Neurodivergence
You don't need a diagnosis to begin wondering
Some people come to therapy already knowing they are neurodivergent. Others are waiting for an assessment, have started recognising themselves in what they have read or heard, or are looking back at experiences that suddenly seem to make sense in a different way.
And some are simply wondering.
You do not need to arrive in therapy certain of what any of that means.
I work with neurodivergent adults, and with families where a young person aged 10 or over is neurodivergent. That includes people with a formal diagnosis, people awaiting assessment, and people who are exploring whether neurodivergence might help them understand parts of their experience differently.
Therapy is not an assessment, and I will not use it to decide whether you are or are not neurodivergent. There is room to explore the question without requiring an answer before we begin.
Neurodivergence may be part of the story. It isn't necessarily the whole story.
Much of what brings neurodivergent people to therapy is not neurodivergence itself.
You may be exhausted from masking or from constantly monitoring how you speak, move, respond or appear to other people.
You may have spent years being told that you are too sensitive, too intense, disorganised, difficult, lazy, dramatic or simply not trying hard enough.
You may be dealing with sensory or emotional overwhelm, burnout, anxiety, difficulties in relationships, work or education, or the cumulative cost of trying to function in environments that repeatedly ask something from you that is difficult to sustain.
Or you may be coming to therapy for something that has very little to do with neurodivergence.
People still experience grief, relationship breakdown, trauma, loneliness, family conflict, uncertainty and change. Being neurodivergent does not mean that everything about you needs to be understood through neurodivergence.
Context still matters.
When an explanation changes
For some people, recognising neurodivergence brings relief.
Experiences that once looked like personal failures begin to make sense differently. There may finally be language for things that were difficult to explain.
But relief is not the only possible response.
There can also be anger about what might have been different if somebody had understood earlier. Grief for the amount of effort it took to cope. Uncertainty about what belongs to you and what was learned through years of adapting.
Sometimes there is the strange experience of looking backwards at your own life with information you did not have when you were living it.
You don't have to turn that immediately into a positive story.
Understanding yourself differently can be a beginning without having to become a conclusion.
Masking and adaptation
Masking is often discussed as though it were simply a habit that should be stopped.
I think it can be more complicated than that.
The ways we learn to adapt often develop for reasons. They may have helped you make friends, stay employed, succeed at school, avoid criticism, remain safe, or navigate environments in which being visibly different had consequences.
That does not mean those adaptations are cost-free.
Therapy can offer a place to become curious about what you have learned to hide or manage, what those strategies have given you, what they have cost you, and where you still need them.
The aim is not to replace one rule with another.
You do not have to perform neurotypicality here.
You also do not have to perform an idea of what a "properly unmasked" neurodivergent person is supposed to look like.
Therapy here is not about learning to pass better.
Difference is not the same as dysfunction
A neurodivergence-affirming approach does not mean pretending that everything is easy.
Some differences can be disabling. Some environments create very real barriers. Executive functioning, sensory needs, communication differences, emotional regulation or competing demands can have substantial effects on everyday life.
Those difficulties deserve to be taken seriously. But taking difficulty seriously is not the same as assuming that the person experiencing it is defective.
Part of our work may involve asking a different question.
Not simply:
"How do I make myself cope better with this?"
but also:
"What is this asking of me, and is that sustainable?"
Sometimes change needs to happen within us. Sometimes something around us needs to change. Often it is a little of both.
Relationships and neurodivergence
Neurodivergence does not happen in isolation from relationships.
Differences in communication, sensory needs, emotional processing, routines, attention or expectations can become particularly visible between partners or within families.
It is easy for difference to acquire meaning.
One person needs space and the other experiences rejection. One person needs predictability and the other experiences control. Someone communicates directly and is understood as uncaring. Someone becomes overwhelmed and withdraws, while another person experiences the withdrawal as abandonment.
The difficulty is real. The first explanation for it may not be.
In individual therapy with adults, and in couples and family therapy, we can look at what is happening between people without beginning from the assumption that one person's way of functioning is the problem that needs to be fixed.
Young people and families
When the neurodivergent person is a young person, I work with families. I do not offer individual therapy to children or teenagers, and young people aged 10 and over can take part in family therapy.
There is a reason for working this way. What is difficult for a young person is rarely happening only inside them. Home, school, friendships, sensory environments, expectations and the relationships around them can all matter, and family therapy makes it possible to work with those things rather than around them.
What this looks like depends on the family.
Sometimes it makes sense for everybody to be in the room together. Sometimes the most useful work happens with parents or carers, thinking about what is going on and what might help. Often it is a mixture, and we agree as we go who comes to which session.
The aim is not to teach a young person to appear less neurodivergent.
It is to understand what is happening, what is difficult, what is working, and what support or change might actually help.
If you are a parent or carer wondering whether to get in touch about your child, you are welcome to do that. The work would be family therapy rather than individual therapy for them, and we can think together about whether that is likely to be useful before anybody commits to anything.
What therapy with me can look like
There is no single neurodivergent way to do therapy.
You may need more time to answer a question. You may think by talking, or need silence before you know what you think. Eye contact is not a requirement.
You may want things explained explicitly rather than implied.
You may find some questions too broad and need me to ask them differently.
You may need movement, a camera turned off at times, or a different way of approaching something that is not working.
We can talk about those things. I will not assume I know what you need because I know a diagnostic label. We work that out together.
A note about diagnosis and assessment
I offer psychotherapy, not diagnostic assessment for autism, ADHD or other forms of neurodivergence.
You do not need a formal diagnosis to work with me, and therapy with me will not result in one.
If assessment becomes something you want to explore, we can think together about what you hope an assessment might offer and what your options may be, while keeping the distinction between psychotherapy and diagnostic assessment clear.
Practical information
I offer online psychotherapy in English and Spanish across Ireland.
Individual therapy is available to adults aged 18 and over.
Where a young person aged 10 or over is involved, I work with the family rather than offering individual therapy to the young person.
Couples and family therapy are also available where the difficulty is relational or affects more than one person.
Therapy here is not about learning to pass better.
It is about understanding what is actually happening, what you need, and what you want to do with that understanding.
Considering therapy?
If you would like to ask about availability or whether this approach.
