Just Undiagnosed?

For most of my adult life, I identified as an INFJ. The rarest Myers-Briggs type. The Advocate. The one described as deeply empathetic, intensely private, driven by values, and somehow always misunderstood.

It fit. It felt true. And honestly, it was comforting to have a framework that made sense of experiences I had struggled to explain.

Then I got my AuDHD diagnosis.

And a lot of things shifted. - “What Being INFJ Taught Me About My AuDHD Brain”

What INFJ Actually Means

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) sorts people across four dimensions: where you get your energy (Introversion vs. Extraversion), how you take in information (Intuition vs. Sensing), how you make decisions (Feeling vs. Thinking), and how you relate to structure (Judging vs. Perceiving).

INFJs come out introverted, intuitive, feeling-oriented, and preferring structure. We’re estimated to make up somewhere between 1% and 2.3% of the general population, with INFJ men being particularly rare at under 1%. Some data puts INFJ women closer to 3.1%.

The profile sounds almost aspirational when you read it: visionary, compassionate, principled, fiercely private. Complex on the inside, calm on the outside. Driven by a need for meaning.

It also sounds, when you look more closely, a lot like how many autistic and ADHD people navigate the world.

Where INFJ and AuDHD Overlap

This is not a criticism of the MBTI. It’s a useful tool for self-reflection and team dynamics. But it was never designed to account for neurodivergence, and that gap matters.

When I look at the classic INFJ traits and set them next to AuDHD characteristics, the overlap is striking.

Introversion or sensory overload?

INFJs are described as deeply introverted, needing significant alone time to recharge. That’s true for me. But what I understand now is that a lot of what I called “needing to decompress” was actually nervous system recovery. Crowds, noise, transitions, social performance — these cost something real when you’re autistic. It isn’t a preference. It’s physiology.

Intuition or pattern recognition?

INFJs are known for picking up on things others miss. Reading a room, sensing what’s unspoken, seeing connections across seemingly unrelated ideas. Autism, particularly in women and people socialized female, often produces exactly this — not because we’re psychic, but because we’ve spent years studying people to survive socially. We learn to read subtle cues because we had to. That hypervigilance gets repackaged as “intuition.”

Feeling deeply or experiencing emotions differently?

The INFJ profile includes intense empathy and emotional depth. AuDHD can involve alexithymia — difficulty identifying and naming emotions — but it can also involve emotional intensity that goes in the other direction entirely. For many of us, emotions arrive fast and hard, without a dimmer switch. What looks like “feeling deeply” from the outside may actually be emotional dysregulation that we’ve learned to manage very quietly.

Judging or demand-driven structure?

The J in INFJ signals a preference for order, planning, and closure. For ADHDers, structure often isn’t a preference — it’s a coping strategy. Without it, executive function falls apart. The drive to create routines and systems isn’t because we love structure. It’s because our brains need it to function.

Why This Matters

I am not saying INFJ is wrong, or that personality frameworks are useless. What I am saying is that for many neurodivergent people, especially those who were undiagnosed for years, personality typing became a way to explain themselves before they had the actual language.

Being rare felt familiar. Being complex felt right. Being misunderstood felt like something to name and organize, not investigate further.

The INFJ identity gave me something to hold. And it wasn’t inaccurate, exactly. But it was incomplete.

Late-diagnosed AuDHD adults often describe a similar arc. We found frameworks that partially fit and held onto them because a partial fit is better than no explanation at all. Enneagram, attachment theory, Myers-Briggs, Human Design — these tools attract people who are trying to understand why they’ve always felt like they were operating on a different frequency than everyone else.

Because they were.

What I Hold Onto Now

My INFJ profile didn’t disappear when I got my diagnosis. I still show up introverted. I still think in patterns and systems. I still feel things intensely and care deeply about the work I do.

But I understand the machinery differently now. The introversion has a neurological basis. The empathy has a sensory component. The need for structure is executive function doing its job.

For my clients, many of whom are late-diagnosed or questioning, this reframe matters. It shifts the story from “I’m wired this way because I’m rare and different” to “I’m wired this way, and here’s what that actually means for how I live and work and rest.”

One is a description. The other is a roadmap.

A Note on Rarity

INFJs represent roughly 1–2% of the population. AuDHD — the co-occurrence of Autism and ADHD — is estimated in a similar range, though likely underdiagnosed, particularly in adults, women, and people of color.

I don’t think that overlap is a coincidence.

I think a lot of people who spent years identifying as the rarest Myers-Briggs type were, in part, reaching for a container that could hold how genuinely different their experience was. They weren’t wrong to do that. They were working with the tools they had.

Now there are better ones.

Rachelle Goldenberg, LCSW, PPSC is the founder of SwiftMindCare, a telehealth therapy practice based in Alamo, CA, specializing in neurodiversity, Autism, ADHD, and cultural identity. She works with adults who are navigating late diagnosis, identity, and the work of understanding themselves more fully.