Neurodivergent Jealousy: The Green-Eyed Monster on the Spectrum

Thursday, July 10, 2025.

Neuro-normative jealousy is already a mess—emotional leftovers reheated in the microwave of your frontal cortex at 2 a.m.

But neurodivergent jealousy? That’s a four-dimensional chess game played during a fire drill, in a building you’re pretty sure you don’t belong in.

There’s no diagnostic code for it.

No neat little checkbox on the clinical intake form.

But if you look closely—at obsessive loops in autistic rumination, impulsive flares in ADHD relationships, and the strange emotional shape-shifting in people who’ve spent a lifetime masking—you begin to see its contours. Subtle. Searing. Sometimes silent. But undeniably real.

Let’s walk through it. Carefully. Kindly. And maybe, if we’re lucky, insightfully.

The Study That Doesn’t Exist

Start by searching “neurodivergent jealousy” in a psychology database. What do you find?

Crickets. And a few misfired hits on narcissistic mothers and polyamory podcasts.

The point is, no one has built the lab experiment yet.

But the raw material is sitting there in plain view: studies on emotion dysregulation, misattuned communication, camouflaging behavior, and sensory overload. The ingredients are real. It’s the recipe that’s missing.

So let’s cook one up anyway.

Brains Wired for Repetition

People with autism and ADHD often report intense emotional experiences that won’t turn off.

And researchers have noticed that their brains show altered connectivity patterns—less efficient pruning, more recursive firing, especially in the default mode network (Just et al., 2004). That’s the part of the brain where rumination lives, broods, and overanalyzes text messages from three days ago.

In ADHD, the trouble isn't brooding—it’s often blasting.

Barkley (2015) argues that emotional impulsivity, not attention deficit, is the core dysfunction. So jealousy arrives like a freight train: no warning, no brakes, just a loud internal monologue followed by a regrettable phone call.

And then there’s alexithymia, the $10 word for “I don’t know what I’m feeling, but I know it’s a lot.”

Common in autistic populations (Bird & Cook, 2013), it makes jealousy hard to identify, let alone articulate.

Instead of saying, “I feel insecure because I saw you laughing with someone else,” it sounds more like: “Why do I feel like I want to vanish and set your phone on fire at the same time?”

Welcome to the green-eyed loop.

Camouflaged Jealousy: Hide First, Hurt Later

Here’s something most people forget: many neurodivergent folks—especially women—are chronic performers.

They’ve been masking since preschool.

They smile when anxious. They nod when confused. They say, “No, it’s fine,” while internally disassociating on a metaphysical level.

Hull et al. (2017) call this camouflaging. It’s exhausting.

And when it comes to jealousy, it turns what could’ve been a mild accusation into a full-blown existential implosion… silently.

Imagine: your partner flirts with someone else.

You feel something.

But instead of expressing it, you analyze it. Dismiss it. Mask it. And then, at 4:07 a.m., you bolt awake, trying to remember if they always called that coworker by their first name.

I can claim with confidence that the tragedy of camouflaged jealousy is that it’s rarely shared, and therefore, never soothed.

Misfires in Translation: The Double Empathy Problem

I’ve found in conversation that some therapists completely misunderstand the implications of Damian Milton’s (2012) double empathy problem.

I propose something a bit radical: autistic partners don’t necessarily struggle to understand their counterparts any more than their neurotypicals partners struggle to understand them. It's a two-way street, but one side insists they built the road.

So what happens when an autistic partner says, “Are you still interested in me?” and the neurotypical partner hears, “You’re being paranoid”? The emotional rupture that follows isn’t caused by jealousy—it’s caused by invalidated jealousy.

This misalignment gets worse when nonverbal cues are misread. A partner laughs at a stranger’s joke.

A glance lingers a second too long.

For the neurodivergent brain—especially one already trained to misinterpret social ambiguity—this becomes evidence in a trial you didn’t even know you were on.

What the Thought Leaders Are Saying (or Not Saying)

Neurodivergent thought leaders don’t often write directly about jealousy. But their insights into emotional regulation, masking, and social disorientation form the scaffolding of my understanding.

• Temple Grandin (2006) describes her difficulty interpreting emotional nuance. She doesn’t mention jealousy explicitly, but her challenges in decoding romantic cues suggest how easily jealousy might form in the gap between intention and interpretation.

• Camilla Pang (2020), in Explaining Humans, builds social understanding using scientific metaphors—suggesting that ND people often need frameworks, not instincts, to navigate messy emotions.

• Kassiane Asasumasu, who helped popularize the term “neurodivergent,” has written passionately about emotional masking, power imbalances, and the chronic dismissal of ND pain—all fertile ground for the growth of unacknowledged jealousy.

In short, neurodivergent jealousy may not yet have a literature—but it does have a living archive.

When ADHD, Autism, and PDA Collide with the Green Monster

Some conservative speculative extrapolations:

• ADHD jealousy can be fast, impulsive, often public, and followed by regret.

• Autistic jealousy can be quiet, ruminative, and prone to internal logic spirals.

• Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) can layer anxiety and control on top, producing behaviors that look possessive—but are rooted in survival-level fear.

All three neurotypes might struggle with attendant emotional regulation. But the presentation of jealousy might differ in tempo, tone, and texture.

Treatment or Translation?

The clinical world lacks consensus on neurodivergent jealousy. But here are a few possibilities that might emerge:

• Cognitive Tools for Emotional Mapping: Using Pang’s model, ND clients may learn how to externalize jealousy—chart it, name it, study it like a scientist would a star. I’m extremely intrigued, and I’m working on interventions along these lines.

• Couples Therapy that Assumes Mutual Confusion: Therapists can frame miscommunications as translation errors, not character flaws.

• Validation First, Analysis Second: Jealousy in ND people often springs from long histories of relational erasure. Before challenging the belief, validate the experience.

• Mask Reduction: Encourage Emotional Fluency Over Politeness. Sometimes “I feel jealous” is the bravest thing a camouflaged person can say.

Final Thoughts: The Monster Was Always a Mirror

Neurodivergent jealousy isn’t just a reaction.

It’s a symptom of misattunement, emotional suppression, and social exhaustion.

It’s what happens when you’ve spent a lifetime being told your feelings are too much, your reactions are wrong, and your needs are weird.

But jealousy, like any signal, isn’t the problem. Ignoring it, misinterpreting it, or shaming it is.

It’s not the alienness of the brain that’s the danger—it’s the failure to recognize it as intelligible.

So let’s start listening. Not just to what ND folks say, but to what they’re afraid to say.

Let’s build a vocabulary for the quiet, camouflaged monster. Let’s give it a name, a space, and a decent therapist.

Because no one should have to map their heartbreak in the dark.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Barkley, R. A. (2015). Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Bird, G., & Cook, R. (2013). Mixed emotions: The contribution of alexithymia to the emotional symptoms of autism. Translational Psychiatry, 3(7), e285.

Grandin, T. (2006). Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism. Vintage.

Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). "Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 2519–2534.

Just, M. A., Cherkassky, V. L., Keller, T. A., & Minshew, N. J. (2004). Cortical activation and synchronization during sentence comprehension in high-functioning autism: Evidence of underconnectivity. Brain, 127(8), 1811–1821.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.

Pang, C. (2020). Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us about Life, Love and Relationships. Viking.