Bias, Rigidity, and the Exclusion of Neurodivergent Clients in Psychotherapy
Introduction
Earlier this year, I delivered this piece as a presentation for the EAIP Congress. It was not recorded or shared publicly, but writing it shifted something in me. It helped me name the distortions I have witnessed in psychotherapy when Neurodivergent clients are viewed through frameworks that were never built with us in mind. I wanted to make this piece available in written form, partly to anchor my own thinking and partly in the hope that it might offer something meaningful to therapists, parents, and Neurodivergent people who recognise themselves in these reflections.
As always, any client stories shared here are not descriptions of individual people. They are carefully created composites drawn from patterns, themes, and repeated experiences in my practice. No identifying details have been used and confidentiality remains fully protected.
Good morning, and thank you for being here.
My name is Gráinne Warren. I work primarily with Neurodivergent children, young people, and their families, through play therapy, supervision, and creative approaches. My practice is rooted in trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and neuroaffirming ways of working.
I also want to name that I am myself Neurodivergent, Autistic, ADHD, and PDA. This shapes how I experience the world, how I work as a therapist, and how I’ve come to see the gaps and distortions that can appear in psychotherapy frameworks when they meet Neurodivergent lives.
And I want to also say something here about language. When I use the word Neurodivergent, I’m aware it holds many realities. And humans are complex, many of us experience more than one form of difference at once. Today I’ll be speaking mostly about Autistic and ADHD realities, because that’s both my lived experience and much of my practice. But the reflections I’m offering about mirrors, about distortion, about the cost of misrecognition, may resonate more broadly across neurodivergence.
The theme of this congress is Opening the Door. For me, that means asking: when clients come into therapy hoping to be seen, what reflection are they actually met with? And what happens when the mirrors we hold up bend their truth?
And as we think about inclusion, it feels important to name intersectionality because inclusion that isn’t intersectional will always be incomplete. When voices from BBIPOC communities, or from those living at intersections of race, culture, gender, class, and neurodivergence are absent, the mirror of psychotherapy only reflects part of human experience.
A mirror that reflects only some lives is not a clear mirror. It bends reality, distorts truth, and risks doing harm. If we are serious about opening the door to inclusion, then we must also be serious about ensuring the mirrors of our profession reflect the full diversity of human experience.
And the same distortion happens more broadly for Neurodivergent people. When our ways of connecting, regulating, and being in the world are filtered through frameworks not built for us, the mirror bends. Our realities are reflected back as deficit or disorder, and that distortion carries its own harm.
That’s what I want to reflect on with you today, the ways our mirrors bend when it comes to Neurodivergent clients. How our frameworks, our training, and sometimes even our language distort Autistic and ADHD realities. And how, if we want to open the door to genuine inclusion, we need to start by clearing the mirror. At the heart of this is something very simple, very human, and very profound: our need to be mirrored.
When I sit with children and young people in my work, I’m always struck by how often they are looking, not just at me, but into me. Noticing my reactions, my body, the way I meet them. And it reminds me of something simple and profound: from the very beginning of life, we come to know ourselves through others. We need to be mirrored. We need to see our reality reflected back to us in order to trust that it’s real.
A baby smiles, and if that smile is mirrored, it grows into a sense of joy. A child shares their interest by bringing an object, showing you a picture, or simply turning toward what they love, and if that interest is noticed, they learn it matters. A teenager expresses anger, and if it’s recognised rather than shamed, they learn their feelings are valid. To be mirrored is not a luxury, it’s fundamental to human development and belonging.
For Neurodivergent people, this need is no different. In fact, it may be even more vital, because so often our experience goes unmirrored or mis-mirrored. In school, a child’s way of connecting might be reflected back as wrong. At home, a young person’s way of regulating might be seen as defiance. In wider society, an adult’s way of processing might be mirrored back as failure or dysfunction. Over time, these distorted reflections sink in. The message becomes internalised: ‘Who I am is not valid. Who I am cannot be seen as I am.’
