Therapy & Coaching for Late Discovered AuDHD / ADHD / Autistic Women
You are highly sensitive. Either too much or not enough. Motherhood or perimenopause have pushed you to the limit. Now it’s time to truly understand and prioritise yourself.
I see you. You’ve spent your life meeting everyone else’s needs, shape-shifting and adapting to what was required of you. First in education, desperate to fit in and be liked, trying to navigate friendships, and achieve academically at the same time. Then you took those same diligent, striving, perfectionist tendencies into your work. You did well, but the cracks were beginning to show.
Perhaps chronic health issues tripped you up. Or you found that your usual strategies for productivity and control backfired spectacularly in motherhood. Or perimenopause and sandwich generation pressures were the tipping point into burnout. Whatever the reason that has brought you here, you’ve reached a stage where you know something has to change. Your usual way of coping and pushing through isn’t working any more.
Now you are beginning to wonder if something else has been going on. Perhaps you already know it is ADHD and/or Autism. You want to get back to your old self, but part of you knows that old self would soon have you being distracted by being busy all the time, saying yes to everything, and resenting it at the same time.
Help from someone who gets it
Many of my clients have spent a lifetime trying to mask who they are to please other people. They’ve played by the rules, only to find that the goalposts keep shifting. It starts to dawn on them.
The organisation where they contributed years of hard work doesn’t care about them in return. The health and social systems they turn to for help minimise and misunderstand their problems. Even their friends and family may not appreciate who they really are. They often don’t know themselves.
Then something happens that triggers a wake up call: redundancy, burnout, chronic illness, motherhood, divorce, menopause, caring for elderly parents, realising that your child is neurodivergent, perhaps seeing yourself in them.
It is at this point that there is an opportunity. Either continue trying to follow a set of rules that were never written for you. Or start writing the rules on your own terms.
Your usual ways of coping aren’t working… but you don’t know how to change
You have realised that pushing yourself to the max, being seen as super competent, staying up all night to hyper-focus, saying yes to volunteering at the fundraiser then regretting it later, pretending to be high performing when inside you feel like a failure, is no longer sustainable.
You want to be present for the things and the people you love, but you find yourself distracted, overwhelmed, and unable to close the hundreds of open tabs in your mind. A low background hum of anxiety is always there in the background.
You have spent so long holding it together that the only alternative seems like falling apart. You are teetering on the brink of burnout most of the time. You don’t even know what you need or want because you’ve always gone along with what’s expected of you.
Perhaps you’ve already tried
Therapy - but you felt stuck going over the same old ground, and your therapist didn’t understand your contradictions and depth of feeling, or worse still, made you feel judged.
Coaching - but surface level goals never addressed underlying issues, and you felt like a failure for not making the changes you’d committed to each session.
Self help books - but you gave up on implementing the frameworks and advice because it felt too restrictive, even though you were looking for structure.
Online courses - but the momentum you felt on the live calls dried up and the resources were consigned to a folder of doom and forgotten passwords on your computer.
Cognitive approaches - but reframing your thoughts did not satisfy your need for deeper, more embodied change.
What’s different about working with me?
Lived experience. Human-ness. Authenticity.
I am a late discovered AuDHD post menopausal woman living with a partner who has ADHD, and a blended family who have varying shades of OCD, Dyslexia, ADHD and Autism. I also care for elderly parents. I know what it’s like to have to keep yourself together while being the one who everyone else relies on.
Relating at depth.
I can’t expect you to feel safe enough to be authentic unless am myself. What that means in practice is that I often share my own experiences and vulnerabilities so that you feel less alone.
Comfortable with complexity.
I meet you with a deep acceptance of how you are on any given day. If you don’t know what to talk about, we can focus on specific areas that I know will help. I provide insights and tools that help to guide our conversation. But if you are someone who needs to tell me EVERYTHING, we can go as wide ranging and expansive and philosophical as you need to go. I’m here for all of it.
Expertise and intuition.
I’m a life long student of the human condition, trained in psychology, philosophy, mindfulness, perinatal yoga, humanistic counselling and somatic coaching. I’ve led several different lives. From corporate career ladder to self-employed meaning seeker. From city dweller to country bumpkin. From happily childfree to mother at 40. I bring it all into a blend of expertise and intuition that you can’t get from a conversation with ChatGPT at 3.00am.
What I offer
FINDING CLARITY
90 minute session to explore what is going on for you at the moment
A single session to dive into your current issues (we can usually cover up to 3 topics) and work out what to do next. You get a write up of the main themes with suggestions of what to focus on.
This is a good place to begin if you’ve had an ADHD or Autism assessment, but you weren’t expecting the emotional unravelling that comes afterwards. Or if you are not sure whether you even need or want a label but would like to talk it through. Or if life is simply hitting you harder than you think it should through matrescence, perimenopause, or other key transitions. We can also discuss whether longer term therapeutic coaching (see Making Sense of Yourself) would be helpful.
MAKING SENSE
3 month exploration into how ADHD and/or Autism might make sense of things for you
You know that you are highly sensitive, but you suspect there may be something else going on. You want to stop pretending to be someone you are not. But it’s hard to be true to yourself when you don’t know who you are any more. This is my invitation to learn to work with, rather than against, your authentic self.
Learn about how ADHD and/or Autism may be impacting your life and what to do about it. Go deeper in your understanding of nervous system regulation. Quieten down all the internal and external noise that becomes overwhelming. Find ways to rest and work that are sustainable for you. Repair your relationship with yourself and others.
Who am I?
I’m Ali, a late discovered AuDHD therapist and coach. My special interest is studying what makes other people tick, but it took me until my 50s to figure out why I felt so different, and what to do about it. I spent many years stuck in repeated cycles of high masking, disguising my own limits to others and myself, only to crash and withdraw when things got too much. Now I’ve found a different way to be in the world that honours my unique way of being and enables me to show up for the people and things I care about without burning out. I can help you do the same.
