Paging Dr. Mom
I was a medical student with two kids, trying to keep it all together. I constantly felt like I had to defend my decision to chase a meaningful career and raise a family at the same time. But professional women with children shouldn’t have to choose between ambition and motherhood.
Paging Dr. Mom is a podcast for the women doing it all and wondering if it’s ever enough. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to be everything to everyone, this space is for you. I’m Dr. Angelle Downey, a family physician, single mom, and host who believes we can thrive, not just survive, through the chaos.
With real talk, expert insights, honest stories, and a few good laughs, we’ll navigate the mental load, burnout, identity shifts, guilt, and joy that come with being a high-achieving woman in a messy, beautiful life. Together, we’ll cry, connect, and grow into the strong, wise women our kids are watching us become.
Let’s build a life we don’t need to apologize for and actually love living.
Paging Dr. Mom
16: Neurodivergent & Overlooked: Professional Women Diagnosed Later in Life with Krystal Sodaitis
Show Notes:
In this episode of Paging Dr. Mom, Dr. Krystal Sodaitis joins us for an honest and empowering conversation about neurodivergence in professional women. We talk about why so many women are diagnosed later in life, how executive dysfunction and masking show up in motherhood and medicine, and why “different is not deficient.” If you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly juggling, but never finishing, this episode will help you feel seen and supported. Krystal shares compassionate insights, practical strategies, and powerful reframes that every high-achieving woman needs to hear.
Resources:
Website: www.NeurodiverseDocs.com
Freebie: Five Steps You Can Take Right Now If You Think You Are Neurodiverse — available on her website.
This episode includes a paid partnership with BetterHelp. Click the link, betterhelp.com/drdowney, to get 10% off your first month.
Click below to purchase the 365 day journal I created called Enough As I Grow. I am a proud affiliate partner with Amazon and will receive a commission from purchases at no extra cost to you.
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🎵 Music: Upbeat Strings by Evan MacDonald
Whether you can diagnose self-identified or you're just starting to ask questions about how your brain works, you're gonna feel seen. Hey, hey, I'm Dr. Angela Downey, and this is Paging Dr. Mom, the podcast for women who are juggling careers, kids, chaos, and cold cups of coffee. We're talking about the real life behind the resumes, the messy moments, big feelings, and how to stay human when you're doing all the things. If you've ever felt like the only one trying to keep it together, you're not. We're gonna laugh, cry, vent, and thrive together. So here we go. Hello to all my busy mamas. I'm Dr. Angela Downey, and I'm so glad that you're hanging out with me on Paging Doctor Mom. This podcast is for all of us who are just trying to keep it all together while juggling kids, careers, and whatever else life throws our way. We're gonna be exploring those moments that we definitely wouldn't be putting on our resumes. I want to introduce you to today's guest. I'm so excited to have Dr. Crystal Saditis on the podcast today because she brings a lens that we don't often talk about. What it's like to be smart, successful, driven woman who's also neurodivergent. So many of us are realizing later in life that the struggles that we've blamed ourselves for have a name. Crystal helps women rewrite those stories with compassion, clarity, and real tools. I cannot wait to hear what she has to say. Hi Crystal, it's so great to have you on Paging Doctor Mom today. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Angela.
