Neurodiversity

It is like being a zebra, in a field of horses.
(Neurodivergent community saying)

Discussions around neurodivergence are everywhere right now — and that is largely a good thing. But it has also created confusion, and I see that confusion regularly in my practice.

​

My understanding of neurodivergence is broad, and includes my own experience as an autistic person. I see it as any way of being that diverges from the dominant neurotypical norm — autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and more. These are not deficits but differences; not disorders, but ways of being that are less common, and less catered for, in the world as currently designed.

​

I work in a neuro-affirming way, and actively push back against the tradition within psychotherapy that has treated neurodivergence as a pathology — something to be explained, or traced back to developmental failure. Many clients have taught me how much damage that approach can do: the misunderstanding it compounds, the loneliness it deepens.

​

Something is shifting. There is a growing movement of adults seeking late diagnosis — and finding not a label, but a liberation. I believe that in time, people will not need a medicalised assessment to understand themselves as neurodivergent. They will simply know, and self-identify — much as people now self-identify their sexuality.

​

That connection between neurodivergence and LGBTQIA+ experience is one I find genuinely meaningful. I work affirmatively with LGBTQIA+ people — not as a specialism added on, but as a core part of how I understand identity, belonging, and the experience of not fitting.

I am drawn to the concept of Neuroqueer — the intersection of neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ identities — because both involve a fundamental experience of difference, and both carry a history of being told that the way you are is a problem to be solved. At their best, both offer something radical: a reframing of the question — not what is wrong with you, but what kind of world would actually work for you?