I specialize in therapy for neurodivergent clients using a range of modalities, content knowledge and experience to meet their diverse needs and help them achieve their therapeutic goals.  As a neurodivergent therapist, I also have my own lived experience to draw from and work from a perspective that is affirming and nonjudgmental, tailoring my approach to the unique needs of each individual.

Before going into more detail, first lets clarify what neurodivergent means.  In the book, “Neuroqueer Heresies”, Nick Walker defines “neurodiversity” as “diversity among minds”, but goes on to state that the term ‘mind’ encompasses everything from perception, cognition, emotion, memory, psyche and consciousness.  Additionally, thanks to the field of neuroscience, we now understand how much of the ‘mind’ is an embodied phenomenon. Meaning the brain and body are not separate entities but instead are deeply intertwined with each other.

Beyond the normal five senses we all learn about in school, there are three more sensory systems that are extremely important – interoception, proprioception, and the vestibular system; these latter three sensory systems greatly impact neurodivergent clients.  Interoception is particularly important as it allows us to notice internal body sensations and how emotions feel in the body.  Many neurodivergent clients struggle with interoception and research shows that helping clients get their interoceptive sense online so they can feel emotions in their body is very important for helping clients achieve positive outcomes in therapy. Many neurodivergent clients also experience some degree of alexithymia, which can make it hard for them to identify and express emotions. The good news is that if clients are able to develop their interoceptive sense a bit, they are able to do successful emotional processing regardless of whether they can articulate their emotions easily or not. And for some, developing their interoceptive sense does help them begin to build their emotional awareness and their ability to express their emotions.

Interventions like mindfulness activities and the Safe and Sound protocol can help develop interoceptive sense in neurodivergent clients. Therapy modalities that have a somatic focus, meaning there is a focus on noticing internal body sensations, can help develop interoceptive sense even further and allow clients to begin getting traction where they haven’t been able to before in therapy.

Beyond helping neurodivergent clients with their interoceptive sense and emotional processing, I also have a client-driven approach. I want clients to pick the focus of a session so they feel they have agency in their own therapy and can begin to translate that experience to their relationships outside the therapy room. For neurodivergent clients in particular this is very important as they often are the ones feeling a lack of power in relationships. Clients are encouraged to being anything to therapy that feels important for them to explore, even if its not expressly related to their treatment goals. By broadening what we focus on rather than limiting it, clients are able to explore more areas of their life and experience, leading to deeper change than just focusing on a narrow goal like symptom reduction.

Specialty in working with Dissociation, Shame, and Emotional Neglect

*If reading the content below starts to feel too much, please stop reading immediately! But also know that I might be a great therapist for you if that’s the case!

I’ve done several trainings in assessing and working with dissociative disorders, something that affects many neurodivergent individuals with complex trauma. I also have a focus on shame and emotional neglect, which are also often deeply entwined with dissociation.

For clients with dissociative disorders, it can be hard for them to make progress if their therapist is not providing dissociation-informed treatment. Often clients do not even know they are dissociative, so if the therapist cannot identify it then it will likely go unnoticed and unaddressed, resulting in poor treatment outcomes for the client.

Likewise with shame and neglect, clients with complex trauma often do not realize how much they’re impacted by it until they start to progress in treatment and understand the scope of the deprivation they’ve been living with as they start to heal it.

As debilitating as dissociative disorders, shame and emotional neglect are to a person’s sense of self and how they relate to others, these symptoms also have a nefarious hiddenness to them because of how they impact people. Dissociation hides our deepest wounds but at the expense of us being able to know and love ourselves. Emotional neglect is hard for our brains to quantify because how do you measure the impact of not feeling unconditionally loved growing up? You have no other life where things were great to compare it to.

Toxic shame can be so ingrained in people with complex trauma that when it is triggered, they spiral and are completely unable to regulate it on their own. They may lash out in anger at others or themselves, feel themselves getting smaller or shrinking, develop crippling anxiety and become preoccupied with anticipating potential social rejection or other shame triggers. Shame not only unravels your sense of self or personhood; at its worst it is the poison in the ground that keeps a positive sense of self from ever growing.

I use a combination of careful assessment and application of my preferred therapeutic modalities, combined with a therapeutic presence that is curious, supportive, calm, welcoming, and at times spontaneous and playful. This approach helps clients with dissociation, shame and emotional neglect have the experience of feeling seen, cared for, supported and considered as they carefully explore and heal their wounding.