A clinically grounded exploration of the grief, shame, and identity shift that accompanies late or adult neurodivergent discovery.

For many clients, a late neurodivergent diagnosis, or the suspicion that they might be neurodivergent, arrives not as a simple answer, but as the beginning of something far more complicated. Relief, yes. But also grief or anger. A rewriting of everything they thought they knew about themselves.

This workshop was born from the overlap of two areas I work with most deeply: neurodiversity and grief. In clinical practice, I kept meeting clients who had received a diagnosis in adulthood, or who were circling one without yet having words for it, and finding that the emotional terrain they were navigating had no clear map in our training. I also have my own lived experience of late life diagnosis and often relate to client experiences of a misunderstood childhood. The mourning of relationships shaped by a self that was always, somehow, getting it wrong. The loss of the life that might have been, with earlier understanding and support.

Together, we will explore what it means to hold this process therapeutically, without pathologising the grief, rushing toward resolution, or inadvertently colluding with the internalised deficit narratives many neurodivergent clients carry into the room. We will look at how shame and masking operate as core clinical themes, how the therapeutic frame itself may need to be adaptive in pace, language, and structure, and what the Double Empathy Problem means to ND clients.

What makes this workshop distinctive is its refusal to separate neurodivergence from grief, because for many late-diagnosed adults, they are the same story. You will leave with a richer clinical language for this territory and greater confidence in sitting with clients who are, often for the first time, beginning to understand themselves.

Description supplied by the event organiser.