Please Accept My Apology

During a recent evening walk with my wife, I had an encounter with a guy who was working on a construction project. I ended up flipping off the guy as we walked away. I’m not proud of it and have zero excuses. When I behave like a total jackass, I typically feel like sh¡t. This time was no exception. I replayed the memory tapes of the encounter over and over as we walked home.

So why does it bug me to no end when I behave like that? And afterwards, why can’t I let it go?

I think it’s because my original intent was to do the right thing, and I’m bothered by the fact that, once again, I failed to do so. I acted like the exact person I do NOT want to be.

As I was standing there interacting with the guy, I literally had a clear-cut scenario playing out in my head of the ideal, respectful way to act during that situation. I want to be a level-headed, under control, civil, rational, mature adult… but, instead, I acted like an immature elementary-school-age child.

It’s frustrating to fail with my behavior, and I literally hate it when I lash out disrespectfully toward anyone.

Eventually, I got curious about what was actually going on in my brain during and after such an encounter. With recent acceptance and new awareness of my autism after thirty years of denying it, I dug into the clinical and research side of my less than stellar behavior.

Maybe I’m not the only neurodivergent person who acts like a jerk, and then looks back with remorse and wonders, “Why the hell did I do that?”

What follows is a replay of what happened and what I learned about the cognitive circuitry involved…

The Walk, the Sign, the Choice

During our walk, as we passed the orange *Sidewalk Closed* construction sign, I immediately started justifing to Sally: "We don’t have anywhere else to walk…can’t walk in the road. It’s dangerous…have to walk here…blah blah blah.” And we consciously disregarded the sign and kept walking.

Of course, I had a choice. We could have turned back into the development, walked a couple of miles, and popped out closer to home. That option was there. I just didn’t want it. I was preparing and rehearsing my defiance out loud.

Executive Function in Autism and ADHD

Clinical research calls this part of the problem “inhibitory control,” which involves a process of executive function within our cerebral cortex. The ability to stop a planned action and reconsider when new information shows up is one example. Like a big orange, “Sidewalk Closed” sign.

A 2024 study found that when your brain has differences in executive function, it becomes genuinely hard to change course even when you know you should.

The word "differences" is intentional clinical language preferred in neurodivergent contexts over "deficits" or "impairments," but it means the same practical thing in context. The executive function system does not reliably do the thing it is supposed to do in the moment you need it:

• ADHD-wired brains struggle with when to use such skills like knowing when to hit the brakes.
• Autistic-wired brains struggle with how to use the same skills in the middle of a fast-moving moment.

Both ADHD and autistic wiring (AuDHD,) can give us struggles with both “the when” and “the how.”

The two challenges stacked on top of each other make real-time behavior correction very, very hard to get right.

The Encounter: Defiance, a Misread, The Finger

As we walked to where the crew was working, a guy in an excavator, probably the owner, called out: “Hey, the sidewalk is closed.” I gave him my rehearsed response about not having a choice. He said to walk the other way. I said we live down that way. He said it was closed. Nothing escalated. He was actually being nice about it.

As we walked away, I heard him say something. I really couldn’t make out what he said, but in the moment, I assumed he was popping-off at me and calling me a name. I flipped him off above my head while walking away.

He said, “You don’t have to be like that.” He was just stating a fact. Not being aggressive.

We kept walking.

And then immediately… I felt like sh¡t.

This Just in: Prefrontal Cortex Hijacked by Amygdala

What happened in my brain that moment has a name in the clinical literature: an amygdala hijack. The hijack happens when the amygdala, the brain’s threat detection center, triggers a fight-or-flight response before the prefrontal cortex has time to evaluate what is actually happening.

Research on autistic and ADHD brains suggests that reduced connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex can make that override more likely and more intense. My response was a classic “fight" reaction to a perceived threat. “Perceived” is the key word. I misread his ambiguous words as a personal attack.

Given the situation, it’s unlikely that anything he said was any real threat to my safety. The encounter didn’t happen in a vacuum, so my sixty five years of life experience and personality patterns no doubt shaped the defensive posture I carried into the interaction. But setting them aside, I’m focusing on the AuDHD part of the picture…the amygdala hijack and the flood of adrenaline and cortisol that hit my system all at once.

