Workplace Gaslighting and Neurodivergent Brains

What workplace gaslighting is, and why it is rarely intentional

Hello, hello everybody. We are back after a long break because of craziness going on and a lot of growth around here. I’m Danielle Ralston, founder and CEO of ND OutLoud, ND Hive, Capacity Works, and danielleralston.com. Since I’ve been here last, I also published a book, Hidden in Plain Sight, which is driving how invisible disabilities are treated in the workplace, and that is a huge center of our conversation today. Joining me, I have Jamie. Jamie DeMico is part of my team, and he’s also the founder of Fortify Leadership Coaching and Training, where he coaches current and future business leaders on improving workplace performance and navigating their career paths. He is a neurodivergent coach here on my team, going through ND Coaching Academy, and helping us explore supporting people in the workplace, not just around neurodivergence but with universal workplace design. Right now we want to talk about gaslighting in the workplace for neurodivergent professionals, because I don’t know how many times I’ve had conversations with my clients, and I’m sure Jamie has had a bazillion conversations with his, about how they feel after being gaslit in the workplace.

It’s a very interesting topic, Jamie said, because it’s a fairly new term, and it happens often inadvertently. I don’t think people set out with the purpose to gaslight. For those who are not familiar, the term gaslighting comes from a movie called Gaslight, an old black and white movie from the 1940s, where the people around a woman told her that her entire existence was not as she understood it to be. They just kept lying to her, telling her that whatever she perceived was wrong, her memories were wrong. It’s considered a form of abuse, because abusers tend to be great at it. But in the workplace, that is absolutely not the case with what we’re talking about.

It’s very rarely intentional. It’s a mismatch in processing styles between an employee and a manager or other employees on the team. It’s a mismatch in understanding of what’s happening in an environment. So we want to make sure we’re not blaming managers, leaders, CEOs, anybody. We’re not blaming anybody, but it is a reality in the workplace.

It very much stems from the fact that neurodivergent brains and neurotypical brains don’t process the same way. As a result, we pick up on different things. We understand things differently. Our perception of what’s going on around us, and our needs, can be very different. A neurotypical colleague or boss may say, “What? That wasn’t offensive, they were just saying XYZ.” And I understand where that comes from. I have a tendency to want to do that myself, to correct somebody: “Oh no, that’s not what they were doing at all.” I have vivid memories of doing that to family members. “No, that’s not what he meant. Why would you be upset by that?” Well, guess what? Everybody has the right to feel their emotions.

Pattern recognition: why neurodivergent brains catch what others miss

Absolutely, and everybody processes differently. There’s an underlying mechanism in neurodivergent brains that most neurotypical managers don’t understand. Our pattern recognition is, without a doubt, way higher than a neurotypical’s. Which means even something that you as a neurotypical don’t detect, like: we had four meetings this week, and three of them all said something different, but the end goal was always the same. So you think everything was the same. A neurodivergent person looks at that and says, no, these were four separate meetings, we all said something different. Yes, the goal was the same at the end, but how we get there is completely different, and now you’ve messed everything up. How do I fix this?

Meanwhile, our neurodivergent audience is sitting here nodding their heads, but the neurotypical audience, of which we have a good amount, is listening to this saying, “Wait a minute, why would that happen?” So Danielle, you mentioned pattern recognition, but maybe you could talk more about the differences in brains and how that shows up in practical ways.

How it shows up in practical ways: most software developers, most product managers and production managers tend to be neurodivergent. Why? Because we can see this piece that happened over here six months ago and this piece that happened two minutes ago, automatically connect them together, and go, “Oh, this is XYZ. This is how it needs to happen most efficiently, or for the least cost.” Neurotypicals are seeing the thing that’s in front of them right now. Not the 9,000 pieces of information back here that have been happening, that are affecting the outcome now.

