What If the Thing Your Family Passed Down Wasn't the Wound, What If It Was the Wiring?

Ida Jeltova • August 8, 2026

Clients and therapists alike keep finding themselves in the overlap between undiagnosed autism, ADHD, OCD, and what looks like narcissistic parenting. What our families passed down may be wiring, and the generational trauma may be what came of nobody naming it.

A version of this conversation happens in my office almost every week. And it almost always arrives at the same question: was my parent narcissistic, or was my parent neurodivergent, autistic, ADHD, OCD, and nobody ever knew?

A client sits down and describes a parent who had to be right. Not occasionally, structurally. Arguments that started over something small and ended two hours later with a citation and a wounded silence. A parent who kept a running ledger of what had been given and what was owed, who could tell you exactly how much your brother's wedding cost relative to yours. A parent who was rigid, exacting, and impossible to please at home, and then warm, gracious, almost deferential with the neighbors, the pastor, the checkout clerk.

And then the client says the word they found online: narcissist.

I understand why. That vocabulary went mainstream for a reason: it named something real for many people who had been told for decades that nothing was wrong. It gave language to a private experience. That matters, and I don't want to take it away from anyone it fits.

But it doesn't fit everyone. And in a striking number of these cases, what the adult child is describing is not a personality disorder. It's an undiagnosed neurodivergent parent, most often autism, ADHD, OCD, or some combination, running a nervous system that nobody ever explained to them, in an era when nobody was looking.

The behaviors overlap almost perfectly. The engines underneath them do not.

The same behavior, two completely different origins

"They had to win the argument, even if it cost them the relationship."

The narcissistic version: being wrong is an injury to a fragile self-image. The argument isn't about the facts; it's about who is diminished at the end. You have to lose for them to be okay.

The neurodivergent version: accuracy is not experienced as a social act at all. To many autistic adults, correcting the record is closer to a courtesy than an attack, the same impulse that makes you tell a stranger their shoelace is untied. The relational cost isn't being weighed or accepted; it frequently doesn't register. If you ask this parent afterward what the fight was about, they will tell you about the fact. They will not be able to tell you what your face was doing.

"Everything was transactional. They were obsessed with fairness."

The narcissistic version: the ledger is leverage. It's kept in order to be invoked, and it always balances in their favor. Fairness applies to them; it does not apply to you.

The neurodivergent version: fairness is a moral operating system, and it exists because ambiguity is unbearable. Rules are legible. Vibes are not. This is the parent who gave each child an identical amount of dollars and could not comprehend why one of them was still upset, and who, crucially, applies the same rigid standard to themselves, often to their own detriment. They'll drive back to a store to return four cents of incorrect change. Narcissistic ledgers are asymmetrical. Neurodivergent ones are ruthlessly, uncomfortably symmetrical.

"They were tyrants at home and charming to everyone else."

This is the one that convinces people. And it's the one I'd urge the most caution about, because it has two very different explanations.

The narcissistic version: image management. The public self is the product; the family sees the maintenance costs. Charm is deployed strategically, upward toward status, contempt downward toward anyone who can't do anything for them.

The neurodivergent version: masking. Holding a socially acceptable performance together for eight hours is genuinely, physiologically expensive, and the bill comes due somewhere. Home is where the mask comes off, and what's underneath is not a hidden true self but an exhausted, dysregulated one. Note the tell: the narcissistic parent's charm is calibrated to audience value. The masking parent is often just as agreeable to the mail carrier as to the boss, because the mask isn't strategic; it's automatic.

"I was an extension of them. They never saw me as a separate person."

This is where the two look most alike from the inside, and where the difference matters most.

The narcissistic version: you exist as a mirror. Your achievements are their supply; your independence is a betrayal.

The neurodivergent version is stranger and sadder. Autistic cognition tends to be monotropic; attention runs deep and narrow rather than wide and shallow. A beloved child can become the tunnel. That is not ego; it's the shape of the attention itself. Add a genuinely harder time intuiting that another person has a fully separate interior world, and you get a parent who managed your life with enormous intensity while having very little idea what it was like to be you. Not because you didn't matter. Because the signal was hard to read and nobody ever told them it was supposed to be difficult.

"Nothing was ever good enough. They catastrophized constantly."

The narcissistic version: your performance reflects on them, so it must be flawless.

