very liable to not register that I’m hungry or thirsty or tired and so on. It feels like I am more or less constantly mediating the tensions between my different needs which often exist in direct contradiction to each other. So yeah, this means I burn out and I burn out hard lol.
I think ultimately my experience of auDHD is one where I can sometimes spot the very clear traits of either one shining through, such as struggling with pragmatics in communication and being completely capable of eating the exact same thing in perpetuity or being so forgetful and inattentive that I’ll put my phone down in a drawer only to close it to later have zero recollection of what I did and having a real drive to experience new things. But more often it feels as though I am an odd mix of the two or that there’s a sort of stalemate between the two and I feel like I’m kinda neither and yet both at the same time.
Sometimes this works really well, as my ADHD traits make me more adaptable and a bit more even in my interests and how I engage socially or as my autistic traits help me sustain my focus and to have a much better memory for things than I would otherwise have. I guess in short, being autistic keeps my ADHD traits more stable and consistent and my ADHD makes my autistic traits more flexible and it broadens my horizons. Each of them softens some of the rough edges of the other and I find that I can often lean into one in order to compensate for the deficits inherent to the other.
Unfortunately, the upshot of the autism and ADHD combo is that very often these needs compete and are in direct contradiction to one another as well. It’s a weird sort of in between space to exist in, one where the only relatable parallel that I can think of that comes remotely closely is ennui - that feeling of being bored but where it’s a conflicted or maybe a more existential sort of boredom; if you’re just purely bored, you find something interesting or exciting and you have fixed the problem and the need has been addressed whereas with ennui there’s a sort of restless interregnum-like quality where you experience a feeling of boredom but the thought of doing something exciting is also in itself boring somehow. That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense lol. Also for my experience of auDHD it’s not a feeling of being bored at addressing different needs but it’s more like craving new things whie simultaneously craving the same things and the same routine, of craving excitement but also being overwhelmed and craving quiet and calmness at the same time. It’s really quite odd to be honest.
Ultimately, while I identify with a lot of traits and experiences of pure ADHD or pure autism, I feel as though my experience of these are much more varied and they shift in intensity. I also think that the way that I present, even if I’m not putting in effort towards masking, is one where the traits of both are apparent but they aren’t easy to pin down because I readily switch between, say, a classic autistic infodump monologue to being very socially-engaging and mischievous like you might expect from an ADHDer. Or I can be incredibly details-focused while also being seemingly oblivious to details. That sort of thing.
Anyway, I think that wraps up my own personal experience of auDHD from an internal perspective.
So unusual eye contact is a very common trait in autism.
The most obvious example is avoiding eye contact but autistic eye contact gets pigeonholed into being exclusively this when, in reality, it’s not unusual for an autistic person to give very intense and sustained eye contact as well. Generally eye contact tends to be avoided in low masking autistic people but as the masking increases the eye contact tends to be more intense until you get to very high masking, where eye contact is often roughly that of an allistic person. Note that this isn’t something scientific or diagnostic, it’s just a general trend, and it isn’t an absolute thing; I worked with one autistic person who was low masking and who had quite high support needs that comes to mind. They would often avoid eye contact but at times they would give very intense sustained eye contact as well. Similarly when I’m in high masking mode, I can slip from fairly allistic-passing eye contact into giving intense eye contact unintentionally but on the other hand if I genuinely need to focus in order to recall information or to receive multi-step verbal instructions (ugh) I’m almost immediately going to break eye contact and avoid it while I’m focusing.
What defines it is that it is unusual and it’s viewed as somewhat socially inappropriate; me breaking eye contact to focus in closely to what they’re saying feels “wrong” to an allistic person, very intense sustained eye contact feels intimidating or threatening to an allistic person even if the autistic person is doing their best to show good manners by using eye contact to indicate that they are listening, eyes that switch from intense eye contact to an averted gaze and back again might be interpreted as the person being furtive or untrustworthy when really it could just be an autistic person trying to perform to allistic expectations of eye contact.
Is unusual eye contact the defining characteristic of autism? No.
Is abnormal eye contact one indicator that a person might be autistic? Definitely.
Are there other factors that may influence “unusual” eye contact? Absolutely - different cultural norms, social anxiety, visual impairment, neurological differences besides autism, having ADHD and making eye contact before lapsing into a daydream so that you accidentally end up giving someone the death stare or being so distracted that you can barely maintain eye contact… there’s too many potential causes to list.
Without knowing more it’s very hard to give an indication one way or another though.
I don’t just avoid eye contact, I also try to make eye contact but, it still comes off weird. It’s either too short a glance or sometimes too long. I guess I have trouble trying to show how I’m paying attention to people, especially when addressing groups. It was that plus fidgeting that made a lady at the child autism center at my university suggest I get evaluated as an adult.
Yeah, those are two of the more obvious external signs that point to autism as a distinct possibility.
I think that most allistic people don’t really think about eye contact much at all, and it’s not at all common for allistic people to try and do eye contact “properly” - it’s something that seems to come quite naturally to them.
On the other hand, it’s super common for an autistic person to get a lot of negative feedback for the way they do eye contact - from “not paying attention” to having a “dead stare” to being “confrontational” or “shifty”.
It honestly feels like there’s a whole kaleidoscope of rules and implications and contextual factors with eye contact that allistic people seem to know implicitly and adhere to instinctively, just like with other forms of communication, that I don’t understand as an autistic person (or that I kinda get the basic rules but I have to be very conscious of them).
It’s a bit like:
Give eye contact to show that you’re paying attention to someone when they are talking but if you don’t show small gestures and micro expressions occasionally during this then you will indicate that you are checked out from the conversation but if you show too many small gestures and micro expressions then you will indicate that you are anxious or you are trying to get the other person to hurry up and you also have to look away occasionally but if you look in the wrong direction then that will indicate that you think the person is lying or that you strongly disagree with what they just said so don’t look away when they are making a point that you agree with but remember to only look with your eyes without shifting your head or it indicates that you aren’t interested and if you look away too often you will indicate that you are trying to hide something or that you are avoiding things but if you don’t look away enough then that will be confrontational and aggressive and if you look away at the same place too often then you are telling the person that they need to look at what you’re focusing on and it can distract them or interrupt them so you need to look at different things each time and and if you look at your shoes then that generally means that you are expressing shame or guilt and if someone joins the conversation then you need to give them a short amount of eye contact when they do in order to show that you welcome their presence in the conversation but if you give them eye contact for too short a time then it’s considered rude and dismissive but if you give them too much eye contact then you are telling the person who is talking that you aren’t interested in them…
If this sounds similar to the rulebook that you have developed over time yourself through a lot of hard lessons by doing the “wrong” thing, and if it feels like you keep these rules in your mind when you’re giving eye contact then that gives strong autistic vibes.
A lot of this resonates with me. I keep this in mind when I reflect on my failings. The part about not wanting to appear anxious is pretty solid but, the fact I’m in this uncomfortable situation where I’m worried of messing up makes me want to get out of the conversation immediately and not appear shifty.
Plus there’s trying to look up from they eyes at people’s foreheads rather than down towards their neck and chests.
I really became self aware of all this when around early high school I had a difficult time adjusting to talking face to face after a summer break away from everyone who wasn’t my immediate family.