People often imagine a clinical psychologist might be non-disclosing in sessions of personal information. Often individuals may have had therapists before who are composed, neutral, even a careful mystery onto whom the client projects. I understand the value of this approach to the work.
The therapy room belongs to the client and there are sound therapeutic reasons for a psychologist to hold back; to protect the space, to allow for unconscious processes to play out in the therapeutic relationship and to keep the focus where it belongs, to name a few. But I have come to think that, with neurodivergent clients especially, staying entirely hidden often carries a cost to how useful we can be in our work.
I am neurodivergent myself. Like many of my clients, I grew up receiving the message, quietly or otherwise, that my differences were not always something to be celebrated. These messages can come from many directions and they can leave a lasting impression that something about you needs to be hidden, changed, managed or apologised for. I would not want to pretend to my clients that I cannot in some way understand this.
How Does Shame Operate?
To me, this matters in the therapy room because I believe a sense of shame to be a shared experience for so many neurodivergent individuals. Shame, by its nature, isolates, and when we are asking our clients for vulnerability in connection, I think we should also be willing to meet them with some of the same. Albeit considerately and sensitively placed, with the only intention to be helpful.
Neurodivergent clients have often faced significant injustices from the outside world, from systems and from people who positioned the problem in them. I do not want to recreate that dynamic in the therapy room. My role, as I understand it, is not to indicate that my client’s neurodivergence is something to be fixed. It is to help them celebrate who they are in the most truthful, authentic and helpful way.
Who Counts As Credible?
There is an idea that we can only learn from someone whose life we would emulate in every respect, that the people we take seriously must first meet a kind of impossibly high standard. I think this idea, however unintentionally, can be one of the things that keeps us separate from each other. For neurodivergent individuals in particular, who often carry very high levels of self-criticism already, the message that we should only listen to those who appear to have it all figured out can perpetuate the same standards that are already so painful to live under.
It is my genuine belief that compassion, in Paul Gilbert’s sense of the word, the sensitivity to suffering in ourselves and others with a commitment to alleviate it, is always the answer. Compassion is not the absence of standards or boundaries; it is what allows us to hold them with kindness rather than judgement. I think we can be more helpful to each other when we choose to meet suffering with care and with appropriate limits, rather than with the quiet expectation that the person in front of us should already be further along than they are.
Jung wrote about the wounded healer; the idea that effective therapists are not those who have transcended struggle, but those who have known it from the inside and continue to navigate it. I can believe in this, because I also believe that the capacity to sit with another person’s experience can depend, in part, on having met something of your own.
What Is The Cost Of Masking?
Much of my work with neurodivergent clients involves gently exploring the costs of masking. The exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that the world finds easier. The slow, quiet cost of spending years presenting as something you are not.
If we are asking our clients to consider unmasking, even in small ways, even just in the therapy room, I think we have to be willing to ask the same of ourselves. It is difficult and complex to invite someone into something you are not willing to do yourself.
Therapists feel pressures of our own, in different ways. To be composed, responsible and wise. To hold something steady for the people who come to us. This is important in many ways and I am not arguing against any of it.
But I have noticed, in my own experience of the work, that some of the deepest trust and connection is found not in my composure but in our shared humanity. In the moments when a client realises that the person sitting across from them is not pretending to be some fully actualised version of a person, whatever that might even mean, but is, themselves, human.
When I disclose something I intend to do so appropriately, sparingly, in service of the work, I do not do so in the service of myself. I am trying to disrupt the message my client has so often received: that they are uniquely broken. I may not know the exact experiences they carry, and nor should I pretend to. But we do all carry something. To me, that is not a truth we should avoid.
I don’t think being a therapist requires me to perform a kind of polished neutrality that I don’t actually live in. I think it requires me to be helpful. To me, being helpful (with neurodivergent clients especially) can mean being exactly who I am. The same thing, in the end, that I am hoping they will find their own way to.