The neurodivergent version is often untreated OCD or anxiety that has latched onto the child as its content. The intrusive thought- what if she fails, what if he gets left behind, what if this is the mistake that ruins everything- is not a judgment of you. It's a compulsion loop being run at you. The checking of homework, the interrogation about friendships, the fear that you're missing an opportunity every other child is getting: that's a parent trying to make an unbearable uncertainty stop. It reads to a child as you are not enough. It is more often I cannot tolerate not knowing you'll be okay.

The diagnostic tell: what happens when you tell them it hurt

If you want one distinguishing question, it's this one.

Tell a narcissistic parent that something they did hurt you, and the injury becomes theirs. You get denial, reversal, escalation, a counter-grievance, a two-week silence. The information cannot be metabolized because accepting it costs too much.

Tell a neurodivergent parent the same thing, and you typically get bewilderment, genuine, sometimes distressed confusion. Then, very often, an attempt to fix it that is clumsy, over-literal, and weirdly earnest. They may ask you to write it down. They may over-apply the correction for months. They may ask the same clarifying question four times. The response is often worse in the moment and better over time because the information actually lands.

One is a defended self. The other is a slow processor.

The harder recognition: it's usually in you, too

There's a moment I've come to expect in this work. A client finishes laying out their parent's pattern, the ledger, the rigidity, the interrogations about homework, and then stops. Goes quiet. And says some version of: I do that. I checked my daughter's grade portal four times yesterday.

This is not a coincidence, and it shouldn't be a surprise. Autism and ADHD are among the more heritable traits we know of. If you are recognizing this constellation in a parent, the base rates alone say to look in the mirror, and the reason you never did is that when a trait is ambient in a family, it's invisible. It doesn't look like a neurotype. It looks like how people are.

The recognition rarely arrives as the thing people fear: that I have become my mother. It's usually stranger and more specific: the same mechanism running with different content. You don't check homework, but you reread a sent email nine times. You don't demand that every child get an identical dollar amount, but you cannot let go of an unfairness that everyone else forgot by Tuesday. You don't lecture about facts at the dinner table, but you feel a small physical pressure behind your sternum when someone is wrong about something, and you decide, again, not to say it.

And this is the actual leverage point on the thing we've been calling generational trauma. In these families, what was often transmitted wasn't primarily the wound. It was the neurotype, plus the total absence of a name for it. The trauma was the compounding interest on being unnamed: a parent white-knuckling a nervous system nobody explained, raising a child with a similar nervous system, both of them concluding that the difficulty was a character problem.

If you're the parent reading this

Some of you did not come to this article about your mother. You came across your kid and found yourself in the wrong column of the table above.

I want to be careful here because you are the reader most likely to close the tab in shame, and shame is the least useful thing that could happen next.

Here is what I actually see in these cases. A parent whose brain runs deep and narrow, who loves a child with an intensity that has nowhere to go but management. Who tracks the grades, the friendships, the missed opportunity every other family seems to have caught, because not knowing whether the child will be okay produces a physical distress that has to be discharged somehow. Who has read the parenting books and executed them precisely, and cannot understand why this particular child keeps reacting as though something is wrong. Who was, very often, raised by someone with the same wiring and no name for it either.

That is not a character defect, nor is it a personality disorder. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it is built to do, aimed at the person you love most.

You cannot out-insight your own wiring. That isn't the goal, and any therapy that promises it is selling you something. But you can do the one thing your own parent almost certainly could not, which is narrate it out loud to the person on the receiving end:

I need things to be predictable, and that's about my brain, not about you.
I'm asking about your test again because I'm anxious, not because I think you'll fail.
I got loud about that fact, and the fact didn't matter; I'm sorry.

That's the intervention. One sentence, offered a generation earlier, would have rewritten a great deal of what brings people into my office.

And to say the obvious: it is not too late. I have watched this shift in families with teenagers, with adult children, with a parent in their sixties and a daughter in her thirties. The window is wider than the internet suggests.

What this work actually looks like

The standard approach to a "difficult parent"- excavating childhood wounds, grief work, reparenting the inner child- is appropriate for some families and largely beside the point for these. There is usually no buried trauma driving the behavior. There is a nervous system managing overwhelm, and a person who has never been given accurate information about it.

So the work is built differently.

The first two or three sessions are assessment and mapping, not history-taking for its own sake. What is the actual mechanism here: monotropic focus, uncertainty intolerance, sensory load, a masking debt that comes due at 6 p.m.? Which of these is producing the behavior your family is reacting to? This is also where we determine whether formal evaluation would be useful, and whether something other than neurodivergence is in play, including the possibility that a parent was in fact cruel.

