Being a Neurodivergent Mental Health Therapist: Considerations for Practicing, Growing, and Thriving
By Heather Hyland
Being a mental health professional while also being neurodivergent takes intentional considerations for you to feel supported in your work with clients and your work setting. The complexity of working in a profession built around communication, emotional attunement, relationships, and flexibility can heavily impact your nervous system requiring specific support to remain engaged in the work.
You might experience or be exposed to colleagues or supervisors’ ideas or comments that neurodivergent traits need to be fixed and corrected in order to be “effective” in your work with clients or fit into the culture and expectations of the agency. With all of these challenges, it is important for you to develop a version of professional practice that is sustainable for you and does not depend on masking.
Understanding Your Own Neurodivergent Profile
Before considering how neurodivergence affects clinical work, it can be helpful to understand yourself. What do you need in order to do your best clinical work, and what do you need to get through the workday? Consider:
- What situations are particularly stimulating or overwhelming?
- What environments help you think and function well?
- How does your neurodivergence affect communication?
- How does it affect executive functioning?
- What happens when you’re overwhelmed?
- What are your sensory needs?
- How much social interaction can you comfortably sustain?
- What types of clinical work energize you versus drain you?
Recognizing Your Clinical Strengths
Neurodivergence can bring meaningful strengths to clinical practice. Explore your potential strengths and interests, and that will help you to guide your client and administrative work.
For example, pattern recognition can be helpful in identifying themes with clients or program development that would benefit the agency. Attention to detail might help identify shifts in emotional states with clients or improve administrative processes. Deep listening, authenticity, direct communication, and a non judgmental approach support the therapeutic alliance making for meaningful work with clients.
Further, a strong sense of ethics and justice aligns with advocacy work at both a micro and macro level. Specialized interests support clinical niches and opportunities for you to train or teach others. Creative problem-solving can go beyond a manual towards services tailored for your client. Recognizing your strengths are an important piece in establishing your therapeutic approach and your identity as a therapist.
Masking and the “Professional Therapist” Persona
We all mask to a certain extent in order to participate in expected societal roles, and work is no exception. Wearing certain clothes to meet “business casual” expectations that are different from your everyday clothes. Changing eye contact, facial expressions, tone, or body language to appear a certain way that might be more expected for clients and colleagues.
Monitoring how you appear to clients by looking at yourself during a virtual session or holding as still as possible in person is another example of everyday masking. Suppressing your sensory needs because it might be distracting for someone else. Ultimately feeling like you are performing “being a therapist” or “in my therapist role” right now.
Masking is needed to show up for clients, meet work expectations, and enforce boundaries for ourselves and others. It might be helpful to consider the expectations you have of yourself and if there is an opportunity to unmask at times by understanding your own needs and having conversations with clients and colleagues. They might be more open to accepting you than you originally thought.
If you are masking during work, how are you recharging and decompressing in your off time. Do you have designated non-work times? Do you have space and time to take time for yourself? How do you recharge for the next day? These are important questions to consider when releasing the masking stress of the day.
The Emotional and Social Energy of Therapy
Therapy is relational work and relational work requires your energy and capacity. In my mind, energy is the amount of usable fuel available to perform work and capacity is the amount of space a system has to deliver the energy. These two indicators change from day to day as well as throughout the day. It can be helpful to check in with both your energy and capacity in planning your day, week, month, etc.
Consider how many sessions you can reasonably manage in a day. Decide if you need shorter breaks during the day between clients or back-to-back sessions with longer breaks before and after work. Developing blocks of time for similar work might have less impact on energy that is required for switching tasks. Scheduling time for rehearsing conversations or eliminating the time if it is not helpful.
Additionally, know that you might need to have time to analyze and process your day’s interactions by scheduling the time into your day or leaving time for it way before sleep time. These strategies can help manage the emotional and social impact of therapy on your nervous system so you can show up the way you want to for your work and be able to recharge and rest for the next day.
Neurodivergent Supportive Work Environments
Neurodivergent therapists bring valuable perspectives and clinical strengths to mental health care. Consider finding or advocating for a workplace that supports neurodivergence.
Practices that support neurodivergence include designing clinical schedules around capacity rather than availability to support you providing consistently effective clinical care for clients. This might look like realigned expectations or adding tasks outside of clinical hours such as program development, compliance, or other administrative tasks that speak to your strengths and add value to the agency.
Consider the sensory environment of the practice to support your needs. This might also look like working partially or fully remote from your own space. Look for clear expectations of responsibilities, expectations, and deadlines. External executive functioning supports like documentation templates, checklists, workflows, electronic reminders, clear prioritization systems, written procedures, and task-management systems can be helpful.
Ultimately, working towards normalizing individual support rather than making accommodations feel like an exception. A culture where people can identify with what helps them work effectively and be accepted and supported by their colleagues and supervisors can support both the neurodivergent clinician as well as the business.
How We Can Help
Clinical supervision can be an important place for neurodivergent clinicians to explore masking, burnout prevention, professional identity, strengths, areas of growth, and work relationships. Being a neurodivergent therapist isn’t about learning how to become a neurotypical therapist. It’s about developing the clinical skills, self-awareness, support, and boundaries that allow you to become the therapist you want to be.
Navigating your career as a neurodivergent therapist is an opportunity to honor the ways your brain works, recognize your unique strengths, and create a professional life that aligns with who you are. When your work environment supports your neurodivergent strengths, you can create a sustainable and fulfilling career where both you and your clients have the opportunity to thrive. Schedule a free 20-minute phone consultation to learn more about how we can support you!
Author Bio
Heather Hyland, LCSW, ACS is a clinical supervisor with Firelight Supervision. She supports therapists and mental health professionals who work with children and families by providing clinical supervision and clinical consultation for child and family therapists. Heather supports caregivers with parenting stressors, neurodivergent adults and mental health professionals working with children and families. She is also an avid reader, blog author, and mom to a human child and two cats.
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