Many late discovered neurodivergent women spend years becoming experts at adapting to other people.
Keeping the peace. Being accommodating. Avoiding conflict. Anticipating everybody else’s needs before their own. Becoming the reliable one, the supportive one or the easy-going one.
From the outside, it can look like kindness or flexibility.
But underneath it, many women slowly lose touch with themselves.
This is often where self abandonment begins.
Not as a conscious choice, but as a gradual pattern of disconnecting from your own needs, feelings and preferences in order to stay accepted, safe or emotionally regulated around other people.
When everybody else comes first automatically
For many neurodivergent women, prioritising other people becomes instinctive.
You may automatically think about how everyone else feels before considering yourself. You say yes because saying no feels uncomfortable. You agree to plans even when you’re already overwhelmed. You minimise your own discomfort to avoid disappointing people.
Over time, this can become so normal that you stop noticing you’re doing it.
A lot of late discovered women realise they’ve spent years shaping themselves around what other people seemed to need from them. Often because masking taught them that fitting in, staying agreeable or avoiding conflict felt safer than fully expressing themselves.
The difficult part is that eventually you can lose connection with what you actually want.
I don’t even know what I like anymore
One of the most common things many women say after late discovery is that they struggle to identify their own preferences.
You may notice yourself asking other people where they want to eat, what film they want to watch or what they want to do, not because you genuinely don’t mind, but because you’re disconnected from your own responses.
Sometimes it goes much deeper than that.
You may realise your personality changes depending on who you’re around. That you’ve spent years monitoring yourself so carefully that you no longer know what feels natural. That underneath the people pleasing and masking, there’s a sense of uncertainty around who you actually are.
That can feel incredibly unsettling.
The exhaustion underneath people pleasing
Self abandonment often creates a huge amount of hidden emotional exhaustion.
You say yes while internally overwhelmed. You keep coping externally while resentment quietly builds underneath. You continue showing up for everybody else while becoming more disconnected from yourself.
Many neurodivergent women don’t even realise how burnt out they are until they physically or emotionally cannot keep maintaining it anymore.
And because so much of this pattern develops through survival, changing it can feel uncomfortable at first.
If your nervous system has learned that being agreeable keeps relationships stable or reduces conflict, even small boundaries can trigger guilt, anxiety or fear of rejection.
Relearning how to check in with yourself
Recovering from self abandonment is usually not about suddenly becoming assertive or putting yourself first all the time.
For many people, it starts much more quietly than that.
Pausing before automatically agreeing to something. Asking yourself what you actually feel. Noticing when you’re overriding discomfort. Paying attention to resentment instead of dismissing it immediately.
A lot of late discovered neurodivergent women spend years learning how to adapt to everybody else.
Part of healing can be learning how to reconnect with themselves again.