Rejection sensitivity and knowing your own communication patterns

I would add to that the rejection sensitivity dysphoria, Jamie said. People who are neurodivergent have a much stronger reaction to anything that is perceived as rejection, such as, “Hey, I know you’re responding to something I said, but I’d like to move on now.” I remember the first time a boss said that to me in a company-wide meeting, “I’d like to move on from the subject,” while I was kind of pounding the table about a topic. I couldn’t have been more offended. In reality, I may have been overdoing it on that topic. But in the moment, it just felt like the worst thing that could have possibly happened to me: he didn’t want to hear what I had to say. So it’s very important, on both sides, for people who are neurodivergent to put a name to it and say, “Oh, I’m experiencing RSD right now. That may not be the slight I take it as.” Whereas those who are neurotypical may want to say, “Hey, with this person, I do have to be a little more careful about how I word this.”

The other part of that: as neurodivergent people, and I’m definitely pointing at myself here, and Jamie is also neurodivergent, we really need to understand our own patterns of communication. Why? It’s not because you have to mask and cover them up, because that’s going to cause its own issues, and we’re not diving into that today. But when you recognize your own pattern, you can then explain that pattern to somebody else.

I once explained that to a boss of mine, Jamie said. I explained, I tend to pick up on vibes. If there’s something wrong, I know it. And he was trying to get a message across to me. So what did he do? He didn’t speak to me for about three days, until I walked into his office and said, “What the hell is going on here?” He said, “Ah, I was hoping you would pick up on that.”

That’s part of our pattern recognition. That’s one of those things we do notice. But we also notice, and this is where the gaslighting comes in a lot of the time, when an organization has a stated process but the actual behaviors diverge from that process. That’s going to happen, because things change but nobody updates the SOP, nobody updates the process, new software gets added, new employees get added. A neurodivergent employee is going to detect every gap, every problem, and flag it, and want to talk about it, and bring it to somebody’s attention.

How repeated dismissal erodes confidence and performance

And the talking about it is where it becomes an issue, right? Because many people are going to view the same things as not an issue. “Hey, this isn’t a big deal.” That’s where it starts to build. Nobody reacts negatively the first time they’re told, “Hey, that’s not a big deal.” It’s that it accumulates. The issue with gaslighting is that you eventually start questioning your own sense of reality. When you’re told often enough, “That’s not a big deal. No, they didn’t mean anything by it. Yeah, it’s different, but I don’t know why you thought it was different, because it was close enough to the same,” that’s when it starts having a personal effect. More often than not, that person is going to lose confidence in themselves. They’re going to become unhappy, more passive, and they may start checking out and become far less engaged.

And there is an operational cost when that happens, because neurodivergent employees, when allowed to be in good environments, become some of the highest-performing employees 99 percent of the time. But when things become too ambiguous, there are too many meetings, over-documenting or under-documenting happens, that cycle starts to reinforce itself, and the cognitive load on that neurodivergent employee increases and increases. They get exhausted. They start underperforming. This is when things like PIPs come up. This is when you hear that contradiction from them: “No, this is what’s happening, and this is how it should be,” while the management team says, “No, all of these changes are happening.” And they say, “But there’s no path from A to B. What’s going on?” And managers start to dismiss that employee because they seem too emotionally tied to whatever is going on.

I do want to state that this isn’t opinion-based, Jamie added. There is trauma research that backs up the fact that gaslighting, being in a position where you’re questioning your reality, has a traumatic effect on the brain, which can be pretty severe for some people. Many times those who are neurodivergent are more sensitive, even though they may not appear that way from the outside. Especially autistic brains, in the sense that people with ADHD tend to wear a lot of things on their sleeve, but autistic brains can often stuff those emotions down, and again, it builds up over time. There’s some excellent research out there on general gaslighting, but this topic is not particularly well researched in the neurodivergent area, like most topics at this point. As we move forward, there’s a whole lot of what we should do about it that I’m still learning myself. I’m still learning how to work with my brain, let alone that of others.

