If you've spent your whole life being told you're so good at reading the room, this episode might reframe everything.

Codependency is one of those words that gets thrown around casually, usually as a polite way of calling someone too needy. But for late-diagnosed and late-identified neurodivergent adults, the pattern looks entirely different, and it doesn't come from neediness. It comes from survival.

In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy, Ph.D. and co-host Russ, break down what codependency actually is, where it came from as a clinical framework, and why neurodivergent people, particularly those who spent years masking without knowing it, are disproportionately likely to develop these patterns. When reading the room is how you stayed safe, outsourcing your sense of self to the people around you isn't a character flaw. It's an adaptive strategy. One that works, until it doesn't.

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Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina

About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD

Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

What if the research you spent years obsessing over was actually about your late diagnosis the whole time?

In this episode, Dr. Regina Ph.D. traces an unexpected connection between her dissertation research on identity formation in digital role-playing games and her own late diagnosis experience. The question she thought she was asking turned out to be far more personal than she realized, and the answer says something important about why so many late-diagnosed adults struggle to know who they actually are.

She unpacks how masking and people pleasing, though they look different on the surface, function as the same underlying system. And why that system, however logical it was, came with a cost most of us don't fully see until something forces us to look.

If you've ever wondered how much of the self you built was really yours, this one is going to hit.

This is the first episode in a new series exploring Neurodivergent Codependency, where those patterns come from, how they show up in work and relationships, and what it actually looks like to start building an identity that belongs to you.

Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights!

Book a Make it Make Sense Call with Regina

About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD

Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) gets talked about a lot in neurodivergent spaces, but there's a layer to it that most people miss: sometimes the pain isn't about rejection at all.

In this episode, Dr. Regina McMenomy Ph.D. shares a personal story about sending a bid for connection and the moment everything went sideways, not because the response was unkind, but because it didn't match the emotional script she had already written in her head. That gap between anticipated response and actual response, it turns out, is its own distinct trigger for RSD.

If you've ever felt a wave of hurt when someone's reaction didn't land the way you expected, even when nothing actually went wrong, this episode is for you.

You'll take away:

• A new framework for understanding RSD triggers that go beyond perceived criticism
• Why neurodivergent people sometimes "pre-feel" emotional responses, and what that reveals
• How to separate emotional impact from intention without assigning blame
• A more compassionate lens on the part of you that keeps writing the scripts

Sign up for N.E.R.D. Notes and get weekly nerdy neurodivergent insights!

Book a Clarity Call with Regina

About Dr. Regina McMenomy, PhD

Regina is a neurodivergent coach and educator who helps late-diagnosed adults unmask, heal from burnout, and build lives aligned with how their brains work. She founded Divergent Paths Consulting to provide the type of coaching and support that late-diagnosed nerdy neurodivergent folks need after receiving their late diagnoses.