My practice is changing, and I’m excited about it.
When I started working with neurodivergent people, I did what I’d been trained to do. I held the therapeutic space, reflected, explored and offered insight. But practising as an AuDHD person, and getting to know my own brain, has shifted my thinking about what neurodivergent people actually need in a therapeutic relationship, as opposed to what conventional, neurotypical ideas say therapy should look like.
Much of what’s imposed on us assumes a particular way of working. Sit with the silence. Talk it out in open-ended hour-long conversations. Let insight arrive at its own pace. For many neurodivergent people, that doesn’t land. It can feel vague, exhausting, or like being asked to perform the role of “client” correctly.
Here is what I’ve come to believe, from my own experience and from the late-diagnosed people I work with: we are our own best therapists.
Most of the people I see already have the insight. They’ve spent years, sometimes decades, analysing themselves. They are not short on self-awareness. Where we get stuck is somewhere else. We run multiple, complex operating systems at once: autism, ADHD, trauma, hormones, culture, masking, burnout. All of it tangles together. What we need help with is detangling the information, sorting what belongs to what, and putting it in context so it finally makes sense.
That is a different job from traditional therapy. It’s closer to coaching and navigation: walking alongside someone, helping them map the terrain, name what they’re seeing, and find a way through. I’m less the assistant fixing the problem and more the guide who has walked parts of this path and can help you read the map.
This is why my work with neurodivergent people increasingly leans into that space. It’s structured, practical and collaborative. It respects that you are the authority on your own life. And it values clarity over ambiguity, which is something many of us have needed all along.
I also think this is bigger than my practice. As more neurodivergent therapists emerge and begin practising as our authentic selves, we will see a real paradigm shift in what counselling for neurodivergent people looks like. We will stop asking neurodivergent clients to adapt to a model that was never designed for them and start building models that fit.
I’m restructuring how I work with people to reflect all of this, and it feels like coming home.
If you’re neurodivergent and you’ve ever felt that therapy wasn’t built for your brain, you’re probably right. And there’s another way.