The therapy room should be different. It should be the one space where clients can risk showing themselves and find an accurate reflection waiting for them. But I want to invite us to ask a difficult question together: what if even here, in this space that promises attunement, our mirrors are still distorted? What if the very frameworks we lean on, the attachment maps, the regulation charts, the trauma models, are quietly bending the reflection, until what the client sees is not themselves, but our assumptions, our rigidity, our inherited lens?
Today I want to explore with you what happens when psychotherapy’s mirrors distort Neurodivergent experience. What it costs clients, what it costs us as therapists, and what it does to the relationship between us. And then I want to ask: what would it take to become clearer mirrors? Mirrors that reflect difference as truth, not pathology. Mirrors that allow clients, especially Neurodivergent clients, to finally see themselves as they are.
Because inclusion isn’t only about who gets through the door. It’s also about what reflection they find when they arrive.
But before we go further, I want to invite you into a moment of reflection. Think back to a time in your own life when you felt unseen or misinterpreted, when someone reflected back to you a version of yourself that felt wrong, distorted, incomplete. What did that feel like in your body? What story did it whisper to you about yourself? And then imagine: what if that had been your daily experience, for years, in every important relationship? What would that have done to your sense of self?
That is the lived reality of many Neurodivergent people. And it is why mirroring, accurate, nuanced, compassionate mirroring, is not just a therapeutic technique, but an ethical responsibility.
Now let’s look at how our mirrors can get distorted in practice. I want to focus on three familiar frameworks: attachment theory, regulation models, and trauma models.
These are powerful maps. They’ve shaped much of modern psychotherapy, and they’ve helped many of us make sense of human experience. But no map is ever neutral. Each one carries cultural assumptions about what connection should look like, what regulation should feel like, what counts as trauma.
And sometimes, when we apply them too rigidly, the mirror bends. The reflection we offer our Neurodivergent clients doesn’t show their truth, it shows the framework’s assumptions. That’s where the distortion begins.
Attachment Theory
Attachment theory gives us a powerful language for safety and relationship. But it was imagined through a very particular lens: the neuronormative infant, in a Western cultural context. Eye contact, verbal reciprocity, smiling, proximity, these became the benchmarks of secure attachment. They are valid ways of connecting, but they are not the only ways.
For many Autistic children and adults, connection looks different. It might be parallel play, shared attention to an object, or simply being together in silence. These are moments of intimacy and resonance, but they don’t always register as connection through the attachment lens. The child who is deeply engaged in parallel play may be mirrored back as avoidant. The teenager who seeks space may be mirrored as insecure. And over time, those reflections whisper: ‘My way of loving must be wrong.’
This distortion reaches into family life too. As an Autistic parent raising Autistic children, I know that connection doesn’t always look like constant closeness. When we come home after school and work, often we each retreat to our own rooms. That dispersal isn’t detachment, it’s how we recover, how we regulate, so that later we can meet again with more capacity. For us, space is part of love. But through the attachment lens, this rhythm can be misinterpreted as unhealthy, even unsafe.
And here’s the cost: not only is the child mis-mirrored, but the parent is too. An Autistic parent may find their authentic way of nurturing pathologised, and they are left carrying shame, shame for not fitting the mould of ‘healthy attachment,’ shame for parenting in a way that actually protects both them and their child. That shame doesn’t come from the relationship itself. It comes from the distorted mirror of theory.
When the mirror bends in this way, Autistic ways of connecting, whether between therapist and client, or parent and child, risk being erased or misnamed. And what gets lost is the truth: that space and stillness can be just as much a sign of secure attachment as closeness and reciprocity. Different mirrors, different truths, no less valid.
Regulation Models / Window of Tolerance
The second framework I want to look at is the window of tolerance. Many of us use this, a neat diagram with a middle zone for regulation, hyper-arousal above, hypo-arousal below. Inside the window = regulated. Outside the window = dysregulated. It’s simple, it’s accessible, and it makes sense. But look closely at what’s being valued here. Regulation is equated with calm, balance, stillness. Anything else is seen as a problem.
