Am I a neurodivergent-affirming therapist?
Yes. I’m ADHD myself. Why would I not be?
I know what it does to grow up being corrected, managed, and improved by people who loved me. That is how it usually arrives for neurodivergent kids. Not as cruelty. As care. The tuition, the talking-tos, the constant loving project of making you easier to teach, easier to raise, easier to be around. You can be loved and still spend a childhood hearing that you are too much and not enough at the same time. I did.
So when people ask whether I’m neurodivergent-affirming, and they do ask, the honest answer is that I was always going to be. It is not a stance I adopted when the term arrived. It is the life I had before the doctorate.
What it means in this room
It means your assessment maps strengths with the same care as difficulties. It is part of why I love twice-exceptional work: half of that job is finding what has been buried under the struggle.
It means I will not describe you, or your child, as a problem to be solved. The problem is usually the fit between a particular brain and an environment built for a different one. We work on the fit.
It means goals are set with you, not for you. We do not do therapy to make you more convenient for your school, your workplace, or your family. Therapy is about making us whole, not serving a larger whole.
Affirming does not mean avoiding hard things
I do exposure work for anxiety and OCD. I coach parents through behavioural programmes. Hard things, chosen together, in service of your goals, are not the opposite of affirmation. They are what it looks like when someone believes you can grow. What is not affirming is hard things imposed on you to make everyone else’s life easier. I know the difference between those two from the inside.
And if you are a parent reading this with a sinking feeling: this page is not an accusation. Most of what lands badly on neurodivergent kids comes from people doing their best with what they were given. You cannot affirm what nobody ever named for you. Naming it is the job we would do together.
About the phrase itself
I am ambivalent about the phrase, and you deserve to know that. A label like this is easy to claim and hard to prove, and the proving is the only part that matters. I am using it because it is what you had to type to find this page, not because saying it makes it true. Judge the practice by the rest of this site, and by the first conversation, not by the label.
Where to go from here
If you are piecing your own story together late, start with late diagnosis in adults. If you are holding a bright kid who is also struggling, the twice-exceptional page is for you. The wider map is on ADHD & neurodiversity, and whether we are the right fit gets its own honest page: clinical fit.
The Meet & Greet is fifteen minutes and free. You do not have to mask for it. Book here.
A few free screeners
Self-completed, instantly scored, no email required. A starting point for a conversation, not a diagnosis.
- ASRS-v1.1 (full 18-item), adult ADHD self-screen.
- AQ-10, first-pass adult autism screen.