Weeks two through eight usually focus on psychoeducation and regulation. Direct, explicit, unsentimental. Most of my neurodivergent clients respond far better to a clear causal explanation than to emotional exploration, and are startled by how much changes when they finally have one. Alongside it: sensory and cognitive load management, so that the parent's regulation no longer depends on the child behaving a certain way.

From there, the work usually splits into three strands, depending on what the assessment found. Exposure-and-response-prevention principles applied to child-focused obsessions, with the goal of tolerating uncertainty about a child's outcomes rather than resolving it. Explicit, non-shaming instruction in perspective-taking, taught as a skill rather than delivered as a moral correction. And script-building: concrete, rehearsed language for the moments that reliably go wrong, because low-ambiguity beats improvisation for most of the people I work with.

What progress looks like is worth naming, because it is not what people expect. There is rarely a breakthrough session. There is a parent who, four months in, notices the urge to check the portal and doesn't, and mentions it in passing, as though it were nothing. Change here is concrete, cumulative, and frequently invisible to the person making it.

I also do this work with adult children who are not in contact with the parent in question, and with couples where one partner is neurodivergent, and the fight has been misdiagnosed for a decade.

When it isn't neurodivergence

I want to be exact, because this framing gets misused , sometimes by the parent who found it first.

None of this makes the harm smaller. A child who grew up feeling unseen, managed, and never quite adequate had that experience regardless of what generated it. Explanation is not repair, and understanding a parent obligates you to nothing, not reconciliation, not contact, not forgiveness on anyone's timeline but your own.

Neurodivergence is not a defense against cruelty. Autistic and ADHD parents are as capable of contempt, rage, and genuine abuse as anyone else. "I didn't mean it that way" stops being meaningful when someone has been told the impact a hundred times and changed nothing. Intent explains; it doesn't excuse.

Both can be true. Neurodivergence and narcissistic personality structure co-occur at ordinary rates. A parent can be autistic and cruel. The one does not rule out the other, and part of my job is to tell you honestly which one I think I'm looking at.

Who this work is not a fit for

I'd rather say this plainly than have you find out after an intake.

This is probably not the right practice if you're looking for someone to confirm a verdict you've already reached about a family member. It's not a fit if you want a diagnosis in a single visit; adult evaluation for autism, ADHD, or OCD requires a developmental history and more time than that. And it isn't the right setting for someone in acute crisis who needs a higher level of care; I'm glad to help you find the right one.

It tends to be a strong fit for adults who suspect their own neurodivergence and have gone decades without anyone naming it, for parents who recognized themselves somewhere in this article, and for high-functioning people whose difficulties have always been read by others and by themselves as character rather than wiring.

Working together

Greatest Moments Therapy is a group practice built around this specialty rather than one that added it to a list. I'm a licensed psychologist in New York and New Jersey with APIT authorization to provide telepsychology in PSYPACT participating states, 40-plus in total, and I supervise every clinician here on this work.

Being a group practice is the point, not a footnote. Specialty practices are usually one person with a long waitlist, which means the adults who most need this end up with whoever has an opening. Here, the intake conversation is a matching conversation: which clinician fits the presenting problem, the schedule, and the fee, with the same model and the same supervision behind all of them.

On fees and insurance. We're out-of-network, and for this work, that's a deliberate choice rather than an inconvenience. Insurance requires assigning a billable diagnosis, often before anyone knows what's actually going on, and a lot of accomplished adults exploring whether they're autistic would prefer not to have a code entered in their permanent record while the question is still open. Out-of-network practice also means sessions run as long as the work requires, rather than as long as a panel will authorize, and that treatment is determined by clinical judgment rather than medical-necessity criteria. We provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement and will talk fees directly at the consultation.

A 20-minute consultation is the usual starting point. It is enough to describe what's happening, hear how we'd approach it, and get an honest answer about whether this practice is the right fit and which clinician it should be. drj@jeltova.com

If you're not ready for that: we've put together a one-page set of scripts for neurodivergent parents. The actual sentences to use when your child says something you weren't expecting, when you notice yourself managing instead of listening, and when you need to repair something after the fact. See this entry

Frequently asked questions

Can a parent be both autistic and narcissistic?