But Neurodivergent bodies don’t always move in steady, balanced lines. ADHD rhythms, for example, are often pulsating, bursts of energy, then collapse, then energy again. Autistic regulation can look like intensity: deep immersion in a special interest, stimming, scripting, entering a flow state. These are not failures of regulation. They are regulation. They are the very things that allow many Neurodivergent people to cope, to engage, to thrive.
And yet, when these rhythms are seen only through the window of tolerance, the mirror bends. The child who regulates by pacing is told they are hyper-aroused. The teenager who scripts or stims is told they are outside the window. The adult who needs silence after a long day is told they are shutting down. Their authentic ways of regulating are mirrored back as dysregulation, even as failure.
This distortion shows up in families too. Think about the end of the school day: a child comes home carrying hours of sensory and social demand. They retreat to their room, stim, or dive into Minecraft or Fortnite to recharge. At the same time, their ADHD parent might collapse on the couch, then re-emerge in a burst of energy to cook dinner at 9 p.m. These rhythms look chaotic from the outside. But they are not chaos. They are the body’s wisdom, finding its own balance.
The problem is that our cultural story of regulation is linear: steady energy, balanced moods, calm as the gold standard. When families don’t match that story, they risk being judged as unstable, chaotic, and unsafe. Parents absorb shame, shame for not providing a ‘calm home,’ shame for their child’s need to retreat, shame for their own uneven rhythms. But the shame is not in the body. It’s in the mirror that reflects those rhythms as wrong.
So I want to ask: what happens to a client’s sense of self when even their natural ways of regulating are mirrored back as disorder? And what happens to parents, when the very rhythms that sustain their family are misread as dysfunction? The mirror doesn’t just bend here. It teaches people to mistrust the wisdom of their own bodies.
Trauma Models
And then we come to trauma models. Most of us are trained to see shutdown, avoidance, or collapse through a trauma lens: dissociation, fight, flight, freeze. And yes, those maps can be useful. They help us make sense of how the body responds to overwhelming threat. But what happens when trauma is assumed to be the only explanation? And what happens when the only traumas our frameworks really know how to name are ruptures, abuse, neglect, misattunement?
For Neurodivergent people, there is another form of trauma that often goes unrecognised: burnout. And I want to be clear Neurodivergent burnout is trauma. But it does not always fit the categories we’re trained in. It’s not simply an acute rupture. It’s not only the familiar ‘small-t’ relational traumas of neglect or misattunement. Burnout is slow, cumulative, and systemic.
It emerges from the daily layering of demands that exceed capacity; from micro-invalidations and mis-mirroring; from sensory overwhelm and the relentless pressure of masking; from living in environments not designed with you in mind.
This kind of trauma doesn’t arrive in one moment. It builds across years. It is not only relational in the narrow sense of parent and child, therapist and client. It is relational in the broadest sense: the relationship between body and environment, person and culture, Neurodivergent child and an educational system that keeps asking for more than they can give. It is the relationship between parent and system, too, the Autistic or ADHD parent worn down by having to bend themselves daily to structures that don’t bend for them.
So what happens in the mirror? A therapist sees a client in collapse and reflects back: ‘You’re dissociating, you’re resistant, you’re avoiding.’ But the clearer mirror might say:‘Your body has been carrying too much for too long. This exhaustion is not failure, it is the impact of systems that keep pushing you beyond your capacity.’
The tragedy is that when we misname burnout, we don’t just get the words wrong, we offer the wrong support. If we treat burnout only as dissociation or avoidance, we risk pushing for more exposure, more engagement, more effort, when what’s needed is retreat, recovery, and systemic change. Burnout needs a different therapeutic stance: one that validates exhaustion, centres capacity, and recognises that the client’s system has done its best to survive in an environment that has not adapted to them.
When we miss this, we don’t just individualise burnout. We pathologise it. We erase its systemic roots. And we leave clients and their families carrying shame for what is, in fact, an understandable and embodied toll of living in a world not designed for their neurotype.
So across these three frameworks — attachment, regulation, trauma — we see the same pattern. The mirror is not neutral. It reflects cultural norms about what connection should look like, what regulation should feel like, what trauma should consist of. And when a Neurodivergent client looks into that mirror, they don’t see their truth. They see distortion. They see pathology. They see a version of themselves that is wrong.