SPEAKER_02:I'm so excited to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Good. I'm glad that we finally get to connect. So this is great. So maybe we can start by having you introduce yourself and tell us about your journey to becoming a coach for neurodivergent physicians.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so um uh my name is Crystal Soditis. I am a pediatrician by background. In 2013, I transitioned to be a healthcare executive. I work for an insurance company, and um around 2015 I started to listen to more podcasts. I got really interested in coaching, never considered to be a coach myself until I heard someone that put the idea in my head that I could use the coaching tools as as a tool in my toolbox for leadership. And so I got certified as a life coach so that it would enhance my leadership skills. Along the way, I fell in love with one-on-one coaching. I think it's because I wasn't seeing patients anymore. And that that coaching, that one-on-one coaching relationship really mimicked that sort of doctor-patient relationship, and so I got that sensation back, and and what as you you know are finishing coach certification, you start thinking about who are is the population I'm going to coach. Um, and as physicians, I think that we are highly intelligent, and many physicians have children, and most of those children are highly intelligent. And if you as the parent of a young child Google like how to parent a gifted child, you get a thousand hits. Like there's a myriad of information about gifted children. But when those children and young adults, when those children become adolescents and young adults, the support almost disappears. And you hear a lot about anxiety, depression, failure in these, quote, formally gifted children. So that's when I saw the lack in in the support system for someone to coach. So I started coaching adolescents, gifted adolescents and young adults. Within that young adult age group is residents, and the more I coached residents and new physicians, the more I saw how much neurodiversity played into their negative self-talk and their shame and their general you know difficulties. Along the way, um, I also discovered I have a lot of neurodiverse people in my family. I discovered that my brain is actually really strong in executive functioning. I didn't have a I didn't have a name for it before, I just knew. So it was a really perfect pairing, and I I absolutely adore my you know physician clients because I can see, and not just physicians, other highly intelligent people too, but mostly physicians. I can really see the gifts that their brain provides them, um, and then we use that to help support where they're struggling.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a lot of professional women out there, um especially physicians, that are being diagnosed with ADHD or autism well into their adult year. So why is it often missed or misdiagnosed earlier in their lives?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a really common question that people are asking, and it's twofold. The first is that because they are highly intelligent, many of them were able to acquire concepts and learn concepts without the needed concentration that someone who isn't as intelligent can needs in order to acquire those skills. Let's just talk about multiplication. Someone with an average intelligence might need a hundred pages of multiplication table examples and practices in order to get those math facts to memorize their multiplication math facts. Someone who's highly intelligent may not need it. They may understand that immediately. They may have the picture in their brain of their multiplication math facts without ever actually having to have formal education around it. And you can use that example anywhere. We know that girls, the phenotype of girls tends to be a little bit more inattention, right? They can daydream. First, it doesn't take them as long to acquire the information, so they don't have to pay attention. And then, if they're not paying attention, it's easy for them to catch up because of that same reason. So easy to miss highly intelligent people, not just girls, but highly intelligent people, up until they get to a point in their education where their intelligence can no longer keep up with the load. So for some people that's medical school, for some people that's even residency or beyond. The other reason why it happens a lot more in girls is because girls and women tend to be, there's two reasons actually. So the late diagnosis, there are two reasons. The first is that it's thought that girls are much more sensitive to the environment around them and are more likely to mask what we call undesirable behaviors, right? They can tell what other little girls are doing and then they are going to mimic it even if it goes against their natural inclination. They are less likely to be hyperactive, so they're not going to draw attention. They're not going to be the ones that are, you know, jumping off high walls or spinning in the in the back of the um in the back of the of the classroom. Right? Spinning, if we think of it as a form of stimming or neuroregulation for autistics, boys might stim or flap their hands, girls might twirl their hair. That's sort of socially acceptable to just twirl your hair, right? Or or you know, they may have other smaller movements because they've noticed from either their friends around them or their family that those larger stem behaviors are not acceptable. And so they find smaller, more subtle behaviors. And then the last reason is that the diagnostic criteria has been very male-based. It's based on male phenotypic um presentation of these neurodiversities, and so we don't see that, we don't think of a woman who is chronic. We think of like if you're always running late, if it's hard for you to keep on time to things, well, you just need to get it together. Like, that's not ADHD. You just need to plan better. You just need to figure out the planner or the organizational system that's going to help you remember your appointments. Those are some of the reasons why.
