ABOUT ME

I was one of those people in and out of therapy for what seemed intractable problems. I often felt misunderstood, and so I developed an intellectual map of my emotions and my responses to things, constantly self-reflecting and building up my self reflection and awareness. I moved through life feeling like an alien, feeling different, and not knowing why. I sought therapy at various stages of my life, but it often felt ineffective because I already knew why I was struggling, I just couldn't figure out how to effect change in my life, or at the very least, feel different. I felt like all I was ever doing in therapy was getting my therapist up to speed, and they would often reflect on how insightful I was, which I found profoundly unhelpful.

I knew that I wanted to connect with other people, and I didn’t know how, so I moved through many different phases of life searching for that connection. I was an actress, I was a destination wedding photographer, and finally, I became a mother to three very intense children. Raising my three children was the best preparation I could have ever had for becoming a therapist, even before I entered graduate school to become a therapist. These children were extremely sensitive to being parented, and I leveraged a life time of self reflective practice to research and learn how to best support them, realizing that in cultivating myself into a loving parent was the healing that my inner child needed.

Attending graduate school allowed me to label the myriad of experiences and feelings and challenges that I struggled to identify, in particular that much of my journey was influenced by the fact that I was autistic and had ADHD. I had often suspected that I was neurodivergent but I had never realized how extraordinarily they impacted every aspect of my identity. So I wrote my masters thesis on late-diagnosed autism, and became a content creator so I would have an outlet to verbally process the research I was consuming.

Content creation allowed me to interact with people who shared this experience in a way I never imagined. As a therapist, this has been incredibly helpful, as research and understanding around autism and neurodivergence is deeply flawed and founded in a model that seeks to define it by it’s deficits. Neurodivergence is a neutral yet valuable difference that ascribes a perspective little supported or understood in our modern culture and systemic structures. Through my research, my experience not only as a neurodivergent person but also as a mother reparenting myself with the guidance of three neurodivergent children, I feel I can bring much needed insight to experiences similar to mine, and through clarity, chart a path forward towards healing and self-acceptance.