And that distortion doesn’t just sit quietly. It seeps into a client’s sense of self, into a parent’s sense of adequacy, into the trust between client and therapist. Mis-mirroring has consequences. For clients, it can mean shame, masking, disconnection. For parents, it can mean guilt and doubt. For therapists, it can mean defensiveness or rigidity. And for the therapeutic relationship itself, it can mean the very opposite of what we hope for, not an open door, but a closed one.
So before we can talk about clearer mirrors, we need to be honest about the cost of distorted ones. What happens when mis-mirroring is repeated, year after year? What does it do to clients, to us, and to the fragile space between us? That’s where I want to turn next.
So what is the cost of these distorted mirrors? What happens when clients consistently look into us and see not themselves, but a bent reflection shaped by bias, rigidity, and cultural norms?
The Cost to Clients
For Neurodivergent clients, the cost is first and foremost misattunement. They show us connection, and it’s reflected back as avoidance. They show us regulation, and it’s reflected back as dysregulation. They show us exhaustion, and it’s reflected back as resistance. Each time, there is a tiny fracture. And fractures, repeated over years, become fault lines.
The message is absorbed: ‘I am not as I should be.’ Clients begin to doubt their own experience. ‘If the therapist says I’m insecure, maybe I am. If they say I’m dysregulated, maybe I can’t trust my body. If they say I’m traumatised in ways I don’t recognise, maybe I’m broken.’ Over time, doubt becomes shame. And shame is a heavy weight to carry.
What many of us call masking, that exhausting act of suppressing one’s authentic self in order to appear acceptable, is, at its heart, a survival strategy born of mis-mirroring. If my truth is always reflected back as wrong, then I learn to hide it. To twist myself into shapes that will produce a reflection closer to what the world expects. But the cost of that is disconnection from self.
And this doesn’t only affect clients. Parents, too, are often mis-mirrored, told that their way of relating or supporting is wrong. Over time, they can begin to doubt their instincts, even when those instincts are exactly what their child needs.
Imagine for a moment: if every mirror you looked into bent your reflection, how long before you stopped trusting your own face?
The Cost to Therapists
And mis-mirroring costs us therapists, too. Frameworks give us a sense of safety. They reassure us that we know what we’re doing. That we can understand and categorise and explain. And that feels good, it protects us from the discomfort of not-knowing.
But when a client doesn’t fit the map and many Neurodivergent clients don’t, that safety collapses. We can feel inadequate, unprepared, even threatened. Sometimes, rather than admitting the map is limited, we double down. We insist on the framework even more rigidly, because it makes us feel competent again. But in that moment, curiosity and humility are lost. The living, breathing client in front of us is overshadowed by our need for certainty.
And here’s the paradox: the more we cling to certainty, the more distorted the mirror becomes.
The Cost to the Relationship
And of course, there is a cost to the therapeutic relationship itself. Therapy depends on trust. On the fragile belief that here, at least, I will be seen. But if the reflection keeps bending, if the mirror keeps showing pathology instead of truth, trust is eroded. The client pulls back. The therapist pushes harder. The space between them narrows into frustration, rupture, silence.
The door that therapy promised to open, the door to belonging, to healing, to self-recognition, quietly closes. And for the Neurodivergent client, it may confirm a painful story they already carry: ‘Even here, I cannot be seen.’
Reflection
So the cost of mis-mirroring is not abstract. It is lived. For clients, it is shame, masking, disconnection from self. For parents, it is guilt and doubt. For therapists, it is false certainty, loss of curiosity, loss of humility. For the relationship, it is rupture and mistrust.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about awareness. Because the moment we become aware of our distorted mirrors, we also open the possibility of changing them.
And sometimes the distortion goes even deeper. It isn’t only that a client’s connection or regulation is misnamed it’s when their very identity is dismissed. I want to pause here to name one of the most painful forms of mis-mirroring I’ve seen: the gatekeeping of identity.
It often shows up in moments when clients bravely name their own neurodivergence “I think I might be Autistic,” “I wonder if I have ADHD.” Instead of curiosity, they’re met with dismissal:
“Don’t label yourself.”
