A late diagnosis explains your past - Understanding yourself shapes your future

In today’s world, where ADHD and autism are openly spoken about across TV, radio, podcasts and every corner of the media, more and more adults in their forties, fifties and sixties are starting to realise that the way they have felt their whole lives might actually have a name. Society might be more accepting than it used to be, but the support has still not caught up. Getting an NHS assessment feels impossible, with waiting lists stretching into years and private assessments costing a fortune, so most people end up doing what everyone else is doing and turn to social media, online quizzes, friends or even AI to try to match years of confusion with a diagnosis. I was one of them, and I did not find out I had ADHD until my late fifties.

This gap in support is exactly why my sister Suzanne began creating the Get You Get Others profiling system. She built it through her work as a therapist and also the turmoil she was dealing with at home with her own daughter’s mental health struggles. Families were coming to her exhausted after trying to hold everything together, and she could clearly see that what they didn’t need was more clinical language but something human, simple and genuinely helpful. At the time neither of us realised how many adults would eventually see themselves in the profiling, including me.

Before I knew I had ADHD, I had already begun to understand myself clearly through the profiling. It showed me why I reacted the way I did, why I pushed myself so hard, why I talked too much when I felt comfortable and said very little when I didn’t, and why I had always felt slightly out of sync with the world around me. So, when my diagnosis finally came in my late fifties, I was not shocked as it simply confirmed what Get You Get Others had already uncovered. A late diagnosis may explain your past but understanding yourself is what shapes your future.

I spent twenty-five years working in education and safeguarding, supporting children, families and schools through incredibly tough moments, and everywhere I looked I saw the same patterns Suzanne was seeing in her therapy work. Children who looked fine on the surface but were exhausted inside, teenagers who masked all day and fell apart the moment they got home, parents who held everything together for everyone else but quietly lost themselves underneath it all. Back then none of it was framed as neurodiversity, but looking back now it is obvious that many people were carrying traits that no one recognised or named.

Suzanne saw the same thing unfolding in her own home when her daughter reached crisis point. She searched for the kind of guidance she gave other families but found very little support for her own. Her daughter was eventually diagnosed with ADHD, but the diagnosis came without direction or tools for the family as a whole, even though every person in the house was affected. That was when Suzanne began developing Get You Get Others, using everything she had learned personally, in therapy rooms, and through conversations with families. She didn’t want it to be clinical or complex; it was created so ordinary people could finally make sense of themselves in a way that was easy to understand and genuinely life changing.

Get You Get Others helps people recognise their traits, strengths and challenges and understand the reasons they react the way they do. It covers communication styles, relationship issues, emotional needs, coping strategies and stress responses in a way that makes sense to people who have spent years thinking they were the problem. It is simple enough to understand straight away and powerful enough to shift patterns that have been there for years, and for many adults it is the first thing that has ever made their behaviour feel understandable rather than confusing or embarrassing.

Most adults who receive a late diagnosis do not struggle with the label itself. They struggle with everything that comes afterwards. You are given a name for what you have lived with, but you are not given a way forward. You are not told how to make sense of your emotions or your decisions, why certain relationships drained you, why you avoided conflict or why work burnt you out so quickly. You are handed information but very little of it feels connected to your real life, so you lie awake at night replaying everything and trying to work out what was actually you and what was your brain trying to cope the only way it knew how.

Get You Get Others gives people the piece that the system leaves out. It explains why your reactions make sense, why you shut down or overtalk, why you panic when plans change and why you burn out so easily. It shows you what you need when you are overwhelmed, how you communicate, how you love, how you handle conflict and what you need from the people around you, so life stops feeling so heavy. It helps you recognise the person you have always been under all the masking and the second guessing.

This is why we are about to launch the Get You Get Others online community. It is a safe place for adults who want support that feels real and human rather than clinical or overwhelming. It is somewhere you can talk, laugh, cry, learn and listen to other people who are figuring out the same things. It is not just another social media group where people say, ‘yes that is me’. This is where you get practical tools you can use immediately, live conversations where nothing is off limits, workshops where you can work through real life situations and retreats that give you permission to pause and put yourself first for once.

It is a warm and honest space where you are understood and accepted for exactly who you are without having to explain yourself again and again. You are not behind, and you are not broken. You are someone who has survived a lifetime without the answers you deserved, and now that you finally have them you do not have to work out the rest on your own. We are right here with you.

Written by Michelle Bush