My nervous system answered before my reasoning brain had a chance to catch up.

The Instant I Knew

We had only walked a few steps past the encounter when I already knew I was wrong. I felt a deep feeling of absolute failure, the kind that lands like a very heavy weight.

I was immature. Ridiculously aggressive. Childish. I did not act anywhere near the way I would like to act with another person.

I have no excuses. Even during the encounter, I knew in the back of my mind exactly what I wanted to say, “I’m sorry, sir. Yes, we shouldn’t be walking here. We live down there. Sorry to interrupt your work.”

I know that’s the better way to behave. I understand human relationships, what is polite and what is not. I tried to raise my children to be civil and kind. And yet I tend to go from fully understanding how I want to act to being two or three steps too late in actually doing it.

In many autistic adults, this kind of “instant knowing” after the fact, rather than during, is clinically recognized as a delayed emotional response. Autistic people often experience emotions after the triggering event has passed, not right in the middle of it. Our nervous systems postpone certain types of processing until the external stimulation drops.

The process is not a failure of character or values, it’s a core feature of autistic experience. The emotional and social insight arrives just a beat or two too late. It’s not that we have no idea what the right thing is. For me, it’s a frustrating, all-too-frequent occurrence.

I have frequently generalized my own lifetime as …two steps too late.

Was it Silly of Me to Write an Apology Note?

I went to bed thinking about it. When I woke up, I wrote the guy a note starting with, “Dear Sir…” I signed my full name, and I drove it over to the worksite at 6:30 in the morning. I taped it to the inside glass door of his excavator with blue tape. Afterward, I realized the whole situation may have been a bigger deal to me than it was to him.

Maybe the note was overkill? But I also realized that I needed to leave the note for him as much as I needed to do it for me. Short of turning back time, it was the best that I could do to right the slight.

What I did with that note is what psychologists call the difference between shame and guilt:

Shame says “I am bad.” Guilt says “I did a bad thing.”

Research on guilt, shame, and self forgiveness finds that guilt paired with reparative action, like a direct apology, tends to support relationship repair and emotional healing.

Shame, less healthy in contrast, pushes people toward withdrawal and avoidance.

In autistic adults who have developed greater social awareness over time, guilt responses often become more common and more intense

…the impulse to repair, to show up again, and to try to make it right, becomes very strong.

The Spoon Deficit: I Need to Practice Better Awareness

For the last few weeks, I have been short on spoons. Very sore from physical overexertion, back surgery recovery, and wrecked sleep from fibromyalgia kicking my ass. On top of that, I was deep in a website post about past relationships. All painful territory…yeah. Go figure.

Spoon Theory, originally developed by Christine Miserandino in the context of chronic illness, gives people like me a language for our daily energy budget and how fast it drains.

A “boom or bust” cycle is described that sounds familiar to a lot of us. We overexert on higher energy days, then afterward we crash both physically and emotionally.

Research results on pain, sleep deprivation, and cognitive load show that even neurotypical people have more trouble with impulse control and emotional regulation under these kinds of adverse conditions. Just ask any parent of a newborn or young children.

For neurodivergents, whose coping baseline is already lower, the impact of these factors is even stronger and harder to hide.

Low spoons. No sleep. Emotional exposure from the writing. These things are all my responsibility to understand.

They are not excuses, but reminders of the potential benefits of me staying aware of my spoon drawer supply on any given day.

Why It Hits So Hard and Stays So Long

So what causes that incredibly heavy emotional feeling of failure and regret after the event? Even now, the emotional weight I felt afterward seems ridiculously out of proportion to the incident itself.

It’s not self-pity, but more like stubborn me not wanting to have acted that way to begin with. But I did, so I refuse to allow myself to merely brush off my behavior and forget about it.

My rational brain was even telling my emotional brain I was silly for feeling so strongly about it…

I literally felt like crawling into a hole, pulling over the cover, and hiding away in the darkness.

Post event rumination is what the clinical research calls this, and it shows up a lot in both autism and ADHD. It can be an overriding sensation which is also related to executive function previously mentioned above.