“You don’t look Autistic.”
“Autism and ADHD are being OVER diagnosed”
Or the one I hear most often: “No, that’s just trauma.”
On the surface, these statements can sound clinical, cautious, even protective. But to the client, they land as erasure. They don’t just bend the mirror they shut it down altogether. And the impact is weighty: rupture in the relationship, a deepening of shame, and a powerful message that self-knowledge is not to be trusted.
And this points to a broader issue in psychotherapy: the authority we hold over what counts as valid. Therapists are trained, implicitly or explicitly, to decide what’s “real.” And when we assume that trauma explains everything, that every shutdown is dissociation, every withdrawal avoidance, every intensity hyperarousal, we erase neurodivergence as a reality in its own right.
I want to be honest here: this gatekeeping doesn’t only come from neuronormative therapists. I’ve seen it happen with therapists who are themselves Neurodivergent but haven’t recognised it. Years of masking and internalised ableism can make it unbearable to face difference directly. And when that’s unexamined, it gets projected. A client’s Autistic way of being is dismissed not because it isn’t real, but because the therapist cannot bear to name it in themselves.
This is the cost of gatekeeping. When we dismiss a client’s named identity, we don’t only cause rupture. We hand them shame. We teach them that their self-knowledge is invalid, that their attempt to be seen is too much, too wrong. And if therapy can’t hold space for identity, then where can they turn?
And yet, the same moment that can cause rupture and shame can also be the moment of repair, if instead of shutting the door, we hold up a clearer mirror. That’s where I want to turn now: what it looks like when the therapy room reflects Neurodivergent clients back to themselves with accuracy, compassion, and truth.
When a client has spent years seeing themselves reflected back as avoidant, dysregulated, resistant, the first moment of being mirrored clearly can be incredibly healing. It doesn’t erase all the fractures, but it can begin to soften the shame, restore trust, and reconnect someone with their own truth. Clearer mirrors don’t just prevent harm, they can help repair it.
I want to bring this idea to life with three short stories. As I share them, I invite you to listen for the mirror, what’s being reflected back, and what’s being distorted.
Story 1: Building Side by Side
A seven-year-old Autistic child sits in the playroom. He picks up Lego and begins to build silently. I sit alongside him. After a while, he silently hands me a piece. He doesn’t look at me, but there’s a quiet rhythm between us. This is his way of connecting.
Now imagine the mirror of attachment theory, applied rigidly. A therapist might say: ‘He’s not seeking proximity, not making eye contact, not engaging in reciprocal play. This looks avoidant, insecure.’ That’s the reflection he receives: ‘Your way of connecting is avoidant.’
But what if the mirror was clearer? What if the therapist simply said: ‘I notice you’re sharing pieces with me. We’re building side by side. This is your way of being with me.’ The reflection then becomes: ‘Your way of connecting is seen. It is valid.’
Story 2: Thinking on the Move
A fourteen-year-old ADHD girl paces the therapy room. Her words spill quickly, her body restless, her thoughts jumping from one idea to another. This is how she thinks, how she processes, how she regulates.
Through the window of tolerance, the mirror might say: ‘She’s outside her window, she’s hyper-aroused, she needs strategies to regulate back into her window of tolerance.’ In other words, the focus is placed on regulation, on helping her ‘come down’ into calm, when in reality this movement is her regulation. This is what allows her to stay connected and present.
So the reflection she receives is: ‘The way your body and mind work is dysregulated.’
But what if the mirror was clearer? What if instead the therapist said: ‘I notice your body moving as you talk. It seems like this movement helps you stay with your thoughts. Your energy has a rhythm to it.’ That reflection says: ‘Your way of regulating is seen. It makes sense.’
Story 3: Burnout and Rest
An Autistic young person arrives to therapy after months of school refusal. They describe exhaustion, brain fog, feeling like they can’t get out of bed. They are in Autistic burnout, the toll of chronic demand and masking.
