How Neurodivergent Women Hold Multiple Selves at Once

Both Parts Are Real

There is the me that perches in the pine tree branches, or on a craggy rock on the hillside, looking down into the bowl of the woods. The sloped ground carpeted in many seasons of pine needles and cones, me watching.

And there is the me that stands in the circle. One of several women in a clearing, under the shade of tall trees. My mom is there. Sylvia, a close family friend, too. The other women feel familiar, but I can't see their faces — time has blurred the memory into warmth and outline rather than detail.

This was the first circle of women I ever stood in — except I was still a girl. I don't remember what we were celebrating or honoring. What I do remember is the calling in of the directions, the way she turned first toward the north. How did she know which way was north? I remember thinking. That alone seemed like a magic act. My initiation into something wordless, an inner knowing. The wisdom that comes from trees, and nature, and the body's quiet compass.

One part of me was a participant in the circle, body and eyes present. Another part, the part that connects to birds and trees, that lives in air and altitude, watched from above, from the high perch.

Both parts are true. Both memories are real.

I have held this memory for decades without knowing what to call this doubling; the way I can be simultaneously inside an experience and watching it from somewhere slightly outside myself, present and witness at once.

For a long time, I’ve wondered if memories like these are evidence of dissociation, like I could never quite land all the way inside my own life. Like part of me was always floating somewhere above the scene, noting details, reading the room, monitoring how things were going.

It wasn't until I received my ADHD diagnosis at 44, during the same season perimenopause was quietly dismantling everything I'd built my functioning around, that I began to see it differently. Two unravelings arriving at once, each one pulling at the same threads.

What if the observer in the trees wasn't evidence of fragmentation? What if it was evidence of a nervous system that had always been capable of holding multiple realities at once?

The witness self as survival tool

Many neurodivergent women, as well as many highly sensitive people, describe a version of this doubling. A simultaneous awareness of being in the experience and processing it from a slight remove; watching yourself in the conversation and monitoring your reactions from the outside. Wondering, in real time, whether what you just said landed the right way.

In therapeutic frameworks, this is sometimes called dissociation, and it can be that. Drawing on trauma-informed and somatic approaches, specifically Peter Levine's work on the nervous system, and the general shift in trauma therapy away from pathologizing protective responses and toward understanding them as intelligent adaptations, I’m looking at this differently.

For neurodivergent people, this kind of observer-self often developed as something more adaptive than pathological. When you grow up in a nervous system that processes differently, that feels more intensely, that reads rooms and people and subtext at a level that can be genuinely overwhelming — stepping slightly outside yourself becomes a way of managing the flood.

It's a long-practiced response to overwhelm, a way of surviving social environments that weren't built for how your brain works. When the learned performance of neurotypicality, otherwise known as masking, becomes second nature, the observer self is what makes it possible. It watches, it adjusts, and it keeps you safe.

The midlife crucible

There is a reason so many women arrive at this particular unraveling in their forties.

Perimenopause, it turns out, is not just a hormonal event. For neurodivergent women especially, it tends to be the moment when the architecture of a carefully constructed life begins to shift at its foundations. The sleep disruption, the mood volatility, and the cognitive changes don't just make life harder. They dismantle the very compensatory strategies that made masking possible in the first place.

The woman who could push through, who could hold it together, who could monitor herself from the outside and adjust in real time, she finds in midlife, that she no longer has the resources to do it the way she used to. The performance becomes unsustainable. And what's underneath, what was always underneath, begins to surface whether she's ready for it or not.

This is frightening.

It is also, I have come to believe, an invitation.

The observer self has seen everything. She remembers who you were before the masking became second nature. She has been holding the wider view while you were busy surviving. And in midlife, when the mask finally gets too heavy, she is still there. Still watching. Still knowing things you've been too exhausted to hear.

The dissolution that midlife brings is not the end of the self. It is, in the oldest sense of the word, a metamorphosis.

But the observer in the trees? She can already see what's forming.

What the observer actually sees

When I return to that memory now, after some research and reflection, and sit quietly with it, I can move between the two vantage points. I can drop back into the body of the girl in the circle and when I do, more details arrive. The thick give of pine needles underfoot. The quality of light filtering through the canopy. The smell of the woods, resinous and cool. A feeling of safety so deep it still lives in my cells.

