- Home
- Neurodivergent-affirming therapy
Neurodivergent-affirming therapy
Therapy for adults who found out later.
If you have recently understood yourself as autistic, ADHD or both, you are probably rereading your entire life at the same time as getting through the week. This is therapy for that.
Online across the UK, or face to face in Brighton, Hove or Lewes. £80 per 50 minutes.
- BACP accredited, member 374395
- Online UK-wide, or in person in Brighton, Hove or Lewes
- A free 15-minute call
- Self-identifying is enough. No report needed
What is neurodivergent-affirming therapy?
Neurodivergent-affirming therapy treats a neurodivergent mind as a difference in how a person is built, not a fault to be corrected. The work goes into self-understanding, unmasking safely, recovering from burnout and rebuilding a life that fits, rather than into training you to appear more typical.u003e
Neurodivergence covers a great deal more than autism and ADHD. Dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and Tourette’s sit under the same heading, and many people include conditions that are acquired rather than lifelong, PTSD among them. Most of my own experience is with autistic and ADHD adults, and that is where most of the writing here sits. The way of working is not limited to them.
Plenty of therapy is quietly built on the assumption that the client should end up more like everyone else. Sit still, make eye contact, manage your time the way other people manage theirs. If you have spent thirty years doing exactly that, more of it is not treatment. It is the thing that exhausted you.
What we do instead is slower and more useful. We look at what is actually costing you, what you have been carrying without naming it, and what would change if you stopped running a version of yourself designed for other people's comfort.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my early thirties, so I know what arriving at that understanding as an adult is like from the inside as well as from the work.
What I am not. I do not hold a formal neurodivergence qualification and I do not diagnose. What I bring is a decade and a half of counselling practice, my own late diagnosis, and a way of working that does not ask you to perform. If you would like an assessment, I can point you toward providers rather than pretend to be one.
Who this is for.
- Adults diagnosed in their thirties, forties, fifties or later
- People who are self-identifying and have not sought an assessment, or are waiting
- Anyone in or recovering from autistic or ADHD burnout
- People whose masking has stopped working and who are not sure what is underneath
- Women and people assigned female at birth who were missed for decades
- Parents recognising themselves while their child is assessed
Who this is not for.
Being straight about this saves you a wasted call.
- You want a formal assessment or a diagnostic report. I do not provide either.
- You want advice on medication, HRT or hormone testing. That is a GP or psychiatrist.
- You want therapy aimed at reducing autistic or ADHD traits themselves.
- You are in crisis and need urgent support. Weekly counselling is the wrong speed, and I will help you find the right route instead.
What we tend to work on.
Not a curriculum. These are the things that come up most, and any of them can be the whole of the work.
Rereading your history.
Grief, anger and relief usually arrive together. Late recognition rewrites school, work and family in one go, and it takes time to sit with what that means.
Unmasking, at a safe pace.
Masking kept you safe. Dropping it everywhere at once rarely goes well. We work out where it is costing you most and what is actually safe to put down.
Burnout and recovery.
Not ordinary tiredness. Reduced capacity, lost skills, less tolerance for things you used to manage, and a recovery that runs on its own timetable.
Telling it apart from trauma.
Hypervigilance, shutdown and exhaustion after ordinary contact show up in trauma and in an unrecognised neurodivergent adult who has spent decades masking. Often it is both, tangled together, and separating them changes what helps. How I work with trauma.
Relationships and being understood.
Explaining yourself to people who love you and still do not get it. Boundaries, conflict, and deciding who to tell.
Writing when talking is too much.
Some weeks speech is the hardest channel. Writing therapy lets you arrive at something without having to perform a conversation to get there.
Work, disclosure and adjustments.
Whether to tell an employer, what to ask for, and how to survive a job that was designed for a different nervous system.
How the sessions themselves work.
- Fifty minutes, usually weekly, at a time we keep
- Camera off is fine. So is silence, stimming, pacing and knitting
- No pressure to make eye contact, online or in the room
- You can bring notes, or write instead of speaking
- I will tell you what I am thinking rather than leaving long unexplained pauses
- If a week is a write-off, say so. We use the session for that instead
Face to face, or online.
I work from rooms in Brighton and in Hove for people who want to be in the same space, and online for everyone else. Online is not the lesser option here. For a lot of neurodivergent adults it removes the travel, the waiting room and the sensory load of an unfamiliar building, and the work is better for it.
You do not have to choose now. We can start online and move, or the other way round.
Common questions.
Do I need a diagnosis to work with you?
No. Self-identifying is enough. Assessment waiting lists in the UK run to years, and a great deal of useful work can happen while you wait, or instead of waiting. What matters here is how you actually experience the world, not whether a clinic has confirmed it in writing.
Can you assess or diagnose me?
No. I am a counsellor, not a diagnostician, and I will not imply otherwise. If an assessment is what you want, I can talk through the routes available and point you toward providers, and we can use the sessions for everything around that decision.
What if I go quiet, or cannot speak?
That is workable and it is common. We can write, use the chat, sit quietly, or pick it up next week. Nothing about a session requires you to produce fluent speech on demand, and going non-speaking is not a failed session.
How long does this usually take?
There is no set number. Some people come for eight or ten sessions around a specific thing. Others work for a year or more, particularly if burnout is in the picture, because recovery there is slow and unglamorous. We review it openly rather than letting it drift.
Will you tell me to try mindfulness?
Not as a default. Standard advice is often the thing that has already failed you and left you feeling like the problem. If something in that family genuinely helps you, we will use it. If it does not, we will not keep prescribing it.
Can you help with medication or HRT questions?
No, and I would be working outside my competence if I tried. Those are questions for your GP, a psychiatrist or a menopause specialist. I can help you prepare for that appointment, and work with how the whole thing is affecting you.
In their words.
“Amy is just incredible. She’s adaptive, it really means a lot to me that she has taken considered effort to tailor sessions to how I find them the most useful, she’s proactive, thoughtful and wonderfully helpful […] In a short amount of time she has helped me out of a painfully challenging headspace, changed my perspective and taught and encouraged me to value myself.”
Start with fifteen minutes.
A phone call, not a form. We talk about what is going on and you decide whether you would like to meet. There is no charge and no obligation.