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I Don’t Fuck With Paris
I wasn’t invited to Paris Hilton’s ADHD event. There was no dramatic refusal. No principled rejection of a pink invitation. No publicist desperately trying to reach me while I weighed my values…
Catalogue subject
#therapist
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I Didn’t Pull the Five of Swords. I Threw It at Myself.
I have been working my ass off lately. The kind of morning where you are doing seventeen things at once, holding twelve more in your head, and somehow still feeling like you haven’t done enough. The…
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Who Are You Fucking For?
We talk about unmasking at work, with friends, at home, in therapy. We talk about letting ourselves stim and communicate more directly. Wearing the clothes that don’t hurt. Leaving the party before…
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You Still Only Have Two Hands
“It doesn’t matter if you have a million tools in your toolbox. You alone only have two hands.” My client looked at me and said, essentially: You need to write about that. So I did. Because I think…
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I Don’t Look Disabled. Whatever the Fuck That Means.
*A large number of neurodivergent folks are living with dynamic disabilities - diagnosed or not so while this does not speak to the overlap, it truly is about what so many neurocomplex folks are…
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Psychic Static: The Sociocontextual Surplus of PDA
*I find that AuDHD/autistic people as a whole tend to fall on different sides of a bell curve. The same is likely true of PDAers but we do not have enough research on differential traits amongst…
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Limerence Isn’t Love, But Maybe It’s Beautiful Anyway
Limerence is not love. That matters. Love is relational. Love knows another person through reciprocity, time, friction, disappointment, repair, and the accumulation of shared reality. Limerence is…
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Why PCIT is Problematic
Let's start with what PCIT actually trains a parent to do, because the marketing language obscures it. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy asks caregivers to lavish praise and attention on a narrow band…
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What I Mean When I Say I'm PDA
What I Mean When I Say I’m PDA When I say I’m PDA, I am describing the nervous system I came to inhabit through biology, experience, adaptation, and survival. I am describing the way my body learned…
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Stripping the Mask Off
This whole piece was inspired by a Tori Amos concert. Or concerts. But I must admit, I’m not Tori’s biggest fan. Not her music anyway. But the way she shows up? The way she inhabits her body?…
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The Radical Politics of Being Misunderstood
Diagnosis has a terrible history. That is not a sentence therapists say often enough. We like to imagine the history of mental health as a steady march toward truth: each generation becoming more…
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What Do Blow Jobs, Clothing Tags, and the World’s Softest Blanket Have in Common?
They all have almost nothing to do with morality. They have everything to do with a nervous system. One person’s heaven is another person’s sensory nightmare. The shirt someone else forgets they’re…
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Second Coming (Out)
I thought I had already stood at the edge of myself with my hands shaking and my mouth full of future and said: Here. This is who I am. I had been out for decades. Out in the way queer people are…
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It's Neurodiversity Pride Day
Enough Like You There are people who say, You don’t seem queer. As if queerness is a costume instead of a life. As if they can measure decades of love with a glance. As if surviving requires no…
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Your Self-Knowledge Is Not Up for a Vote.
I am a bisexual woman married to a woman. And it’s pride month and I’m going to talk about it. Because if you relate, if you’re struggling with taking up space, with owning the fullness of who you…
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The Neurodivergent Therapy Community Has an Echo Chamber Problem
One of the things I love most about the neurodivergent community is that we challenged expertise. For decades, autistic people were studied but not listened to. ADHDers were talked about but rarely…
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The Privilege of Going Back: What It Means to Join Pride, Year After Year
There is a specific kind of aliveness that happens when you turn a corner and the street opens up — the sound before the sight, the drums and the bass finding you in the chest before your eyes have…
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Why PDA’s “Pathological Demand Avoidance” and “Pervasive Drive for Autonomy” Are Both a Problem
When people first encounter PDA, they are often handed two competing explanations. One is Pathological Demand Avoidance — a name that frames the nervous system response as disordered, irrational,…
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What's Context Got To Do With It?: What cultural expectations around communicatory context means when expressions of love and care are culturally bound
Most people think communication problems are about personality. One person is “too sensitive.” Another is “too blunt.” One “expects mind reading.” The other “doesn’t pay attention.” Breaking The…
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Holding It All Together: hEDS Awareness Month
There’s a particular kind of irony to living with a body that can partially dislocate while the world still expects you to hold everything together. It’s Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome Awareness…