And then I can rise again to the high perch, and from there I see the whole picture at once; the shape of the clearing, the arc of the circle, the way the women's bodies turned in unison toward the north. Details my body-self couldn't have tracked because I was too busy being in it.

The observer took in what the participant couldn't hold. And the participant felt what the observer could only watch.

Neither is more true. Neither is more me. They are complementary ways of knowing, each giving something the other cannot.

I am, in fact, deeply embodied. I trust my body. I rely on it for information and signals in a way that feels fundamental to who I am. The observer self doesn't contradict that, it extends it and widens the aperture. Together, they form a kind of perception that is both intimate and panoramic, both rooted and aerial.

I have learned to move between them. And that movement, the fluid return to whichever vantage point serves the moment, is not a symptom or a coping strategy. It has become a practice.

Ancient company

I want to gently name something here without turning it into doctrine. That is that many of the world's contemplative and Indigenous traditions have long recognized the ability to hold multiple states of awareness simultaneously as a mark of spiritual maturity rather than psychological disorder. I was floored when I learned this as part of my graduate studies in transpersonal psychotherapy.

The woman in that circle, the one who knew which way was north without looking at a compass, was practicing something that doesn't have a clean Western clinical name. She was orienting by something interior, by the felt sense of direction in her body, or by her long relationship with that particular land, or by something that lives between those two things and refuses to be separated into categories.

Many traditions speak of awareness that can simultaneously inhabit and observe including the witness consciousness in yoga, the "clear seeing" of Buddhist mindfulness practice, the concept of soul flight found across shamanic lineages. These aren't considered fractures in the self; they are cultivated capacities and gifts that some people are simply born closer to.

The identity question underneath

So many of the women I work with come to therapy in midlife carrying a version of this question: Which one is actually me?

After a later-in-life neurodivergent diagnosis, the question becomes even more layered. Suddenly there are new explanations for decades of experiences. New language and new frameworks. And a creeping, disorienting grief over all the years spent trying to be someone you couldn't quite manage to be, without knowing why.

For many women, this diagnosis arrives in the same window as perimenopause. That timing is not coincidence. The hormonal shifts of midlife have a way of stripping the nervous system down to its studs. Perimenopause doesn't cause the fragmentation. It just makes the mask too heavy to keep wearing.

And so everything surfaces at once. The identity you constructed to survive. The self underneath it that you've only glimpsed in fragments. The observer who has been watching the whole time, waiting for you to finally ask what she sees.

The self that masked, managed and monitored. The self that longed for something more authentic underneath. The self that watched from the trees. The self that stood in the circle.

Which one counts? Which one is real?

Here is what I've come to believe, in my own life and in the lives of the women I sit with - the question itself is the wound. Not because the answer doesn't matter, but because the either/or framing does more harm than the multiplicity ever could.

Both memories are real

I was in the circle and I was in the trees. I felt the ground beneath my feet and the bark rough under my palms from a hundred feet away. Both are true encodings of the same experience. My nervous system was simply doing what it has always done, holding more than one vantage point at once.

That capacity to be participant and witness, to hold multiple truths in the same moment, is not a defect. It is, in fact, the ground from which so much of the sensitivity, creativity, and attunement that neurodivergent women carry actually grows.

It is also, I would venture, something older than psychology. Something the woman who knew north already knew.

The work isn't to collapse the two into one. It's to stop pathologizing the perch in the trees and to find your way back into the circle too.

To let both parts be real. To let both parts belong to you.

Before you go — a writing invitation

Find a few quiet minutes and a piece of paper, or open a blank document, and write a letter from your observer self to your body-self.

Not a critical letter. A loving one.

She has been up in the trees for a long time. She has seen things from that vantage point that you couldn't have seen from inside the experience — the shape of the clearing, the arc of the circle, the whole picture at once. She has been holding a wider view while you were busy surviving.

What does she want you to know? What has she been waiting for the right moment to say?

Write without editing. Let her speak.

If something in this piece found you, there are a few ways to go deeper.

→ Individual therapy, online across Washington state — [work with me]

→ Decision-Making for Neurospicy Women — a mini-course for when you can't trust your own compass — [learn more]

→ The Writing Cocoon waitlist — [save my spot]