Autistic and AuDHD Adults

You Don't Need to Become Someone Else

You may have spent years wondering why life seems to take so much more effort than it appears to for everyone else. Maybe you've become exceptionally good at studying other people and environments by learning the unspoken rules, anticipating how you'll be perceived, and adjusting yourself accordingly. From the outside, you may look capable, successful, or like you're holding everything together. Inside, though, you may feel exhausted by how much effort it takes just to keep up.

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Perhaps you've been called too sensitive, too intense, too direct, too quiet, too focused, or simply too much. If you're also gifted, you may have learned to rely on your intelligence to compensate by analyzing conversations, anticipating problems before they happen, or pushing yourself beyond your limits because you believed you should be able to handle it. Over time, it's easy to begin questioning yourself instead of questioning whether the expectations around you were ever a good fit in the first place.

 

But what if the problem was never that your brain works differently? What if it was spending years trying to adapt to environments that asked you to become someone else?

 

For many Autistic and AuDHD adults, life has meant navigating workplaces, relationships, schools, and communities that weren't designed with their communication styles, sensory needs, or ways of thinking in mind. Constant adaptation has a cost. Burnout, anxiety, chronic self-doubt, sensory overwhelm, and the feeling that you never quite belong are often understandable responses to living this way and not evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

 

A Different Starting Point

One idea that has shaped my work is epistemic trauma. This is the experience of repeatedly receiving the message, directly or indirectly, that your perceptions, needs, emotions, or understanding of the world cannot be trusted. When that happens often enough, many people begin to doubt themselves instead of the circumstances that taught them to doubt. Therapy can become a place to begin rebuilding that trust.

 

My approach starts from a different assumption. Rather than asking how to help you fit into a world that has been exhausting, I'm interested in understanding your experiences, what your nervous system has been adapting to, and what those adaptations were trying to protect you from.

 

Together, we'll make sense of the patterns that helped you get through life, understand why they developed, and decide which ones still deserve a place in your life today. We'll explore the effects of masking, perfectionism, sensory overwhelm, chronic stress, and years of adapting to expectations that may never have fit in the first place. We do this not to judge those patterns, but to understand them.

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More Than Reducing Distress

One of the reasons I enjoy working with Autistic and AuDHD adults is that our conversations rarely stay on the surface. We explore patterns, ask difficult questions, and connect ideas that others often overlook. Those ways of thinking are frequently misunderstood or treated as problems to manage. I see them as strengths that deserve curiosity, not correction.

 

Therapy shouldn't simply be about reducing distress. It should also help you understand the qualities that make you who you are, recognize the strengths you've spent years overlooking, and create a life where those strengths have room to flourish.

 

Therapy That Fits You

As an Autistic therapist, I understand this work from both personal and professional experience. That doesn't mean I assume your story will look like mine. Every Autistic and AuDHD person has their own experiences, strengths, and challenges.

 

My lived experience shapes the questions I ask and the assumptions I bring into the therapy room. My clinical training allows me to tailor therapy to the individual sitting in front of me rather than to a diagnosis or a predetermined treatment model. My role isn't to tell you who you are. It's to help you understand yourself more clearly and discover what genuinely supports your well-being.

 

I also believe that many of the struggles people bring to therapy don't exist in isolation. Our relationships, workplaces, schools, communities, and broader social systems all influence how safe we feel to be ourselves. While therapy can't change every system you live within, it can help you understand which struggles truly belong to you, which have grown from years of adapting to environments that never fit, and where you have the freedom to begin making different choices.

 

A Life That Fits

I don't believe therapy should be about helping you become less Autistic or AuDHD. I believe it should help you trust yourself again.

 

My hope is that, over time, you spend less energy wondering whether you're "too much," less time trying to earn belonging by becoming someone you're not, and more time building a life that fits the way you naturally think, relate, create, and experience the world.

 

Because healing isn't about becoming someone else. It's about finally having the freedom to become more fully yourself. If this resonates with you, I'd be honored to walk alongside you. I invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation so we can explore whether working together feels like the right fit.