SPEAKER_01:What are some signs of undiagnosed neurodivergence that might show up in a really high-functioning, overachieving adult, but might get dismissed or normalized?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so um some things might be, you know, when someone reaches a level of responsibility where that responsibility now overcomes their ability to their coping strategies. Um, it could be something like you've moved into your first house, you managed to pack everything up, but now you can't unpack. Or maybe you couldn't even pack things up, right? You were still putting things in garbage bags as the movers were coming and moving things away. And you've been in your house for five, six, eight months, and most of the things are still in boxes. Um, you now have one or a few children, and you can't get anybody out the door in time, including yourself. You're late to work regularly as a doctor. You may be unable to complete your charts because of a sense of people call it perfectionism, but really it's a it's a form of um anxiety and the need to sort of like perfect and perfect and read and read and read over your notes.
SPEAKER_01:I have difficulty focusing sometimes, and I get pulled in all sorts of different directions. I might have ten tasks going on at the same time, and I'm not able to get any one of those tasks completed because I keep getting pulled on to one of the other tasks. Um, and my brain just seems to be going in all sorts of different directions all at once. And I remember my mom a couple months ago gave me, she had kept all my report cards, and she moved, and she gives me this envelope full of report cards from when I was young, and I thought, well, this is gonna be really interesting. I want to see what you know. I I thought I was doing really well in school, but all the comments from the teachers were always like needs constant redirection, or has trouble focusing, has has her head up in the clouds all the time, doesn't seem to be paying attention, is is uh drifting off. And I always wondered maybe if if I got missed somehow and and if I had ADHD, and but because I didn't cause any problems in the classroom, if maybe that just wasn't picked up.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, again, I'm a doctor, I'm not your doctor, this isn't medical advice, but it does seem like, especially you're also a doctor, you're probably highly intelligent, and so you didn't need to pay attention in order to grasp the strategies. One of the criteria of ADHD is that it's present since in adults it has to be present since before the age of 12. Um, but your grades were good, you weren't causing any trouble. No one was gonna call you out for you know a diagnosis, and certainly back then, and not knowing how old you are, um, no one was gonna create an IEP or a 504 for a child that was otherwise doing well and not being disruptive.
SPEAKER_01:So is that something that you hear about commonly that you know people just weren't diagnosed, but because they've managed to cope somehow, that they just kind of got passed through the system and and never diagnosed? And is there any point in maybe trying a medication when they're older for it if they have learned to cope to a certain extent?
SPEAKER_02:So it this kind of goes into do I need an official diagnosis or not? I can just say, like, I have ADHD. Um that's just the way my brain works, nothing wrong with it. I just have to know what my strategies are to support where my executive functioning may be a little bit weak. There is a role for medication. If you feel like the inattention is impacting your life in a way that you know you can't get your work done, you can't get your charts, you need the medication in order to be able to get your charts done. Another thing I see in doctors is that if you're always running late, because some people with ADHD like to talk a lot. And so they can't do an eight-minute visit, not because they don't want to, but because they're talking, they're they love their patients. Um, and so those visits can go longer and longer and longer. So that might be a reason for a diagnosis. If you feel that you could benefit from accommodations in your workplace, then you really should get a diagnosis, but depending on your workplace, you might not have to.
SPEAKER_01:So you work with women who say things like, I should be able to do this, and yet, you know, they feel like they're barely holding it together. So, how does executive dysfunction show up in motherhood and medicine?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, so much. So you would be amazed at how much I talk about laundry. The inability to get the laundry done. And people, especially women, especially high-functioning women, feel like the laundry needs to be washed, folded, and put away. And they should be the ones to do it. And so we talk a lot about laundry. Losing your keys. Well, I've already mentioned the you know, getting getting notes done, getting getting you and your family out the door in time. All of these things that society has told us women are supposed to do, right? And I'm a smart, educated physician. I should be able to do all of these things. And like the reality is some of us can't. And when we hit that point where like our lives, our executive functioning can't keep up with our lives anymore, that's when I see a lot of women. And that's when a lot of women really seek a diagnosis because they're looking for an answer. Why can't I do this?
