Who I work with · Neurodivergence
Counselling for late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults
The diagnosis explains a great deal. It also raises questions nobody warns you about. This is a space to work through both.
Nobody tells you about the part that comes after
The assessment ends, the report arrives, and there’s often a period of enormous relief. It wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t weakness. There was a reason.
And then, frequently, something more complicated. Grief for the years spent trying to be someone else. Anger at the people who should have noticed, and at a system that didn’t. Doubt — am I really? — that circles back no matter how definitive the paperwork was. And a strange, disorienting question underneath everything: if a lot of how I’ve been presenting myself was a performance, who’s actually here?
There’s very little support offered for this stage. The diagnostic pathway usually ends with the letter.
What we might work on together
Every person’s material is different, but these come up often.
- Rereading your own history. Going back through school, jobs, friendships and family with the new information, and reinterpreting things you’d filed under personal failure.
- Masking, and what it has cost. Recognising when you’re performing, noticing what it takes out of you, and working out where you might safely stop — which is a much harder question than it sounds.
- Burnout. Not ordinary tiredness. Autistic and ADHD burnout is its own thing — skills you used to have simply aren’t available, and rest doesn’t touch it. It’s one of my main areas of work, and one I have my own experience of. More on burnout →
- Identity. Separating out what’s genuinely you from what you constructed to survive other people’s expectations.
- Relationships and family. Telling people, or not. Being believed, or not. What it means for a partner, for your children, or for the parent you now suspect is neurodivergent too.
- Sensory and regulation needs. Taking them seriously as real needs rather than preferences you ought to be able to override.
- Self-doubt. The imposter feeling that visits almost everyone identified in adulthood, particularly those who were assessed privately, or who were told for years they were “coping fine”.
What “neuroaffirming” means in this room
The word gets used a lot, so here’s what it actually means for how we’d work.
I start from the position that neurodivergence is a difference in how a brain is wired, not a defect in it. The goal of our work is not to make you appear more neurotypical. It’s to help you understand yourself and build a life that fits how you’re actually made.
In practice:
- I don’t treat your traits as symptoms to reduce. Stimming, deep interests, direct communication and needing routine are not problems we’re solving.
- I don’t require eye contact, and I won’t read its absence as evasion.
- I take sensory needs seriously. Lighting, seating, noise — say what you need.
- Processing time is normal here. Silence isn’t awkward and I won’t fill it.
- Self-identification is respected. Formal assessment is expensive, slow and much harder to access for some groups than others. You don’t need a diagnostic report to work with me.
- I use identity-first language — “autistic person”, “ADHDer” — because that’s what most of the community prefers. If you’d rather I said it differently, tell me and I will.
A word about my own experience
I have lived experience of neurodivergence and of how it moves through families and relationships. It’s part of why this work matters to me.
I’m wary of overclaiming, though. My experience isn’t yours, and neurodivergent lives vary enormously. What I can offer isn’t a shortcut to understanding you — it’s a starting point several steps further along than you might be used to, and a counsellor who won’t need the basics explained.
Somewhere to think it through
A free 20-minute call, by phone or online. A script is fine, if you'd rather write down what you want to say first.
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