Why conventional advice underperforms for neurodivergent employees

So let’s talk about why conventional advice underperforms for a neurodivergent person, because I think understanding the why matters. The wisdom that’s already out there from psychologists and psychiatrists wasn’t built for this, because again, this isn’t a well-researched topic in the neurodivergent world. We hear things like, “Managers have been taught to tell their employees to build resilience.” But building resilience assumes that person has regulatory capacity. A neurodivergent person may not have the capacity in that moment to regulate in order to build resilience, because that regulation requires growth.

“Have a direct conversation with your manager.” But then you’re bringing in RSD and executive dysfunction issues, and it’s only really workable in an environment where there is psychological safety. Studies say that less than 10 percent of employees feel safe in their work environments. And that’s the general population. We need to do better than that, for sure.

And “manage your own stress.” Well, when the work environment is causing the stress, how do you manage it when you’re in that stress environment eight to ten hours a day? The pattern I see is that a lot of wellness systems inside companies treat workplace gaslighting as a communication issue, and not a cognitive accessibility issue. Is there some communication issue there? Absolutely. But because of cognitive understanding, not because somebody is refusing to communicate.

Can you explain the difference between cognition and communication here? Communication is what you say and how you say it. Somebody who is having cognitive difficulties may literally not be hearing the words correctly, because they have a preconceived pattern that you’re supposed to be following in their head, and they’re stuck in that pattern and unable to cognitively process the actual words being said. Or they’re stressed out, which means they’re only catching a fraction of the words in a sentence. A lot of people who are neurodivergent also have auditory processing disorders, or visual-spatial disorders, or they’re hyperverbal but they need to see it in writing, not just have somebody speak it to them. And a manager is handing everything over in writing, or handing everything over verbally, and it’s the opposite of what somebody needs.

So there are environmental and communication factors that play into all of this because of how a neurodivergent mind is functioning. Absolutely.

Practical interventions: what you can do for yourself

So let’s get to the practical interventions for an employee. As an employee, you can intervene on your own behalf in these situations. Ask for things in writing. Even if writing isn’t your best communication style, ask for it in writing. Why? You can take that writing and put it into AI, whatever you’re allowed to use for work, and have it analyze what was said and restate it for you. You also get more time to process when it’s in writing. You can read it out loud to yourself if you need it said verbally. Record yourself saying it so you can play the recording back if that’s what you need. Those are easy things you can do for yourself.

Identify a trusted colleague or external advisor who can help you corroborate what you read and help you make sense of it. That’s where having an ND coach who is a career and leadership coach can absolutely help, because we translate corporate worlds a lot. I translate the corporate world for my clients a whole lot.

And conserve your cognitive bandwidth. That goes very deeply into protecting your dopamine levels, Jamie said. Preserving your cognitive bandwidth is something most people really struggle with, no matter who you are, because we are in a society that rewards being in the rat race, being on the hamster wheel, running and running, and those are the people we uphold as successful. I can tell you, the people who get away and allow their brains to recharge are the ones who ultimately do the best. It’s just like any other muscle. Back in the day when you played sports, it was day after day: hit the weights, work harder. Then they started realizing your muscles actually need downtime to repair themselves in order to get stronger. You can actually make yourself physically weaker by working out too often. It’s the same thing for your brain.

Rest, silence, and using AI to close communication gaps

We need rest. And whether you’re spiritual or not, the Bible says on the seventh day you rest. Your body needs at least a day of rest. Our society, in the US, in the modern world, is not built to actually take a day of rest. And what does a day of rest look like? Walk away from the computer. Don’t go home from work and then do a second job or play video games all night. I know there’s a lot of dopamine attached to that for many of us, but your eyes and your body need a break from that.

Silence. Silence is good for your brain. It drives some of us insane. I don’t handle silence well, I’m very honest about this. But I still need a break, and I have to have a silence break for at least 15 to 20 minutes a day to give my brain a rest. When I do that, plus physical movement, I’m able to operate at a much higher level. It only takes 15 to 20 minutes.

