When we talk about Autism and ADHD, we often treat the diagnosis as an isolated, individual event. We look at a child or an adult in a vacuum and attempt to map their traits. If they struggle with emotional regulation, social connection, or sensory overwhelm, popular psychological narratives – such as those championing trauma-causation models – frequently tell us to look backward into childhood to find a psychological “fracture” or an environmental cause.
But the hard data tells a completely different biological story.
A landmark study published in JAMA Psychiatry, which analysed health data from over 2 million individuals across five countries, concluded that 80% to 90% of the variance in autism traits across a population is directly driven by inherited genetic factors. Similarly, massive global meta-analyses from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium place the heritability of ADHD between 74% and 80%.
Neurodivergence is not a response to trauma – it is a highly heritable, biological blueprint.
When I received my own late diagnosis, I operated on the standard, flat stereotypes: I thought autism meant a ‘Rain Man’ level of isolation, and ADHD meant an inability to sit still. My formal diagnosis forced me to look at my own biology, I had to look backward. If these traits are up to 90% heritable, I didn’t develop them in isolation. I inherited them.
Looking back at my childhood through this clinical lens completely reframed my understanding of my parents, moving me away from childhood blame and toward a profound structural empathy.
The Predictability of Routine and Sensory Overwhelm
Growing up, my parents always felt profoundly different from the parents of other children. At the time, I rationalised their differences through culture and geography: my father was from a coastal village in Egypt, and my mother was from a small village in the former German Democratic Republic. But the traits were there, hiding in plain sight.
Every year, we spent months in my father’s village by the Mediterranean. For weeks on end, our meals never varied: steamed onions and tomatoes for lunch, flatbread and cheese for dinner. To an outsider, it looked like a cultural quirk or a strict diet. Through a neurodivergent lens, this is a classic autistic trait known as “same-fooding” (relying on an identical, predictable sensory profile to eliminate choice fatigue and regulate the nervous system). Back home, if my brother or I expressed a liking for a specific food, my parents wouldn’t just buy it; they would purchase it in nuclear-war-style reserves. It wasn’t hoarding, they wanted to support us in the same way they supported their need for absolute predictability.
The sensory markers were equally clear. My mother was intensely sensitive to auditory input, constantly policing the volume of her environment to avoid becoming overwhelmed by noise. Yet, her coping mechanisms mirrored my own. I watched her sit entirely still, fully engulfed in the high-arousal excitement of the daily tabloids, completely unresponsive to the world around her. What I used to view as emotional unavailability, I now recognise as hyperfocus, an intense cognitive monologue that acts as both a necessary neurological break and a compulsion.
Masking and the Cost of Dysregulation
Together, my parents built a flourishing business, combining my father’s intense focus on hyper-systematising what worked elsewhere with my mother’s public-facing role. But her social interaction was entirely algorithmic. She relied on a series of carefully memorised, “canned” phrases, delivered with such practiced warmth that customers never realised they were hearing a script. It was a flawless execution of social masking.
But masking has a massive energy tax. When you spend all day forcing a neurodivergent nervous system to comply with a neurotypical world, the cost is paid at home.
The social isolation of our family wasn’t accidental. My parents were genuinely startled whenever the phone rang, protecting their home as a sensory sanctuary. And when the pressure became too high, the mask slipped. My childhood environment was often highly punitive and rigid. My school reports frequently branded me an absent-minded professor or a “scatterbrain” (Schusselkopf) because I consistently failed at basic executive functioning tasks, like remembering materials for class. In our home, failing to meet perfection or disrupting the fragile family structure was met with sudden, explosive meltdowns from my father.
For years, I viewed these outbursts through the lens of standard relational anger. Today, as a therapist, I see them as profound nervous system dysregulation. My father lived by incredibly rigid, unyielding rules to keep his world secure. When those rules were threatened, his nervous system went into an involuntary fight-or-flight collapse. Later in life, when things became tough, he found immense relief in the rigid, predictable structure of religious practice (making use of the five daily prayers as an external regulator for his internal world).
From Blame to Intergenerational Empathy
Initially, I blamed my parents for my own social awkwardness, my intense special interests, and my tendency to use work and study as a hyper-focused escape hatch. I thought their parenting had broken my ability to connect.
The genetic data cured me of that misconception.
My parents didn’t break me, they were navigating the exact same intense, unmasked, dopamine-starved reality that I was born with. They did so in a world that gave them zero vocabulary, zero grace, and zero tools. Their desperate insistence that my brother and I conform – forcing corrections on everything from left-handedness to eccentric clothing – wasn’t born out of cruelty. I know now that it was born out of an intense, traumatised fear of what happens to people who are (visibly) different.
At a recent high school reunion, I was reminded of how little the general public still understands about neurodivergence. My parents never fit in, and consequently, neither did I. But looking backward through the lens of 80% heritability allows me to drop the old narratives of childhood trauma and replace them with profound realisations. It allows me to see two neurodivergent individuals who used every ounce of their limited energy to build a functional life in a world that wasn’t built for them. We have the tools and the language to unmask today – they simply had to survive.