Who am I?

If you are considering therapy with me, you may be asking yourself this question. Perhaps you’ve recently come to understand that you might be neurodivergent, or perhaps you have recently received a diagnosis. You may be wondering who you have been all these years, or how you can be yourself in a world built for the neurotypical majority. And what does yourself actually mean? I can help you answer all of these questions. But perhaps I ought to go first. In today’s world, with so much transparency and information at our fingertips, it seems to me natural to wish to know a little about the professional we are talking to. Traditional psychotherapy training teaches us to disclose information about ourselves to clients in a sparing way, ensuring that any disclosures we make about ourselves are strictly for the client’s benefit and will aid the process that they are going through in counselling. However, for those of us who work with autistic clients in particular, we know that a little bit of information about ourselves goes a long way to helping the client feel safe in a world where feeling safe is not necessarily the norm.

Since being diagnosed with autism in 2022, I have learned that my journey is fairly characteristic of women late diagnosed with autism. Those of us who somehow flew under the radar know all too well the cost of appearing to be living a normal life, and the extent of the gulf between what others see and what we are feeling inside. In essence, that sums up my story. I decided to become a therapist because I knew I wanted to help those like me who had been failed by traditional counselling and psychotherapy. When I decided to embark on counselling training in 2017, I did not really know who those clients were or how to find them, or why counselling had not helped me and did not help many others. I believed I could find the answers to these questions and find my own way of helping, leaning on established practice while making adjustments that I know would have made such a difference to me when I was a client, earlier in life.

None of us who received a diagnosis in adulthood can recover the time lost before we found out who we really are. When clients come to me for help, our work may involve examining the past, what is happening in the present, and what the future may hold. The client decides when and how we look at these time periods, and the emotions that arise may provide fuel for decisions surrounding how to live from this point onward.