When Connection Misfires: Relational Ruptures in the Misdiagnosed and Missed.

From the forthcoming book The New Normal by Dr Miriam

Introduction: When Being Misunderstood Isn’t Just Internal, It’s Relational

In previous entries, we’ve explored what happens when neurodivergence is filtered through narrow cultural narratives, flawed diagnostic tools, and internalised doubt. But misrecognition doesn’t live in the mind alone. It lives in our relationships.

It’s felt in the moment a therapist tells you you're “too self-aware” to have ADHD.In the teacher who praises your calmness, unaware it’s a trauma response.In the partner who questions your overwhelm because “you always seem fine.”In the parent who interprets your shutdown as indifference.

These are not just interpersonal misunderstandings. They are relational ruptures, the human consequences of systemic invisibility.

Part I: Reckoning – Misrecognition is a Relational Injury

When your neurodivergence is consistently misread, you learn to be cautious in connection. You learn that being yourself can lead to rejection, confusion, or even punishment.

This is particularly true in therapeutic and care-based relationships, where people often seek help for struggles that remain unnamed. But when your experience doesn’t match what the clinician has been trained to look for, when your coping strategies are mistaken for emotional regulation, or your exhaustion for laziness, you may walk away not only undiagnosed, but unseen.

The damage isn’t just diagnostic. It’s relational.

When professionals misattune to our reality, it mirrors earlier ruptures, being misunderstood in childhood, being gaslit in school systems, being told we’re “too sensitive” or “too much” in moments of genuine overwhelm.

And for racialised and marginalised people, this rupture often carries an added layer: being read through a lens of cultural stereotypes, gendered assumptions, or implicit bias.

We don’t just lose access to care, we lose the ability to trust the people offering it.

Part II: Disruption – Trust Isn’t a Given, It’s a Process

Therapeutic relationships often assume a baseline of trust. But for many neurodivergent clients, especially those who’ve been historically misdiagnosed, misheard, or mislabelled, trust is not the starting point. It must be earned.

Too often, relational models assume that if a client is not “open”, “connected”, or “regulated”, they are resistant or avoidant. But what if those responses are not defences, but adaptations?

A client who intellectualises may have learned that emotion makes people uncomfortable.

A client who shuts down may be protecting themselves from previous therapeutic harm.

A client who corrects or challenges you may not be oppositional, they may simply be tired of not being believed.

These are not signs of dysfunction. They are signs of intelligence, of people attuned to what happens when vulnerability is mishandled.

Disruption here means shifting from an expectation of instant rapport to a practice of earned attunement. It means recognising that people who have been unseen may not readily show themselves. And that trust is not built by pathologising someone’s caution, but by honouring its origins.

Part III: Reframing – Relational Recognition as Repair

Reframing begins with a simple but powerful premise: being seen is a form of healing.

When someone recognises your difference not as a flaw but as a truth, when they reflect back your complexity without reducing it, it restores something that misrecognition took away.

For therapists, educators, and care providers, this means moving beyond formulaic rapport-building. It means asking:

• What am I missing because it doesn’t look the way I expect?

• What assumptions am I making about this person’s capacity, insight, or intent?

• How do my own cultural lens and clinical training shape what I perceive as “real”, “valid”, or “disordered”?

Reframing also means making space for repair, not just at the individual level, but at the systemic one. Institutions must be willing to interrogate how diagnostic frameworks and therapeutic norms have failed to serve those outside dominant narratives.

And for those of us who’ve lived through these failures, reframing can look like seeking relationships—professional, platonic, romantic—where we no longer need to translate ourselves into something legible.

Because sometimes healing doesn’t come from being fixed. It comes from being fully met.

Closing: Misrecognition May Have Been Your First Language, But It Doesn’t Have to Be Your Last

When we are consistently misread, we begin to misread ourselves. And when that misreading plays out in relationships—with therapists, teachers, partners—it reinforces the belief that our inner truth is not trustworthy.

But recognition is possible. Repair is possible. And it begins with relationships that centre presence, not projection. Curiosity, not correction. Translation, not transference.

The new normal means building relational spaces that are capable of holding our complexity without collapsing it into stereotype.

We are not too much. We are not too unclear. We are simply too often unseen.