Rumination isn’t really about wallowing. It’s more a sense of the brain revisiting the interaction to understand what happened. We need to understand it. We want to figure out how to act in the moment differently next time. For many of us, we find our best time for such analysis is later at night when our senses and our surroundings are more chill. You know, like when it’s time to sleep…

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)

On top of that, there is the fun bonus round called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD, which clinicians and advocates now recognize as common for both ADHD and autistic folks. RSD describes the extreme emotional pain triggered by the belief, not necessarily the reality, that we have failed, been criticized, or been rejected. Our mere belief that it happened can set off that emotional pain.

For autistic and ADHD adults who have spent decades being corrected, scolded, or told, "you need to chill" and "you’re too intense" …a single social failure like this can trigger a boatload of old memories and related emotional experiences.

That’s where the shame guilt loop kicks in: the cycle starts with the incident, then moves through the triggered emotional pain, the guilt about what we did, followed by our shame of being “so sensitive,” and then back around again.

What I Am Trying to Build: A Better Lens

I want to give myself better tools to recognize the moment something is going sideways and the moment my own self-defensive reaction is building. I want to catch myself before I act like a dick and disrespect a fellow human being. When I fail to get it right, owning my behavior and apologizing are the right thing to do. Replaying the memory tapes with an eye toward review and correction is helpful.

What doesn’t help much is endlessly beating my self-up about the failure after the fact.

Newer research says that being kind to yourself works a lot better than beating yourself up when you mess up or feel ashamed. (Duh.)

Self-compassion helps calm your brain’s alarm system so you feel less attacked inside, which makes it easier to pause, take a breath, and choose a different reaction instead of going straight into a defensive meltdown.

Instead of an emotional once-a-day vitamin, “self-compassion under fire” means taking my emotional-pulse as needed.

That’s not a small distinction for us neurodivergents. While an emotionally-healthy neurotypical brain might automatically hand-over the proper cognitive tool in the moment, our neurodivergent wiring responds with delayed circuitry.

As I’m learning about why and how my brain works, I’ve been doing so with an active sense of self-compassion. What do I mean by self-compassion? As I’m researching and learning about my autism, I’m trying to maintain a conscious attitude of empathy and compassion toward myself.

Therapists working with autistic and ADHD people are focusing more on helping us understand how our own brains work. That kind of knowledge, knowing how our cognitive wiring works, is one of the best tools we have for handling our reactions.

Learning more about our brain’s wiring doesn’t mean we’ll always act ideally. Hopefully, we’ll have better recognition when things are going sideways, catch our reactions, and grab the rational tool faster for a better outcome.

I personally need a better understanding of my own cognitive mechanisms as they relate to my autism, ADHD, neurodivergence, and chronic pain. I want to understand why and how my brain does what it does. I want to recognize what’s happening under fire.

Using the info I've researched and discussed here, I’ll try to recognize what's happening in my brain and use a better tool during my next encounter on life’s proverbial sidewalk… Here’s hoping.

Until next time,

— Steve

P.S. — Please practice compassion…and self-compassion too.

