Most of the neurodivergent adults I see (who are autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, or some combination still coming into focus) don't arrive at therapy asking about neurodivergence at all. They arrive exhausted. They describe a burnout that rest doesn't touch, a social battery that drains faster every year, a lifetime of being told how capable they are while privately falling apart between obligations. And somewhere along the way, often in their thirties or forties or later, they've started to suspect the reason: they've been masking. Performing a more acceptable self, at enormous cost, for so long that they're no longer sure what's underneath.

I offer neurodivergent-affirming therapy online across Washington State, for adults. I'm part of the communities I work with, and my hope is that you won’t have to translate yourself in therapy, because you likely do plenty of that everywhere else.

Masking works — that's the problem

Masking is the ongoing effort of monitoring and editing yourself to pass as neurotypical: scripting conversations in advance, forcing eye contact, suppressing stims, rehearsing "normal" reactions, running social interactions through a manual conscious process that other people seem to get for free. If you're high-masking, you got good at it. Good enough that teachers, doctors, and sometimes your own family never saw anything to flag. Good enough, maybe, that you didn't see it either — just a vague, persistent sense of being an impostor in your own life.

Masking is a genuinely effective survival strategy, and its very effectiveness is what delays recognition, delays support, and saps our energy in order to appear “fine.” This can lead to chronic exhaustion, anxiety that never fully switches off, and a creeping loss of any sense of who you are when nobody's watching.

Autistic burnout is not ordinary burnout

Autistic burnout gets mistaken for depression, or for the garden-variety job burnout that a vacation is supposed to fix. It's neither. People in autistic burnout often describe losing skills they used to have: words come slower, executive function collapses, sensory input that used to be tolerable becomes unbearable, and the mask that always worked simply stops working. Pushing through, the strategy that got you this far, can become impossible.

Recovery doesn't come from productivity systems or trying harder. It comes from reducing the load: fewer demands, more genuine rest, more sensory relief, and, crucially, less masking. But for most high-masking adults, the mask isn’t easy to take off. Parts of you built it for good reasons, and those parts need a say in how it comes down.

"But I never felt autistic enough"

If you're late-diagnosed, or have no formal diagnosis at all, you may have run the tape backward and discovered that childhood suddenly makes sense. Burnouts that finally have a name. You may be grieving how differently things might have gone, tangled up with real relief. And you've probably also met the doubt: everyone's a little like this. I made eye contact once. I can't actually be autistic. Almost every high-masking person I've worked with has some version of this. Feeling "not autistic enough" is one of the most common experiences among people who spent decades being missed precisely because they compensated so well.

You don't need a formal diagnosis to work with me. PhD level Adult assessment is expensive, waitlisted, and historically calibrated to how neurodivergence looks in young boys, which is exactly why so many women, trans and queer folks, and high-maskers of every kind get missed. If you've done the reading and recognized yourself, that recognition is enough for us to begin. Self-identification is a legitimate starting point, not a lesser one.

AuDHD: when the accelerator and the brake share one brain

A large share of autistic adults are also ADHD, and living AuDHD has its own texture that neither label captures alone: a nervous system that craves novelty and needs sameness, that hyperfocuses for ten hours and can't start a two-minute task, that wants deep connection and needs three days alone to recover from it. Many AuDHD adults spend years being told they're inconsistent or self-sabotaging, when what's actually happening is two real neurotypes negotiating in one body. Therapy here might be about ending the internal war, and building a life rich in both structure and novelty.

The same goes for demand avoidance. If demands can trigger shutdown or a wall of can't, a pattern often called PDA (Persistent Drive for Autonomy), that's not defiance or laziness. It's a nervous system protecting itself. So I don't run therapy as another demand system. No homework-compliance model, no behavior charts, no performance review. We work collaboratively, at a pace your system actually consents to.

What working together looks like

I won't be teaching you to make better eye contact, and I'm not here to make you more convenient. Neurodivergence isn't a disease and this isn't treatment for who you are. What we work on is what actually hurts:

Unmasking at your own pace. Not "take the mask off" — that's just a new demand. We get curious about where the mask protects you, where it's a cage, and what it would take to need it less. I often use parts work here: most long-term maskers have parts that performed an emotionally taxing mask for decades, and a self underneath that never really had room to exist. Those performing parts don't need to be fired. They need to be thanked, understood, and relieved of a job they've been doing alone since childhood.

The trauma of growing up undiagnosed. Decades of being misread, corrected, bullied, or chronically invalidated leave real marks. Many late-diagnosed adults carry relational trauma that never got named because each instance looked small. For that processing work I use EMDR, adapted for neurodivergent nervous systems: titrated pacing, sensory adjustments, and no forced anything.

Burnout recovery and a life that fits. Sensory needs, energy accounting, executive function without shame, and untangling which of your coping strategies still serve you.

The intersections. Many of my neurodivergent clients are also queer, trans, kinky, or non-monogamous — communities where I'm also an insider. If several of these are true for you at once, we might be a good fit.