what i mean when i say neurodiversity-affirming care

If you're considering therapy with me or a psychological evaluation — here's some important info to know about how I think about this work.

the lens i work from

The traditional medical model treats things like autism, ADHD, and other brain-based differences primarily as disorders — deviations from a standard that need to be identified, managed, and where possible corrected. I work from a different premise, often called neurodiversity-affirming care: differences in how people's brains work are a natural, expected part of human diversity, not a flaw in the design. That's the lens I bring to every evaluation and every therapy session.

mismatch, not malfunction

Much of what actually produces distress is the mismatch between a particular brain and an environment that wasn't built for it. This is sometimes called the social model of disability, and it reframes a lot of what looks like a personal problem as a design problem instead. A sensory system that's in genuine pain under fluorescent lights and open-plan noise isn't malfunctioning — it's responding accurately to an environment that wasn't built with it in mind. It's just that most people spend years being told they're too sensitive.

Even knowing that, the distress often still feels like it's coming from inside you — because you've internalized it. You've absorbed the message, over time, that the way your brain works is the problem. But that feeling of fault is usually tracking something systemic, not something true about you.

This is why, in the work I do, I'm not “treating autism,” and I'm not making someone "less ADHD." I'm trying to help someone function sustainably in a world that wasn't built for them — which is a very different goal, and it changes what "getting better" even means.

so what counts as neurodivergence?

Neurodivergence, in this framework, is broader than autism and ADHD. It includes any way a brain diverges from what's considered typical — learning differences like dyslexia, movement differences like dyspraxia, tic disorders like Tourette's, communication and intellectual differences, and, depending on who you ask, conditions like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and OCD.

It also includes differences that show up later in life rather than being present from birth — a traumatic brain injury, a post-stroke change in how the brain works, that kind of thing.

This isn't a settled, universally agreed-upon list. Different clinicians and communities draw the line in different places. But the underlying idea holds across all of it: a brain that works differently isn't a broken version of a standard brain.

Next I plan to cover what this actually looks like in practice — how I think about autism, ADHD, AuDHD, and OCD specifically. Stay tuned!