The other thing that’s really easy is fixing your communication gaps. How? Use AI. Right now that is one of the easiest tools you have. Before you send that email or that chat message, put it through AI. Does this tone sound good? Does it sound positive? Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Whatever the thing is that you’ve been criticized for, tell AI you’re looking to fix that issue with communication. There are very few workplaces that aren’t letting you use one of the million AI tools out there. Those are really practical things you can do to fix the communication gap without masking, because that’s a really important skill: not masking your own communication style, but letting AI polish the delivery. You’re going to fix a lot of issues for yourself.

I’m very happy you’re bringing these up, Jamie said, because one of the things that bothers me as somebody who’s neurodivergent is the attitude that the world has to adjust to us. We have to take care of ourselves first. As much as we don’t want to admit it, we are a minority, and that means there is a responsibility on our end to work with the world around us. It is certainly important for people to become more educated on neurodivergence, so we can take these conversations out of the shadows and start understanding how we work better with each other. Underneath it all, one of my rules is treat everybody with respect and dignity, and one of the best ways of doing that is learning more about them, no matter how different they are.

What leaders and managers can do

But I don’t want to go too far without talking about what leaders and managers can do to assist people they suspect may be neurodivergent. I want to start with an anecdote, Jamie said. In the coaching I do, I am not a therapist, therefore I cannot diagnose. I’m a coach. But we can sort of smell our own along the way, and I have enough education to pick up on the signs. So what happens when you’re working with somebody you suspect is neurodivergent? Instead of asking them, “Do you have ADHD? Are you on the autism spectrum?”, you can start moving into strategies that work for people who are ADHD and autistic. Because let’s be honest, you don’t need a diagnosis to know you have ADHD, and somebody doesn’t need to tell you they have ADHD for you to recognize it if you’re informed on the topic. Starting point number one: if you suspect it, start using some of these strategies and see how they work.

Even if you don’t suspect it, every employee deserves to operate at their most effective. And every employee, neurotypical or neurodivergent, has their own things that will make them operate the best they possibly can. What is that? Get curious. That is the number one thing you can do as a manager: get curious about every person under you and ask what will make them more effective in their position. End of story.

Yes, and make sure there is enough goodwill that they will actually tell you. That’s not coming at them with, “Well, I noticed you’re not doing great at this, how can we fix it?” No. “Hey, I want to empower you to be better at your position. What support can I provide to help you with that?” If you have a neurotypical person whose mom is dying, and they’re taking care of their mom, they’re exhausted. They’re going to need you to put things in writing for them. You know who else needs that? A neurodivergent person. You know who else needs that? Your deaf employee. Your employee with visual-spatial learning disabilities. Your employee whose brain works 9,000 times harder than anybody else’s and hears everything in the room, that pen tap, somebody playing with their hair. They need it in writing. I just named every type of employee probably in your meeting. Why aren’t we putting everything in writing? Some of these things are universal workplace design.

Universal workplace design: put it in writing

For those unfamiliar with universal design, that’s something that was born out of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When the government started mandating handrails on stairs, ramps on curbs, doorways of a certain width, the immediate effect was that everybody loved it. Everybody found it easier. The mother with a stroller going down the sidewalk doesn’t have to lift the stroller and wake the sleeping baby. People who have balance issues, maybe vertigo, maybe they’re just elderly, suddenly have something to grab onto, and now they are more mobile than they were before. The basic definition: if it helps a small group, it probably helps everybody. This has been moving into education for a while. Here’s an example: fidget spinners. They started saying, okay, if you have ADHD, you can have a fidget spinner, and the research showed those kids did much better. Then they studied what happens when all the kids have fidget spinners. They all did better.

Something we do quite a bit within our partnerships here, especially Capacity Works, is take universal workplace design and help bring it to companies. So the things we’re going to talk about to help with the gaslighting effect experienced by neurodivergent people are general, mostly communication recommendations, and I promise you they will work for everyone. Your deaf employee, your hearing employee, your employee who had a little too much to drink last night and is recovering. If you give verbal-only direction, there is space for ambiguity, space for lost-in-translation. Ever played the telephone game? If you put it in writing, none of those things happen. Magically, things are trackable.

