What We Talk About

Our conversations sit at the intersection of clinical practice, neurodivergence, professional identity, ethics, systems, and lived experience.

That means we may talk about a complicated case one month and the politics of adult autism assessment the next. We might examine countertransference, masking, collaborative care, burnout, giftedness, attachment, or what happens when the therapist is simultaneously the person with significant expertise and the person wondering whether everyone else in the room knows something they don't.

Topics have included:

• unmasking when our professions still reward masking

• working with autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, gifted, and twice-exceptional clients without making neurotypical functioning the treatment goal

• the particular experience of being a 2e clinician: highly perceptive, highly capable, and sometimes carrying a lifetime of evidence that says otherwise

• imposter syndrome, expertise, ego, humility, and taking up appropriate professional space

• navigating multidisciplinary and collaborative-care teams as a neurodivergent professional

• recognizing when “clinical resistance” may actually be autonomy, overwhelm, sensory distress, mistrust, or a mismatch in treatment

• therapist countertransference—including cognitive countertransference, or the ways we begin to think differently in the presence of particular clients

• the commercialization and commodification of autism assessment alongside very real problems of historical underdiagnosis, inequitable access, and barriers to affirming assessment

• balancing client autonomy with clinician ethics and values

• knowing when adaptation is appropriate and when a client genuinely needs something outside our scope

• questioning clinical practices that prioritize compliance over curiosity

We are interested in complexity rather than arriving quickly at the “right” clinical answer.

Neuroaffirming Means More Than Knowing the Right Vocabulary

Divergent & Disorderly is grounded in a neuroaffirming framework and informed by the social model of disability.

That does not mean pretending disability isn't disabling. It means being willing to ask where the distress is actually coming from.

Sometimes it comes from an individual's nervous system, executive functioning, sensory profile, trauma history, or support needs. Sometimes it comes from inaccessible workplaces, schools, families, healthcare systems, professional expectations, or cultural ideas about what a successful human being is supposed to look like.

Usually, it is more complicated than either/or.

That complexity matters clinically.

We are particularly interested in moving beyond approaches that simply teach neurodivergent people to perform neurotypicality more effectively. Instead, we can ask better questions: What is adaptive here? What is protective? What is costly? What does this person actually want to change? What support would make change possible? And whose definition of “functioning” are we using in the first place?

A Consultation Group for Clinicians Who Think Differently

Divergent & Disorderly also exists because professional consultation can be harder than it looks when your brain processes information differently.

Some of us think associatively rather than linearly. Some need to understand the entire system before we can make sense of one part of it. Some notice patterns before we can explain why they matter. Some ask twelve questions because all twelve actually are relevant. Some are exceptionally good at conceptualizing other people's experiences while struggling to recognize our own expertise.

And many neurodivergent clinicians have spent years learning to translate those ways of thinking into something that looks sufficiently “professional.”

Here, they can also be clinical assets.

The goal isn't to romanticize neurodivergence or assume neurodivergent clinicians automatically understand neurodivergent clients. It is to create room to examine how our cognitive styles, identities, histories, strengths, support needs, biases, and nervous systems enter the therapy room with us.

That is part of clinical competence, too.

From Consultation to Clinical Education

Divergent & Disorderly is also part of a larger professional education project through Unapologetically Well.

My work as a clinician and educator increasingly focuses on questions that don't fit neatly into a single diagnostic category or therapeutic modality: neurodivergence, giftedness and twice exceptionality, trauma and attachment, cognitive complexity, professional identity, shame, masking, epistemic trust, and the ways highly analytical clients process therapeutic work.

I am particularly interested in what happens when clinicians stop asking only, “How do I adapt this intervention for a neurodivergent client?” and begin asking, “What would therapy look like if neurodivergent ways of thinking were part of its architecture from the beginning?”

That question is shaping an expanding body of consultation, training, writing, and curriculum development at Unapologetically Well.

Current and developing professional education includes work around:

Neurodivergent & 2e Clinical Practice
Understanding giftedness, ADHD, autism, AuDHD, asynchronous development, pattern recognition, cognitive intensity, analytical empathy, and the clinical implications of twice exceptionality.

Working With Intensely Analytical Minds
Recognizing when insight supports processing—and when analysis becomes protection, avoidance, regulation, or an attempt to create certainty.

Adapting Experiential Therapies
Exploring how EMDR, parts work, attachment-based approaches, narrative therapies, expressive interventions, and somatic work may need to shift for highly verbal, cognitively complex, neurodivergent clients.

Neurodivergent Clinician Development
Examining masking, burnout, professional identity, collaborative care, cognitive countertransference, boundaries, imposter experiences, and the complicated relationship between expertise and belonging.

Neuroaffirming Systems & Organizations
Helping practices, clinical teams, and organizations move beyond surface-level inclusion toward policies, supervision, communication, and professional cultures that actually account for neurological difference.