SPEAKER_01:I've definitely had moments in my life where I just felt so overwhelmed and it was hard to know was that was that because I had a diagnosis that maybe had been missed, or just because as women physicians, we just have so many things on our plates all the time. Between medicine and taking care of the families and that invisible mental load that that women carry, um, there are a lot of things that keep us busy. So sometimes it's hard to know is it because there's a misdiagnosis there of some kind, or are we just taking on too much?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's why you know getting a a physician, ideally a physician, doesn't have to be a psychiatrist, but someone who who has experience diagnosing neurodiversity in women, and if you can get in highly intelligent women, a lot of people do this online now, um, is a benefit. But I will say that one thing, I did want to go back to one thing you said that I hear all the time is that people feel like their brain is like they've got 25 tabs open on their computer and their notifications are going off. Like that's their brain all day long. That's a really common thing I hear.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I I tend to like manage to bring myself back to one task, but I never get it completed because then another task kind of starts getting my attention, and um yeah, nothing ever really gets to gets to be finished. It gets close to being finished. But then then uh there's other things coming on, and I've got these great ideas that just keep coming to my mind. And um yeah, I'm constantly starting projects but have trouble. Yeah. So let's talk about maybe shame a little bit. Why do so many neurodivergent women internalize their struggles as character flaws instead of realizing that it's a brain-based difference?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, because society has told us as a woman, you should be able to do this. Nobody has told us as women, like, oh, you should be able to drive a stick shift. So for those of us that can't, at least now, when there's so many, so much, so many cars that um have automatic transmission, now there's no shame. Oh, I can't drive a stick, who cares? But society has told us like you should keep a clean house and you should make dinner every night for your family, and you should be able to have the family dinner and get your laundry done and get all your boxes unpacked after you've moved. And when we can't, we I I can't tell you how many women are ashamed of their house. They like, I can't have anybody over because I don't want them to know what this house looks like.
SPEAKER_01:I was putting laundry in the other day and pulling out like tomatoes from the garden and trying to get the yard ready for for fall, getting all those things done, and I'm like, oh, I have to run in and do that that load of laundry. And I kept thinking to myself, like, what what would life be like if it was like 80 years before and I actually had to wash all this clothing by hand? I should be grateful that I've got this washing machine that can do it for me as I do these like 50 other things. I think about how much harder life would have been if I actually had to wash all these clothes. But if if that was the case and and I was washing these clothes by hand, I wouldn't have all these other 50 things that I had managed to fill my time up with. And it's like never-ending the create all these machines for ourselves to make our lives easier, and yet we just manage to fill up our time with other things. Get kind of overwhelming after a while.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, the culture of busyness, right? There's some value, some some moral value in being busy. Who said that? Who who decided that?
SPEAKER_01:There's this huge pressure in our culture, especially in healthcare, to be efficient and organized and on top of everything. So, how does this perfectionistic culture hurt neurodivergent women in leadership roles?
SPEAKER_02:Many neurodivergent women have so many ideas, right? They're incredibly creative people, and so they're constantly coming up with new and innovative, you know, projects or plans, but the follow-through can sometimes be a challenge, especially like you said, like I start out and I'm all excited about it, and then I hear a lot like I Peter up at the end. Um, and they have difficulty sort of like completing the project. And in leadership, that can be a real struggle.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think neurodivergent women are more prone to burnout?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. There is a term called neurodiverse burnout, just the neurodivergence can cause its own level of burnout because of the amount of masking that is sometimes required in the workplace. It's exhausting. And not just in the workplace, but also at home. Imagine you're in a new relationship and people have been talking to you all day. And you come home, you're a little bit sensitive to noise, to a lot of people, to the smells, especially the hospitals. There's a lot of strong smells. And you come home and your new relationship wants to spend time with you, wants to talk to you, wants to talk about your day. The only thing you want to do is go to bed and get into like a sensory deprivation chamber. It can be really difficult. That in and of itself can cause burning.