AuDHD Therapy for Identity, Relationship Patterns & Self-Understanding

I work with autistic, ADHD, AuDHD and other neurodivergent adults, including people who are questioning whether neurodivergence might be relevant to their experience.

You may have spent years feeling that certain things were simply harder for you than they seemed to be for everyone else. Perhaps you became very good at adapting, copying what other people seemed to expect, or pushing your own needs aside without quite realising you were doing it.

Neurodivergent-affirming therapy is not about teaching you how to appear more neurotypical. It is about becoming curious about how your mind works, what you need, and what becomes possible when you are no longer starting from the assumption that you are doing life incorrectly.

A late autism, ADHD or AuDHD diagnosis can bring relief, recognition, grief, anger and a lot of questions.

Many of the people who find me are newly diagnosed or beginning to wonder whether they might be neurodivergent. They may be trying to understand what the diagnosis means for their relationships, family or work, while also looking back over earlier experiences through a completely different lens.

Therapy can give you space to explore what belongs to you now, which old explanations you no longer want to carry, and how you would like to understand yourself going forward.

You might understand a relationship pattern very well and still find yourself repeating it.

Perhaps you become responsible for other people’s feelings, find it difficult to say what you need, lose sight of your own boundaries, or notice yourself adapting depending on who you are with.

In individual therapy, we can become curious about these patterns without reducing them to a flaw in your personality. We can look at how they developed, what purpose they may once have served, and what happens when they begin appearing between us in the present.

This is one of the places where Gestalt therapy can be particularly useful, because we are not only talking about the pattern. We can notice it together as it happens.

If you have spent a lot of your life adapting to other people, it can become surprisingly difficult to know what you actually need.

You may automatically prioritise somebody else’s comfort, find yourself agreeing before you have had time to work out what you think, or notice that your sense of yourself changes depending on the people around you.

For neurodivergent people, this can sometimes sit alongside years of masking and trying to meet social expectations that did not come naturally.

Together, we can begin noticing these responses as they happen, making it easier to recognise what you feel, need or want before automatically adapting around somebody else.

Some people arrive in therapy with an internal voice that is relentlessly demanding.

You might feel that you should be coping better, achieving more, behaving differently or finding everyday things easier than you do. Even after discovering that you are neurodivergent, those older messages do not necessarily disappear.

In Gestalt therapy, I am interested in how that self-criticism developed and what it might have been trying to protect you from. We can explore the difference between the standards you have learned to impose on yourself and what you actually need now.

Burnout can develop after a long period of pushing through, adapting and trying to meet expectations that require far more effort than the people around you may realise.

You may have become very capable at appearing fine while internally feeling exhausted, overwhelmed or increasingly disconnected from yourself.

For me, burnout work is often about more than recovering enough to keep going. We can explore what has been costing you so much energy, including the ways you may have learned to adapt, override your needs or organise yourself around other people.

Complex or relational trauma is a significant part of my work, particularly where it overlaps with late-identified neurodivergence.

I do not always see trauma and neurodivergence as two completely separate strands. For some people, years of masking, adapting to environments that were not built for them, turning needs inward or losing a clear sense of their boundaries become intertwined with earlier relational experiences. In Gestalt terms, trauma and neurodivergence can become “figure and ground” for one another.

My approach is paced and relational. I do not believe you need to disclose or retell traumatic experiences before there is enough safety to hold them. I pay attention to what is happening moment by moment and work within what feels manageable rather than pushing towards disclosure because therapy is “supposed” to look a particular way.

I have a particular interest in working with parents and carers, including parents of neurodivergent and disabled children.

I am a parent-carer myself and have also supported families professionally through Autism Hub London and my work with Contact. My experience includes working with parents around sensory processing, overwhelm, meltdowns, shutdowns, school difficulties and co-regulation.

Caring responsibilities do not happen in isolation. You may also be working, maintaining relationships, managing appointments and services, supporting other family members and trying to meet your own needs somewhere within all of that.

I am interested in the person behind the caring role too. Therapy can be somewhere to explore exhaustion, guilt, identity, grief, anger or simply what it is like to carry so much responsibility.