Through mainstream trauma models, the mirror might say: ‘This is dissociation, depression, avoidance rooted in fear.’ A lot of the time it’s labelled as anxiety because we have a habit, as a field, of naming almost every expression of overwhelm or shutdown as anxiety. But when we do that, we miss the truth. Not everything is anxiety. Sometimes it is simply the body saying: ‘enough.’
So the reflection this young person receives is: ‘Your collapse is pathology. It doesn’t make sense in its own right.’
But what if the mirror was clearer? What if the therapist said: ‘It sounds like your body has been carrying too much for too long, and it’s asking for rest. Burnout is your system’s way of saying enough.’ That reflection tells them: ‘Your exhaustion is not failure. It is a response to harm.’
The difference matters, because one reflection pushes the client to fight harder against themselves, while the other validates that their body is making sense. And most of the time what needs to change is not the client, but the environment around them.
Gathering the Threads
In each of these stories, the client is offering us something of their truth. And in each case, the mirror can bend or it can reflect more clearly. The difference is not small. One reflection whispers shame: ‘You are wrong.’ The other whispers recognition: ‘You are seen.’
And this, I think, is the crux of the work. Every moment of therapy is a mirror. Every word we use, every interpretation we offer, tells the client something about who they are. The question is: are we distorting, or are we reflecting? Are we repeating the harm of mis-mirroring, or are we breaking the cycle?
So if every word, every look, every interpretation is a mirror, then how do we keep those mirrors clear?
One of the ways I’ve found most protective is through creative practice.
Creative Modalities as Clearer Mirrors
So far we’ve looked at distorted mirrors, and at what happens when therapy reflects back avoidance instead of connection, dysregulation instead of rhythm, pathology instead of burnout.
But I also want to explore what helps us protect against those distortions, what helps us hold clearer mirrors.
For me, one of the most powerful protections is creativity.
When we work with play, art, movement, metaphor, music, sand, story, we create a space where the client’s truth doesn’t have to pass through rigid categories before it can be seen.
A drawing doesn’t need to prove secure attachment.
A rhythm tapped on a drum doesn’t have to fit inside a window of tolerance.
A character in a story doesn’t have to be mapped against diagnostic criteria.
The expression is there, alive, embodied.
Our role is not to translate it into theory, but to witness it, hold it, reflect it.
And that’s the gift of creative modalities: they act as a protective barrier to distorted mirrors.
Because when a person builds a world in sand, or paints in colour, or scripts lines from a TV show, the mirror is right there in front of us.
The question is not “how does this fit into my framework?” but “what truth is being shown here?”
I think of a child who spent months in my playroom building elaborate mazes with marbles.
To some, it might have looked repetitive, avoidant, even obsessive.
But through the creative process, the maze became a metaphor for his own nervous system, winding paths, blocked routes, sudden drops.
Sitting with him in that world allowed me to witness his regulation, his overwhelm, his persistence, without imposing a lens of pathology.
The maze became the mirror.
He saw himself reflected not in my interpretation, but in his creation.
Creativity protects against distortion because it shifts the power.
Instead of the therapist deciding what a behaviour “means,” the client externalises their truth in a form they can see, shape, and share.
That externalisation creates a triangle: client, creation, therapist.
And in that triangle, the mirror is less likely to bend because the client can look at their own creation and say, “Yes, that’s me,” or “No, that doesn’t fit.”
Their self-knowledge stays central.
And here’s something else: creative modalities invite us, as therapists, to let go of certainty.
When I sit with paint, clay, movement, I cannot predict exactly what it means.
I have to stay curious, to enter a space of not-knowing.
And that humility is itself protective.
It softens the mirror, keeps it clearer, because I am less tempted to force meaning too quickly.
Inclusion, at its heart, is about making space for multiple truths.
Creativity makes that space tangible.
It opens doors to expression beyond words, beyond neurotypical norms, beyond the narrow frameworks we’re trained in.
And when we combine inclusivity, creativity, and neurodivergence, something new becomes possible: a therapy that doesn’t just avoid harm, but actively celebrates difference.
So if distorted mirrors bend reality, creative practice can help straighten it again.
It can hold up reflection without judgement, without translation, without distortion.
