My Journey To Become a Neurodiverse Couples Therapist
A(longer) video version of my story is available here.
I could write a whole book about my journey of discovering neurodiversity and falling in love with neurodiverse relationship work (perhaps some day I will!), but here’s my best attempt to tell the cliff-notes version of the story in three mini-chapters.
Me, the therapist
From the beginning, when I became a therapist, I knew I wanted to be a relational therapist. I studied family systems theory in my marriage & family therapy (MFT) training program and quickly fell in love with couples therapy — it was wonderfully challenging and meaningfully rewarding to be in the messy beauty of human intimacy.
I further found my center in postmodern, social-constructionist approaches to therapy. The ethics behind these practices rang so true to me; they were non-pathologizing, attended to dynamics of privilege and marginalization, and held such optimism about human wisdom and resilience. Further, these approaches encouraged me to practice from a “not-knowing stance”, meaning they invited me to hold my “professional” knowledge loosely while leaning into unending curiosity about my clients’ perspectives and experiences. This way of being in “dialogue” with my clients felt life-giving and exciting, I’d always felt at home thinking outside-the-box and going off-script and this approach to clinical work gave me the permission to do just that.
As my therapy practice developed, all of these elements came together to form a passion for what I referred to as “complex relationship issues”. Anything that didn’t fit into pre-existing “boxes” or “scripts” about relationships was exactly where my gifts and interests came together. Clients found their way to me to who said “I don’t know what’s happening in this relationship and I don’t know what to do about it,” and I would say in response, “Well, I don’t know either, but let’s put our heads together and see what emerges”.
Every day, every conversation, every relationship felt like a new adventure, a new opportunity for exploration and discovery.
Me, the person
Operating in the background of “me, the therapist” (who I just described) was “me, the person” who couldn’t quite locate myself in traditional perspectives of family therapy and relational dynamics. I had a whole masters degree, years of personal therapy, and hundreds of experiences of working with clients specifically on their relationships and yet I still felt vaguely disoriented. Sure, there were frameworks and theories that held some usefulness for me, but something was missing.
I remember vividly the sinking feeling that emerged during one particular educational family therapy conference I attended. I enjoyed the speaker and his ideas about family dynamics, but something was terribly wrong. I couldn’t genuinely fit my own family experiences onto the map he was providing and the dissonance of that was unavoidably jarring. I could hear this voice within me, practically shouting, “there’s something about your family you don’t know.” Yet I had no idea what that could possibly be.
So I kept at engaging the relational mysteries in my professional life even as I had yet to unravel the relational mysteries in my personal life.
Then, sometime much later, a number of seemingly small events accumulated that led me to ask, for the very first time, “What if my mother is on the autism spectrum?” I was soon obsessed, googling everything about autism, rewriting the entire story of my life with each new thing I learned about neurodiversity.
This was it, the thing I didn’t know, the map I needed to orient myself. I WAS FROM A NEURODIVERSE FAMILY. I was the neurotypical child of an undiagnosed autistic parent.
Finally, I could see myself, my whole life, my whole family in a way where everything became so much clearer. My emotions were all over the place as this new way of mapping my life developed, but one new emotion in particular motivated me and comforted me: this tremendously powerful, liberating sense of self-acceptance that was expanding and expanding and expanding.
With time, I began to use a neurodiversity map to help me understand not just the family I grew up in, but also the family I created. My husband (who has ADHD) and I started having conversations about our brain differences and how that impacted our communication and our relationship dynamics. I walked alongside one of my children as they received an ADHD diagnosis and learned to celebrate and support their brain.
The integration of therapist & person
As I was embracing and deepening my understanding of a neurodiversity lens to view my own experiences, I increasingly realized there was unnamed, undiagnosed, unattended-to neurodiversity in many of the lives of my therapy clients, too. Bringing this way of viewing relationship dynamics into my clinical work felt daunting at first, but I rounded up some additional training and support to cushion me as I ventured out into the big wide world of neurodiversity.
The more I did this, the more I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. The overt integration of my personal and professional selves was intense at times, but it brought me a level of peace, grounding, and even belonging that kept me coming back to this fascinating, eye-opening intersection, over and over again.
In the two years I’ve been intentionally focusing on neurodiverse relationships professionally, I keep finding new ways my professional experiences shape my personal experiences and vice versa. I’ll be honest, some days all of that awareness and the work that comes with it is a lot and I fleetingly fantasize about buying an rv and running away from everything (I’m joking, a little…).
But many, many more days I find discoveries upon discoveries coming together, making room, making way.
Pathways to self-compassion.
Pathways to neurodivergence-compassion.
Pathways to creative problem solving.
Pathways to laughter and joy and lightheartedness.
Pathways to better relationships with myself and those I love.
