If we say we support neurodiversity and work with neurodivergent clients, it is worth taking a good look at our own consulting room, too.
Can you adjust the lighting? How comfortable will the client be sitting there? Can they choose to sit on an exercise ball or use a balance board to help regulate themselves? What sounds and smells are there? I once had a client for whom I removed the battery from the clock before our sessions: its ticking made it difficult for him to hear me.
How often can clients take breaks or pause briefly? Can you follow the client’s pace and attune to it?
These are practical considerations worth attending to at every stage of the assessment process.
Traditional mental health frameworks often draw on a medical model that can be inherently pathologizing. A deficit-based perspective still has a strong influence: it closely examines whatever falls outside the “norm.” This approach focuses on what is “wrong and needs fixing,” while overlooking the whole person, with their wealth of possibilities and individual combination of characteristics. It can also be extremely harsh and hurtful in the way it formulates diagnoses and recommends directions for development. If we notice only pathology, our recommendations may communicate a sense of “not being enough” in every area.
More recent approaches ask how the environment can adapt to the person. The work should begin in the areas where the client has already experienced success. Before coming to see you, they have often received more than enough messages from the world that “something is wrong with them.” They need support to begin trusting themselves—and to believe that they can cope.
When we begin therapeutic support with the areas where a client is successful and explore how they achieved that success, we help them recognize their own adaptive strategies and begin using them in other areas of life.
This is what therapy that supports neurodivergent clients should look like.
Related reading in English
- Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence: What Is the Difference?
- Regulation and Self-Regulation
- A Child’s Individual Profile in DIRFloortime®
- Following the Child’s Lead Does Not Mean Doing Nothing
- High Sensitivity in Neurodivergent People
Neurodivergence resources · DIRFloortime® · Sessions, training, and supervision