And let me give some advice there, Jamie said. One hundred percent of people do better when you put things in writing and structure it correctly. Short paragraphs, short sentences, bullets wherever you can, section labels on your emails. Put something in bold: this is what we’re going to talk about. Then another section heading, and your bullet points. It works wonders for people who are neurodivergent, and it works perfectly for those who are neurotypical as well.

The thing to know is, neurodivergence is a disability, and there are a million disabilities that could sit under that: learning disabilities, dyslexia, all kinds of invisible disabilities. By creating structure for everyone, you’re removing things that can be a hindrance, and you’re increasing everybody’s effectiveness.

Lock priority windows and make questions safe

The next thing I want to tell you: lock priority windows. What do I mean by that? Don’t tell your employees XYZ is happening this week on Monday, then Tuesday morning change your mind, then Wednesday morning change your mind again back to the first thing, and Thursday change it again. Lock priorities. This week, this is what we’re working on. This is the priority. We do have emergencies that come up, but if it’s an actual emergency and only happens once in a while, guess what gets attention? The thing that needs it. If you’re doing that all the time, nobody’s paying attention, because nothing is an emergency.

This is something I work on with leaders fairly regularly, Jamie said. Agility is very important in the workplace. But what I end up telling people in leadership positions all the time is: do not workshop things with employees. Get all the information you need, and then make a decision. Don’t have a feeling you should be doing something else and change your mind after you start. Do your homework. Not only do you look more decisive, but your employees are shifting gears less. It takes on average 23 minutes for an employee to recover from an interruption. Now imagine adding on top of that interruption a task they have to figure out. They may be derailed for half a day or more. So to keep things moving forward, lock the priority window.

Let me follow that with another piece of advice: make asking questions safe. Clarifying questions, especially. Folks who are neurodivergent process differently, but even those who don’t, some people just take more time to think through something. Some people need to know the why behind things, very common among folks who have ADHD. Other people need to know the how. You can’t get upset with people for asking those questions because you feel like it’s taking too much time. If it is actually taking too much time, move it to email, have a sidebar conversation. But people need to feel able to ask all the questions they need in order to move forward, and that is going to help with the gaslighting immensely.

Immensely. Something a lot of managers don’t realize: when a neurodivergent employee asks, “Why are we doing this?”, it’s not because they’re questioning your authority or the logic behind the thing. They just want to know why so they can process it. That’s it. I personally ask why a lot, and I have had employers tell me to stop being so combative. That’s not combative. I just want to know why.

I was just having that conversation with a good friend, Jamie said, whose six-year-old daughter, who they’re fairly sure has ADHD, asks why all the time. Her own mother used to say, “Why does everything have to be so difficult?” And when you’re a parent, you emulate what you grew up with. She’s trying so hard not to say the same thing to her daughter. It wasn’t until we talked that I explained: folks with ADHD don’t fully understand the what unless they also know the why. There’s something incomplete for people with ADHD if they don’t know the 360 degrees of something. And a lot of them don’t care what the answer is. They’re not going to argue with you. They just want to know why.

Ask what is in your way today

The next thing I really want to talk about is, again, in the wording: what is in your way today? As a manager, “what’s in your way?” should always be a question you’re asking your employees. Jamie and I had this conversation a week or two ago. He was working on something and something was just in the way, really frustrating him, and I said, “Okay, what’s in your way? How can we fix this? Okay, I’ve got a fix for you. Here.” That was it.

The thing to remember is, the more you put on your employee to operate cognitively and physically, masking, navigating a workplace, the more you’re going to have burnout, whether it’s a neurodivergent employee or a neurotypical one. The more stress you can remove by asking “what’s in your way today?” and “how can I make you more effective?”, the more you’re going to have employees who burn out less, who need fewer sick days, fewer mental health days, who spend less on mental health support. Just by asking two really simple questions.