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I do puzzles. Amazing. I could sit, I could come home after a busy day and do puzzles for hours on end. And sometimes it's hard for people to like how can like how can you do that? I want to talk to you now. Um, we're finally together. It's the evening. And it's just it's hard for me to to not go into a bit of a cocoon. So you've said that different is not deficient. So can you speak to some of the gifts that come with neurodivergent minds? Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I already mentioned that they're incredibly creative, they're incredibly entrepreneurial. There was a US a study that showed that 35% of US entrepreneurs are dyslexic. There has to be something within the dyslexic brain that that that sort of like drives that entrepreneurial spirit. I know many um people who have ADHD but also might have a photographic memory or might be just really gifted artists. Um there's um we know that autistics tend to be very pattern-focused. They're able to do repetitive things over and over again, which you know can be really beneficial if you are in that sort of a workplace. Let's say you're a, and I'm not an epileptologist, I don't know anything about reading EEGs, but I can imagine if you are really good at pattern recognition and you have the ability to just look at EEGs all day long, that's a perfect occupation for you.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. So, how can a late diagnosis or self-discovery help you kind of reclaim our narrative, especially when we've spent decades feeling like we're too much or not enough?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think the first thing is to understand that your brain is not broken, that you have areas where you excel as well as areas where you um struggle. Don't make yourself wrong, don't shame yourself because of that. Just know, like, hey, I'm either gonna bring somebody in to do the laundry, or it's clean. It doesn't have to be folded, it doesn't have to be put away, it can just stay in the basket. It's fine. I help people create muscle memories, like the people who are regular who regularly lose their keys or have difficulty. There's a type of executive functioning that has to do with short-term memory, and like there are people who can't remember what's in their refrigerator. That's why they have 15 bottles of ketchup in their pantry, is because they they always think, like, oh, we have ketchup. So we need ketchup. Um, and so coming up with systems that specifically work for your brain to help you to um, you know, support the areas where you have trouble.
SPEAKER_01:I love that you brought out ketchup because I think there was a point where I had four bottles of mustard, and my partner's like, why do we have so much mustard? I'm like, well, because I like mustard on my sandwiches, but like it's been months and we still haven't gone through that first bottle of mustard. So it's a little, it's interesting that you brought the ketchup up because uh yeah, for me it's it's the mustard. So tell me about this coaching that you do with with physician women.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it's not just women, and um, I do coach men, and I use that philosophy of that your brain has strengths, and we're gonna use those strengths in order to come up with a way of supporting where you're weak. And I have because my brain happens to be very strong in executive functioning, I can pull from a lot of different tools and we try things out like is this gonna work? What works well for you? Is it muscle memory? Is it um is it creating a reward system? People with ADHD often have lower levels of dopamine in their brain, and so that the reason why they're attracted to the next shiny object is because it's a dopamine hit and they feel that change in dopamine much more than people without ADHD. And so we work on what is the best way that how is your brain going to work in order to help you, whether it's create systems or get something specific done. Um, that's for ADHD. For autistics, we do a little bit of that too because there is some executive function component of autistics, but mostly with autistics, I have worked on how to create a world that doesn't impact their sensory system as much so that they can function a little bit better or figure out ways of re-regulating after they've been dysregulated.
SPEAKER_01:Did I hear correctly that you're saying people who are neurodivergent have lower levels of dopamine?
SPEAKER_02:ADHD. There have been some studies that show that um that people with ADHD have lower levels of dopamine in their brain.
SPEAKER_01:Is that gonna put them at higher risk of things like addiction if they're getting those dopamine hits from addressing resources?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. There's a very high risk of risky behavior, um, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, gambling, porn, all of that is much higher in people with ADHD. And there are studies in adolescent boys showing that adolescent boys off medication are more likely to be in a car accident than adolescent boys that were that are on medication. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Is there still a lot of stigma around kids who are on ADHD medication?