For Further Reading

1. Simply Psychology. “Autistic Rumination: Why It Happens and How to Manage It.” Simply Psychology, December 2024. https://www.simplypsychology.org/autistic-rumination.html
2. PubMed Central / National Institutes of Health. “An Integrative Model of ADHD Symptoms, Rumination, and Negative Thinking.” PubMed Central, November 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11594572/
3. Thornton, Charles. “ADHD and Rumination: Why Your Brain Replays Everything and How to Stop It.” ADHD Philadelphia, December 2025. https://www.adhdphiladelphia.com/blog/-adhd-and-rumination-why-your-brain-replays-everything-and-how-to-stop-itby-charles-thornton-pmhnp-bc-adhd-philadelphia
4. Blue Sky Learning. “Autistic Rumination: When Your Mind Won’t Stop Thinking.” Blue Sky Learning, November 2025. https://www.blueskylearning.ca/post/autistic-rumination-when-your-mind-won-t-stop-thinking
5. Psychology Today. “How Justice Sensitivity Amplifies World Issues for ADHD.” Psychology Today, July 2025. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-your-corner/202506/how-justice-sensitivity-amplifies-world-issues-for-adhd
6. ADDitude Magazine. “Why Am I So Sensitive to Social Justice and Fairness Issues?” ADDitude, November 2022. https://www.additudemag.com/why-am-i-so-sensitive-adhd-in-adults/
7. Peace Humanistic Counseling. “When Fairness Feels Like a Threat: Justice Sensitivity and the ADHD Nervous System.” Peace Humanistic Counseling, January 2026. https://www.peacehumanistic.com/blog/when-fairness-feels-like-a-threat-justice-sensitivity-and-the-adhd-nervous-system
8. Focused Mind ADHD Counseling. “Rumination in ADHD: Understanding Overthinking.” Focused Mind ADHD Counseling, March 2026. https://focusedmindadhdcounseling.com/what-is-rumination-understanding-overthinking-in-adhd/
9. Eton Psychiatrists. “What Dopamine Reveals About Autism.” Eton Psychiatrists, September 2025. https://etonpsychiatrists.co.uk/blog/what-dopamine-reveals-about-autism/
10. Kapp, Steven K., Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, Lauren E. Sherman, and Ted Hutman. "Deficit, Difference, or Both? Autism and Neurodiversity." Developmental Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2013, pp. 59–71. National Institutes of Health / PubMed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22545843/
11. Diamond, Adele. "Executive Functions." Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 64, 2013, pp. 135–168. National Institutes of Health / PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4084861/
12. Knopf, Essy. “Understanding Neurodivergent Dopamine Crashes.” EssyKnopf.com, January 2026. https://www.essyknopf.com/dopamine-crashes/
13. CogBT Therapy. “Cognitive Defusion Techniques and Exercises.” CogBT Therapy, December 2023. https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/cognitive-defusion-techniques-and-exercises
14. Find Inner Calm. “Using ACT and Cognitive Defusion to Improve Negative Thinking.” Find Inner Calm, December 2025. https://findinnercalm.ca/using-act-and-cognitive-defusion-to-improve-negative-thinking/
15. Simply Psychology. “12 Ways to Manage Autistic Rumination.” Simply Psychology, July 2025. https://www.simplypsychology.org/how-to-stop-autistic-rumination.html
16. Healing Psychiatry Florida. “Overcome ADHD Rumination: 7 Strategies to Improve Well-Being.” Healing Psychiatry Florida, July 2024. https://www.healingpsychiatryflorida.com/adhd/adhd-rumination/
17. University of Virginia School of Education. “Autism Researchers Compare Mental Health Benefits of Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.” University of Virginia, July 2023. https://education.virginia.edu/news-stories/autism-researchers-compare-mental-health-benefits-mindfulness-and-cognitive-behavioral-therapy
18. CenterWatch Clinical Trials. “Comparing Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Versus Mindfulness-Based Therapy.” CenterWatch, June 2024. https://www.centerwatch.com/clinical-trials/listings/NCT06060860/comparing-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-versus-mindfulness-based
19. PubMed Central / National Institutes of Health. “Executive Function Deficits in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.” PubMed Central, August 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11485171/
20. PubMed Central / National Institutes of Health. “Reduced Amygdala–Prefrontal Functional Connectivity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Its Association With Emotion Regulation and Aggression.” PubMed Central, February 2019. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7173634/
21. Simply Psychology. “Autism and Delayed Emotional Responses.” Simply Psychology, September 2025. https://www.simplypsychology.org/autism-delayed-emotional-responses.html
22. Strelan, Peter. “Personality and Self-Forgiveness: The Roles of Shame, Guilt, Empathy, and Conciliatory Behavior.” University of Adelaide, 2007. http://transformationalchange.pbworks.com/f/Personality+and+Self+Forgiveness.pdf
23. WebMD. “What Is the Spoon Theory?” WebMD, April 2025. https://www.webmd.com/multiple-sclerosis/features/spoon-theory
24. PubMed Central / National Institutes of Health. “Post-Event Rumination and Social Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” PubMed Central, March 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11018455/
25. ADDitude Magazine. “RSD: Meaning of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, ADHD Link.” ADDitude, February 2017. https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/
26. Arnica MH Counseling. “Neurodivergence, Shame, and the Path of Self-Compassion.” Arnica MH Counseling, November 2025. https://arnicamh.com/shame-and-self-compassion/