Yes. Neurodivergence and narcissistic personality structure co-occur at roughly ordinary rates, and one never rules out the other. Autism, ADHD, and OCD explain a great deal about how a parent behaves without saying anything about whether that parent was also contemptuous, cruel, or abusive. If someone has been repeatedly told about the impact of their behavior and has changed nothing, the neurotype is no longer the relevant explanation.

How do I know if my parent is autistic or just difficult?

The most useful distinction isn't the behavior itself but what happens when you name its effect. A defended, image-driven parent tends to turn your hurt into their injury — denial, reversal, a counter-grievance. An undiagnosed neurodivergent parent is more often bewildered, then clumsily and over-literally corrective, and sometimes measurably different a year later. Consistency also matters: neurodivergent traits are pervasive, lifelong, and not calibrated to a person's social usefulness.

Does calling it neurodivergence excuse the harm?

No. Explanation and absolution are different things. A child who grew up feeling unseen, managed, and never adequate had that experience regardless of what produced it, and understanding a parent's neurology obligates you to nothing.

Is generational trauma always trauma?

Not always, and this is the central argument of this piece. In many families, what actually passed from generation to generation was a heritable neurotype combined with the total absence of a name for it — a parent white-knuckling a nervous system nobody explained, raising a child with a similar one, both concluding the difficulty was a character flaw. The harm is real. Its origin is often not what people assume.

What does therapy look like if my parent is neurodivergent rather than narcissistic?

The approaches diverge substantially. Trauma-excavation and inner-child work, appropriate for some families, is frequently beside the point here. What tends to move the needle is direct psychoeducation, ERP-style work on tolerating uncertainty about a child's outcomes, explicit, non-shaming instruction in perspective-taking, sensory and cognitive load management, and concrete, rehearsed scripts rather than emotional insight. The section above walks through how that unfolds.

Will I work with you, or with another clinician?

Either, depending on fit. Greatest Moments Therapy is a group practice, and the consultation is partly a matching conversation — which clinician suits the presenting problem, the schedule, and the fee. Every clinician here is trained in the model described above and supervised by me in this specialty, so the approach doesn't change depending on who you see. In practice, it also means you're unlikely to be told that the next opening is in five months.

Do you take insurance?

We're out of network. We provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement, and we're happy to explain why private pay is often the better structure for this specific work — particularly for adults who don't want a diagnostic code on file while they're still figuring out the question.

I don't live in New York or New Jersey. Can we still work together?

Possibly. In addition to my NY and NJ licenses, I hold APIT authorization under PSYPACT, which allows telepsychology with clients located in participating states; our clinicians' licensure varies. Mention where you're located when you reach out and we'll confirm what's available.

Can I diagnose my parent or myself from an article like this?

No, and please don't try. This is a second hypothesis for people who only ever had one, not an assessment. Formal evaluation of autism, ADHD, or OCD in adults requires a qualified clinician and a developmental history.

About the author

Ida Jeltova, PhD, is a licensed psychologist (New York and New Jersey) and the founder and clinical director of Greatest Moments Therapy, a group practice specializing in neurodivergence and trauma. Her clinical work focuses on the intersection of the two — undiagnosed autism, ADHD, and OCD in adults, neurodivergent parenting, and the family patterns that get handed down when nobody had language for what was happening. She trains and supervises the practice's clinicians in this work, holds APIT authorization under PSYPACT, and sees clients across participating states by telehealth.

This article is educational and is not a substitute for individual assessment or treatment.

What the child experienced	If it's narcissism	If it's neurodivergence
What the child experienced	Being wrong injures a fragile self-image; you must lose for them to be okay	Accuracy isn't experienced as a social act; the relational cost never registers
Kept a ledger; obsessed with fairness	The ledger is leverage and always balances in their favor	Fairness is a rule system that makes ambiguity survivable, applied just as rigidly to themselves
Strict at home, charming in public	Image management; charm is calibrated to who's worth impressing	Masking; the performance is expensive, and the bill comes due at home, with everyone
Never saw you as a separate person	You exist as a mirror and a source of supply	Monotropic attention plus genuine difficulty reading another interior world
Nothing was ever good enough	Your performance reflects on them, so it must be flawless	Anxiety or OCD that latched onto you as its content; I can't tolerate not knowing you'll be okay
When you said they hurt you	The injury becomes theirs: denial, reversal, counter-grievance	Bewilderment, then clumsy over-literal repair, worse in the moment, better over time