SPEAKER_02:I think that there are less. And I think especially as each successive generation is getting more open to talking about mental health issues, I think that there's much less stigma, especially around ADHD. I think we're not quite there with autism. I think there's still a lot of stigma, especially since people picture, they still very much have the picture of the five-year-old boy in the corner drooling and bagging his head. That's their picture of autism. They don't think of the highly functioning woman who is an engineer who is excellent at her job, and maybe it's a little awkward in social situations. Like, come on. She talks to people, she makes eye contact, she's an engineer. How can she be autistic?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, that's interesting. I found it really interesting how you're saying that we often get missed because we are smart and we're able to compensate. I always thought that maybe women got missed because we weren't climbing the walls, we didn't have the hyperactivity component. But for some of us who just had the attention deficit, if we're we have the mental capabilities to be able to doing do the work that we need to be doing, we we can often get missed like that.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:What conversations do you wish more physician moms were having around neurodivergence?
SPEAKER_02:What I would love to see from physician moms is to be the forefront of people who realize that take away the pathology aspect of these conditions. These are just different ways that people's brains work. It's not necessarily something that needs to be fixed or cured. We know all of our brains work differently. You or your child's brain, the way it works, happens to fit into a very specific diagnostic criteria that has been pathologized, but that doesn't make it a disease.
SPEAKER_01:So if someone is listening who suspects that they might be neurodivergent, what would you say to them?
SPEAKER_02:I would say you're not broken. There's nothing wrong with your brain, there's nothing wrong with the way you approach life. If there are specific areas where you're struggling, and of course, if you're a physician or otherwise highly intelligent, I would love to coach you about it. But you can find find resources, right? There are plenty, especially these days, there's a lot of blogs and online books about adults with either ADHD or um autism, dyslexia, discreet. I mean, there's a lot of neurodiversity. We talked we talk a lot about ADHD and um autism because these are the most common, but actually the most common neurodiversity is dyslexia. It's not that they're the most common, but they're the ones that a lot of people clearly identify. But dyslexia is the most common neurodiversity. Um and that can also show up in lots of different.
SPEAKER_01:Is that a book that you that you like that you would recommend for professional women?
SPEAKER_02:I don't have a specific book, and part of the reason why is because there is so much diversity in neurodiversity. I think people need to really pick and choose what relates best to them. Um, I highly recommend against going into one of these like ADHD like coaching programs or system programs, because that program was probably made and is successful for that person who has ADHD and how their brain works. If it works for them, that's great, but often you don't know until you've paid your money, and you could be halfway through and be like, this doesn't work for me at all. This is not how my brain works at all. Because it's not like a broken arm. Like someone breaks their arm, like you kind of know. Like what happened to them and what their arm looks like. ADHD and autism, dyslexia, all of these neurodiversities are not the same. One person's OCD, like one person's intrusive thoughts around OCD, another person's gonna have a completely different set of intrusive thoughts.
SPEAKER_01:I guess it's just a matter of finding what works best for you. So Krista, I I love quotes. Is there a particular quote or a mantra maybe that you love and would like to share with us?
SPEAKER_02:Well, you shared one of my mantras, which is different is not deficient. Um, and then the other quote that I absolutely love, one of my favorites, is Maya Angelou's Do the best you can until you know better. And when you know better, do better.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. And I mean, really, we can all just do the best that we can. There's lots of quotes from Maya Angelou that I think are just so fantastic. So I love that you brought her up.
SPEAKER_02:Crystal, where can listeners find you? You? You can find me at neurodiversedocs.com. That's where I put all of my content, my blog posts. I've got an ebook, a free ebook. Five things that you can do right now if you think that you are neurodiverse, um, whether you're a physician or not.
SPEAKER_01:I'm gonna make sure that all of those links are in the show notes so that people can easily retrieve them. Crystal, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights so generously with us. Your work is changing the way that many women see themselves, and I'm so grateful that you were able to bring your wisdom to this space. And thank you all for hanging out with us on Paging Dr. Mom. If you enjoyed today's episode, go ahead and hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's coming up next. And if you want to keep the conversation going, you can find me over on Instagram at dr Angela Downey. I would love to hear from you. So take care for now, you are doing better than you think. That is it for today's episode of Paging Dr. Mom. If it made you smile, nod along, or feel just a little more seen, then go ahead and hit that follow button and share it with a friend who needs to hear it. Take care for now, you are doing better than you think.