Newly 'diagnosed': next steps?

[MrsGhastlyCrumb]

I say 'diagnosed' because I am slightly sceptical of the diagnosis. However.

I have one child with ASD, and the other has ADHD. I felt I had a lot of ADD traits, which I've struggled with all my life along with depression. I finally reached the top of the list for an assessment recently; the doctor I saw felt I didn't reach enough of the childhood criteria for a diagnosis of ADD- but proceeded to do the screening for ASD. That, he felt I did meet the threshold for.

I've got some doubts and am struggling with feeling like an impostor. I have read some books on autism in females previously - more to understand my daughter and other female family members who are more obviously autistic than I feel I am, really.

There is a local resource centre that has groups I think but I'm not sure I want to go there, especially as they have specialist LGBT+ groups (I am firmly gender critical).

I haven't told many people- just my partner and daughter, and randomly an autistic woman I know when we happened to be talking about autism and it felt disingenuous not to IYSWIM.

Can I ask (particularly if you were diagnosed late in life), what you found useful? I would like to try to work out whether I should take it seriously, and if so what this means for me, and what I can change in order to cope better. I need to function better as a parent amongst other things as I feel I am failing my kids.

Thanks in advance.

Okay, I guess it was a stupid thing to post- no doubt this is one of those questions that keeps getting asked- and you're all bored AF of it...😂

This board doesn’t get a lot of traffic (the threads don’t appear in Active, you have to purposely come here to read them). So posters often have to wait days for a response.

I was diagnosed with ASD as an adult. It was difficult for me to accept because I feel “functional” - in the sense that I’ve coped and managed to get married and have kids. But if I’m totally honest, I have always struggled with a lot of things. I just minimised my struggles because I thought it was just me being crap. I didn’t realise I actually had ASD.

So the biggest change for me is being kinder to myself. I acknowledge what my difficulties are and I don’t force myself any more. I put adjustments in place to help myself - which I previously didn’t realise I needed, and wouldn’t have allowed myself to have. I no longer push myself to be “normal”.

I didn’t have any success with support groups because they seemed to be aimed at people who had autism with intellectual impairments, not people like me who are of normal intelligence.

I haven’t told anyone except my DH about my diagnosis. My parents would just pooh-pooh it and say it was nonsense, and possibly get angry or upset, because I’m essentially saying they failed to get me a diagnosis and support when I was a child. I prefer to keep it private. It’s more about me being able to understand and help myself.