And in that, it becomes not just a method, but an ethic, a way of ensuring that when our clients risk showing themselves, what they see in return is not pathology, but truth.
But even creativity doesn’t make us neutral.
Because the mirror is never just the modality, it’s us.
So far, I’ve spoken about distorted mirrors in terms of frameworks. But the mirror is also us. Who we are in the room, our histories, our biases, our neurotypes, all shape the reflection we hold up.
The Myth of Neutrality
Psychotherapy training often holds up the idea of neutrality. That if we study enough theory, if we’re steady enough, we can reflect a client’s truth without distortion. But no mirror is ever neutral. Every reflection bends. The real question is not whether bias is present, but whether we can notice it, name it, and soften its impact.
Our Neurotypes Matter
I know this in my own body. I’m Autistic, ADHD, and PDA (and a lot more). My neurotype is part of the mirror I carry.
Sometimes it sharpens clarity. I can see connection in silence, regulation in movement, safety in refusal because I’ve lived those states. My mirror can catch truths that others might miss.
But my mirror bends, too. I can project my own meanings onto clients. I might assume their shutdown feels like mine, or their avoidance functions like mine when it may not.
Neuronormative therapists bend the mirror differently. Autistic connection may be mirrored as avoidance. ADHD intensity as dysregulated. Refusal as defiance. Not out of malice, but because those states don’t resonate with their lived reality.
Every one of us brings our own mirror into the room and every mirror carries both clarity and distortion.
My Own Doubt
And I want to be transparent here. There are moments, even as I speak about this today, when doubt creeps in. Internalised ableism whispers: ‘Am I really seeing this clearly, or am I projecting? Do I even belong in this room, saying these things?’
I name this because I don’t think I’m alone in it. Every therapist, whatever their neurotype, carries doubt. We all worry about bending the mirror too far. And maybe that’s not a weakness, but a sign that we’re paying attention. Because the moment I admit my mirror bends, I also open the possibility of clearing it.
Even my mirror carries distortion. Owning that is part of holding a clearer mirror.
Curiosity and Not-Knowing
And this is where curiosity and not-knowing become vital. When I feel that doubt, I have a choice. I can cling to certainty, to theory, to projection, to control. Or I can let doubt soften me.
I can hold multiple possibilities at once. I can say: ‘I don’t fully know this, but I believe you. Teach me how to see you more clearly.’ That’s not a failure of competence. That’s humility. That’s inclusion.
Closing: What Kind of Mirror Do You Want to Be?
So let’s return to the image we began with: the mirror. Clients come into therapy carrying a lifetime of distorted reflections. They look into families, schools, systems, and see themselves bent into shapes that don’t belong to them. And when they come to us, they are hoping for something different. A place where the mirror is clear.
But we’ve seen today how easily our mirrors distort too. Through attachment theory, where authentic Autistic connection can be mirrored back as avoidance. Through regulation models, where ADHD rhythm and Autistic intensity can be mirrored back as dysregulation. Through trauma models, where the slow, insidious trauma of burnout can be erased. We’ve seen how these distortions carry real costs: shame, self-doubt, masking, disconnection. We’ve seen how they cost us as therapists, and how they fracture the therapeutic relationship.
And yet we’ve also seen that the mirror can be clearer. That humility, curiosity, compassionate language, and not-knowing allow clients to see themselves reflected more truthfully. That when we soften our grip on certainty, the reflection sharpens.
And when a client sees themselves clearly, even for the first time, something shifts. Old fractures begin to heal. A more truthful story of self can take root.
Inclusion in psychotherapy is not only about opening doors, but also about clearing mirrors so that clients, especially Neurodivergent clients, can finally see themselves as they are. And while I’ve spoken mostly about neurodivergence, the challenge is wider. If we are serious about inclusion, we must also ask: whose realities are still missing from our mirrors altogether?
So I want to leave you with one last question: when your next client looks into you, what will they see? Their reality, or your version of it? Distortion, or recognition? Because in the end, the kind of mirror we choose to be will determine whether therapy becomes another closed door, or the first place someone sees their reflection clearly, and believes it.
Thank you.
