I am overwhelmed by the support for my podcast. I started it 2 years ago in my bedroom because I felt different and misunderstood. Two years later, after speaking to hundreds of amazing guests, I have never been more certain that none of us are broken, we are different, and we have always been enough. Thank you so much for your support. Alex 💚

I think that therapy fails a large proportion of AuDHD people because of alexithymia and delayed emotional processing. Someone can appear fine in a therapy session, however, because of alexithymia, they struggle to identify and name their feelings in the moment; until a few hours after the session when they often arrive overwhelming the person and the therapist is no longer available. I believe AuDHD therapy should involve two sessions on the same day, with the second one 4-5 hours after the first one. That second session would be invaluable.

Therapy for an ADHD person is like explaining to a very short person that he is very short. But it won't make him taller.

I have absolutely no problems as long as I am no where near humans.

Key Points to Remember After You Watch The Video. (Thank Me Later):
1. Understanding why your brain works the way it does is just the first step, not the final goal of healing (3:54).

2. Just because you have a lot of knowledge about your ADHD or autism does not mean you have processed the emotions associated with them (3:43).

3. Therapy can sometimes feel like an intellectual exercise instead of actual healing if you only focus on analyzing your brain instead of feeling your emotions (31:17).

4. Many people with ADHD use overthinking and analyzing as a way to avoid feeling painful emotions (10:15).

5. The ADHD brain often finds it hard to switch out of the default mode network, which makes it easy to get stuck in self-reflection or rumination (16:34).

6. Masking for a long time can make you feel disconnected from your true self, making it hard to know who you really are underneath (24:32).

7. Healing begins by reconnecting with your body and learning how to feel your physical sensations, which is called interoception (36:33).

8. A good therapist helps you feel safe enough to stop analyzing and start actually experiencing and processing your feelings (38:59).

9. You do not need to be perfect at things like house chores to be worthy; it is okay to accept that some tasks will always be a struggle (18:16).

10. Healing is a slow, ongoing journey that happens through small steps and safe relationships, not a quick fix that leads to a final destination (47:18).

11. When you notice you are over-analyzing, you can try to calm your body and treat yourself with kindness instead of rushing to solve a problem (46:01).

12. Finding your true self is not just about discovering a hidden version of you, but about creating who you want to be after years of masking (51:02).

Hope I hit 100K subscribers soon.... so my dad stops thinking I’m wasting time helping people. 💪💪💪

Three decisions I made that vastly improved my life: 1)Feeling good is better than what I get out of feeling bad. 2) Feeling good is better than knowing why I feel bad. 3) Feeling good is better than proving to others how bad I feel.

I needed this today. I went to the doctor, totally fell apart in my brain and once again looked like a complete idiot to the doctor. I thought I was prepared and he walked in the room made a statement and my brain completely left the room. I looked like an anxiety ridden patient. I am so mad at myself!!!! THIS PODCAST is my therapy 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽

As an AuDHD therapist, I know therapy can be such a struggle of neurodivergent people. Please know there are therapists doing the work to specialize in helping our community. Please don’t give up if you need support! Neurodivergent affirming therapists exist and we want to help!

I honestly don't think I'd have any problems what so ever if I had money and time. Can't function today? no problem, I still get to eat and nobody yells at me. Bored? Go travelling or whatever. Emotionally dysregulated? Just hide for a week or two.
It's the constant working and burning out trying to fit into society while also not being able to afford anything substantial that is the real killer. Like, everything I deal with with ADHD isn't really a problem if I didn't have to work 40hours a week and still be broke. Yeah I'm slower than others, yeah I spend weeks unable to function properly and I burn out all the time but the only reason I feel so shit about those things is because there's a constant looming cloud of doom over my head. If I did what I needed to take care of myself, I'd end up homeless.

My experience: Most conversations about therapy and diagnostics feel like groping in the dark because they completely miss the core of the problem: the civilizational hypertrophy of convention.

From an early age, we are fed the toxic advice: "think first before you do anything." For a neurodivergent mind, this instruction is suicidal. Overanalyzing, shifting into prefrontal cortex calculation, and choking on rigid instructions literally paralyze the executive system. Spontaneous agency and automatisms collapse the moment any bureaucratic absurdity - signing a piece of paper, pressing a button, or having one's rhythm interrupted by a trivial question-blocks the path.

This creates the split mentioned in the podcast, stretching between two extremes:
Extreme conventionalization (closer to the ASD profile): rigidly clinging to instructions, rules, and external frameworks because, without them, the world falls apart.
Flight into sensation and spontaneity (closer to the ADHD profile): rebellion against conventions, seeking novelty that can fascinate, but after 15 seconds - once the novelty fades - leaves behind emptiness and exhaustion.
In reality, these postures mix and overlap. You crave routine while simultaneously longing for stimulation; you have a massive motivation for a normal, simple life (family, work, peace), but the system exhausts you physically. A convention cannot be adopted simply because you read an instruction and "grasped" it intellectually. A convention must be felt and processed somatically, and in a rushing world, new rules appear faster than the nervous system can tame them. Hence the painful paradox: theoretical knowledge of one's own functioning completely fails to translate into relief in action. You can have full awareness of your mechanisms and still get stuck trying to hit a sugar bowl with a teaspoon because the process breaks down into millions of terrifyingly crucial micro-steps.
This is most evident in clashes with the diagnostic system, which operates entirely within a register of suspicion and rigid check-boxes. When a clinician abruptly asks, "Why do you want this diagnosis?" or "What is wrong with you?", a defense mechanism triggers underneath: a sudden blank space in working memory, a block, and a feeling of being attacked. The most important, most painful, and most sincere motives - brought along from years of exhausting struggle and prompted by worried loved ones - evaporate in a second.

