These months have had their own flow – a lot of them rollercoaster, with dips and loops and breathless inclines. Yet from the outside, nothing much looks to have changed. Some changes have been internal, some external and necessary. Others a work in progress.
As always, I didn’t mean to take a seven month hiatus from blogging. It seems as if there always has to be some reason for writing, some topic I want to cover. Then I remember, when I started this blog, it wasn’t for any particular reason. It was a place to just write – about anything.
One of the biggest changes for me is that I had to change therapists. The therapist I had unexpectedly became unwell, and had a long journey back to recovery. It’s always upsetting when something comes to an end, and I was sad for a while, grieving an end to something that had become part of my recovery and wellbeing, and a relationship that helped me uncover a lot about myself that needed to be seen – one of those being my neurodivergence.
Having a deaf therapist, and having that conversation going smoothly and that aspect of my identity being understood, helped the therapeutic relationship so much.
So I was left with a question, one that became more prominent in the absence of therapy. Was I ready to stop? Or did I need to change directions and find something different? The only difficulty with my previous therapy was that the focus wasn’t on autism or ADHD, mostly just because it wasn’t the specialism.
It was a good opportunity to explore the options. I know that I’m lucky to be able to do this – and it doesn’t come without its difficulties, especially financially, but at this moment it’s possible to be able to manage these costs.
On Instagram, I follow a lot of autistic and ADHD accounts, and some of them mentioned neurodivergent affirming therapy, which seemed to me along the lines of what I’d been looking for. A lot of neurotypical-based therapy is based on therapeutic modes that don’t have training in or don’t cover how different neurodivergent people process and manage life.
As someone with ADHD for example, I can’t ‘just do it’ when it comes to creating a routine, and struggle so much with things like sleep, energy, taking care of my daily needs, chores (ie. executive functioning). I’m a perpetual planner – I like making plans and lists but when it comes to executing said plans, I stumble. I used to become incredibly frustrated with myself. This bleeds into my life goals too – I often struggle to do the things I know I love doing, that would benefit my emotional and mental wellbeing.
As an autistic person, I have trouble taking care of my social needs – reaching out to people, feeling isolated and out of the loop, but equally prone to social overstimulation. This doesn’t mean that I don’t need other people. The right people make me happy, and I like spending time with them. Having both neurotypes means I often have contradictory needs that don’t always match up. Even before I uncovered this, I always though of myself as someone who was full of contradictions.
Neurodivergent affirming therapy works with the client with their particular needs and brains, rather than following strictly neurotypical modes (such as CBT, which can be detrimental to people whose brains work differently). It is often based within person-centred therapy and therapists are usually neurodivergent themselves. Sometimes tools from other types of therapy are used and adapted.
For me as a deaf person, I wasn’t sure initially if it would work out – I worried about whether I would connect with my therapist because I’d have to use captions to follow the sessions. Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams come with in-built automatic captions, and I’d never relied on them in a sensitive environment like therapy or medical appointments because they are never 100% accurate. Like lipreading, they rely on some guesswork when the words don’t quite match the context.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised and have taken up a few useful tools suggested by my therapist. It helped that I’d come from therapy already, so had some idea of what to expect, and that I was open to making changes. One thing that I’m using so far is a visual habit tracker – yes it seems so simple! – but I think the simplicity combined with the prioritisation, and the visual nature of it (creating some dopamine – in my case with colourful stickers), is effective, for now.
It’s also helping with my imposter syndrome aka internal gaslighting when it comes to my neurodivergence. Having a therapist who understands how different all ND people are helps so much. It seems like I’m more of a sensory seeking person, and don’t have as many sensory sensitivities as some people do – potentially because I’m deaf, but also possibly because of the ADHD.
I have preferences that are quite rigid, which are probably related to sensitivities (an example is I hate strip lighting, bright lights, the ‘big light’ in a room, and prefer soft pools of light or fairy lights – I often like darker rooms), but not usually to the point that they’re painful.
Then again – I work from home, I can usually control my environment and what I eat, who I see, and where I go. That probably accounts for why I’m not bombarded with sights, sounds, smells, crowds and lots of people – which can easily become overstimulating and stressful. School was an incredibly stressful and overwhelming environment for me, both sensorily and socially. Part of that, yes, was being deaf, but in hindsight I can see there was a lot going on for me.
I often wonder what this blog is for me. If I spend months away from writing, away from the community, does that mean it’s lost its draw for me? Or is it just a symptom of the struggle I’ve had with creativity in general? My main issue seems to be a struggle between needing to make money, and the pressure that puts on my (tired, recovering from burnout) brain. I want to write, to be creative, but my cup is more depleted than it used to be.
In an ideal world, I wish that we could all just have what we need. I often feel as if having a base of stability would solve so many problems in this world. If all our basic needs were met (and I do mean everyone, including people who have more complex needs and disabilities), what could we achieve? Would we be happier? Would we be able to work together to solve some of the biggest problems of our time? How would society be structured if we could all work together to make a better world with our various skills and brains?
‘There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.’
– bell hooks
Cats and Chocolate 