And I’m going to add to that, Jamie said. Always tell them at the end, “If something comes up or you think of something, let me know right away.” Because it becomes very reflexive to say nothing. It’s like asking somebody “how are you doing?” It’s a greeting; it’s reflexive to say “fine, good.” Most people just want to move on with their day. So make it clear that if something comes up at any point, you are there to help remove the barrier. That’s leadership 101: in a leadership position, you’re going to get far less done than you used to, because you’re dealing with people now, not just issues. And I love a good check-in. One of my clients is seeing much greater productivity from her team since she started doing 5 to 15 minute stand-ups on a daily basis, and they are not a neurodivergent crew.

Feedback without shame, and five things every manager can do

May I give one last recommendation? Find a way to provide feedback without shaming people. How do you do that as a manager? There are two things you absolutely have to do. Number one, take your own emotion out of it. If you take emotion out of it, you always know the right thing to say. It’s when you’re upset or frustrated or stressed that you say things you regret. That becomes the subject-object move I talk about in coaching, and they talk about in psychology all the time: the subject has to become an object. Write it down. Put it on the board. Our amazing colleague Shay, just yesterday, made that recommendation: take this scene, pretend you’re projecting it onto a screen, and tell me what you’re seeing. It was wonderful. The other thing: take the personal out of it. The “you.” Talk about the situation. Instead of “you didn’t get that done and now we’re behind schedule,” it becomes “when things don’t get done, we end up behind schedule.” It’s the same message.

I tell my clients to use outcome-based feedback. “We had this project that just did not go well. It’s caused us a lot of issues. Do you see a way this could have gone better?” When you have that conversation, your employee, especially if they’re neurodivergent, and a neurodivergent employee is going to be more self-aware about this than a neurotypical, is going to say, “Oh man, I was so far behind and I didn’t understand this process. I wish I would have had XYZ.” You as a manager are going to get amazing feedback when you do a postmortem of why something didn’t work well. Not accusing any single person, not accusing your team, just saying, “This didn’t go well. What could have been done to make it better?”

And on a more personal level, something tied to the well-documented time blindness of people who have ADHD: late arrivals. A way of approaching that, taking the “you” out of it, is “late arrivals lead to X, Y, and Z. It becomes too lax an environment. People find it disrespectful. It gives the impression that people arriving late don’t care. I know that you care, but we are judged by our peers on these things.” That’s where the shame gets removed. And finally, management 101: don’t ever address problems like that in front of other people. Don’t do it in a team meeting, ever. And don’t address anything with sarcasm. As a manager of neurodivergent people, I’ll tell you, sarcasm is sometimes a way of communication on a team, and it’s very hard to get them to communicate outside of it. But you as the manager should never be using it, even if it’s the normal culture of your team.

I was told some great advice very early in my career, Jamie said, by a guy who ended up being a VP by 26 years old. He had one golden rule, and I think he took it right from the movie Road House: no matter what, just be nice. It is your job to be the nicest person there. That doesn’t mean you can’t correct people or give bad news, but you have to be nice to everyone, and sarcasm cuts right into being nice.

So can I quickly summarize the advice for managers? Put it in writing. Make asking questions safe. Lock priority windows. Do not shame people. And get problems up to the surface early by having regular check-ins and letting folks know you are available to help solve problems. That’s five things.

Five things. They’re very easy, and I will tell you, if you do those five things, you will become one of the best managers in the company you’ve got. Because unfortunately, that’s still a very rare thing. So I hope we’ve empowered the managers today, and I hope we’ve empowered the neurodivergent people dealing with this today. If you have more questions and want to learn more, below are some deep articles we’ve written on gaslighting in the workplace: one for neurodivergent folks, one for the bosses, and one for therapists helping their clients deal with it. If you have questions, always reach out to us. We’re always happy to talk to you. Have an amazing day, everybody.