When a person later tries to calmly address this in retrospect, they hit a wall of incomprehension. The diagnostician perceives belated sincerity as sophisticated dodging and rationalizing, and the clinical notes end up bearing the absurd accusation that "the patient evades specific questions, but speaks fluently about ADHD symptoms because they are interested in them." As if a living, painfully experienced description of mechanisms that have poisoned your life for decades were some cynical display of erudition rather than a helpless cry for help.

The psychological tests themselves become another semantic trap. Questions about hedonism, motivation, or goals shatter against the lack of distinction between:

What I feel like doing (a purely hedonistic impulse),

What I choose to do (conscious moral or purposeful decision),

What my executive system is capable of doing (actual ability to bypass a working memory block).

When you ask how to define these states, you are simply told: "understand it however you think best." The result? Your paperwork paints you as a hedonist, while you have spent your entire life functioning in a mode of exhausting, raw asceticism, fighting for the simplest, most fundamental social goals.

This is precisely why mere "talk therapy" and consuming endless volumes of knowledge change nothing. Until systems - from diagnostics to everyday social conventions - stop treating human suffering as a suspicious algorithm to be verified, we will remain stuck in the same place: with a head full of useless, brilliant analyses and a body that simply no longer has the strength to take the next step.

Anwen Reid’s anxiety quiz showed up on my feed again today. I ignored it the first two times, but now the algorithm is making it feel personal 😂 Fine, I’m going to see what everyone keeps talking about.

We speak about masking as though us folks with autism are the only ones doing it. As I understand it, the ego of each person creates a mask. The scammer-used auto salesman who lied to me was wearing a mask, the roofer who cost me $10k to fix his mistakes wore a mask, the sales people I worked with in real estate all wore masks. The numbers of people who marry and discover their spouse isn't who he/she presented as were masking. I don't know if the difference between me and the folks who scammed me is just that I am 1. driven to be honest and 2. had to study social interactions intentionally (copying tv show dialog for small talk, learning NLP, studying Paul Ekman's book to understand emotion from facial expressions, etc). Diagnosed a year ago by a psychologist who specializes in autism in older women. Still trying to work out what that means.  I am repeatedly fooled by people--I'm too naive, too trusting.

For neurodivergent folks with NVLD/SDAM, cognitive operations aren't 'intellectualisation as a defense mechanism' – they're our primary, real-time operating system. When somatic or episodic signals aren't available, cognitive processing isn't avoidance; it's how we think, feel and remember.

Traditional therapy often fails me for this exact reason: words are how I think in real time, I don't visualise, emotion isn't granular, and implicit memory isn't activated in a way that allows re-experiencing.

Cognitive operation is essentially the only pathway open to us, and I think it's important not to inadvertently pathologise the only mechanisms some people have no choice but to use to process reality.

That letter from the last guest made me cry.
'I don't have to earn the right to be me' there's something in that for me. It stopped me in my tracks.
I think I am very skilled at analysing and rationalising feelings, then tucking them away and expecting them to stay there.
Thank you everyone :)  x

“Therapy is not so much about knowledge, and more about the experience of being connected and feeling together.” Co-regulation, in other words. I’m very autistic - high 90s percentage on all testable indicators. But if I’m with my therapist, with whom I feel a strong intuitive connection, I’m able to process emotions that never surfaced in over five decades of masking. The right person came at the right time for me. I realise what a rare privilege this is. But I suffered alone for long decades before this.

I’m super analytical myself and have the AuDHD combo. I find in the analysis, emotions come up along the way. But I have to revisit things multiple times, talking, thinking, ruminating, it becomes my only focus as I work through it. Grief is something I seem to process in drips and drabs, so rumination amps up. I see it all as one thing. My brain loves loops and monotropic focus but it also loves to zoom out and consume something from all possible angles. Eventually I’ve kind of embodied it for so long that it wears off, either my brain is satisfied or it’s lost its shine and I’m now distracted by something new. It’s bloody exhausting. Throw in complex trauma and the long term effects of that, executive functioning and processing emotions are a fucking journey to work through. It’s like taking the long way round. While it’s great I have all this knowledge, man I wish I just didn’t know. It doesn’t make me closer to knowing myself. It just helps me understand how I work. Meanwhile analysing all this shit consumes my days, weeks, months, years, and I worry I’m missing out on living and being in the moment.

Me, clicking on this: of course I think instead of feeling as much as possible, my feelings are bad and wrong and get me in trouble. Add in some CBT ('your thoughts are driving those wrong feelings, you need to address your wrong thinking to stop the wrong feelings'), and I'm going to intellectualize as much as I can because that's the way I'm being told to navigate the world if I want to hold down a job and not have everyone mad at me

I think a lot of us need more "radical acceptance" of ourselves. We don´t fit society's norms, so what!  We are different, and that is a good thing. We are still valuable and bring skill, knowledge, colour and whimsy to society. We need less shame for not fitting in and more acceptance.

Dr Mohring's genuine interest, care, understanding and validating responses in this conversation makes me envious of all of the people she has had a therapeutic relationship with - consider yourselves lucky people! Her tone in responding about interoception and emotions (37:40ish) really made me tune in and it was such an encouraging validating feeling. Thanks for what you do and how you do it Judith!

I just had a discussion with my therapist about my ADHD today. I've been struggling a lot more than normal and since having kids life feels even more out of control. He recommended I go see my psychiatrist again and work on getting my ADHD under control before working on other things like my depression. Which could very well be coming from my struggles with ADHD. So thank you for sharing this. I too, along with others in this comment section, needed this today. It helped me feel a little more calm about my therapists suggestion to see my psychiatrist again hahaha.