and why it’s so spot on for neurodivergent minds

I didn’t set out to invent a new way of working. For a long time, I simply said I was a coach, with a strong caveat. Coaching is often described as future-focused only. About techniques, tools, tips, hacks. Useful things, sometimes. But to me, that always felt incomplete.

If we don’t understand why we do what we do, how are we supposed to change in any meaningful way? Most of our patterns exist for a reason. They worked once. They kept us safe, helped us cope, got us through something. Yet so often, coaching language skips straight past that and asks us to push forward anyway.

When we can’t, we tend to turn on ourselves. Lazy. Weak-willed. Disorganised. Chaotic. Words handed to us by systems and diagnoses that rarely offer a kinder explanation. The kind of coaching I practise makes room for the full story instead. For the past, feelings, bodies and nervous systems. For pauses. Coaching where someone might spiral out of control over a throwaway comment in a colleague’s email, and we take that seriously.

It never quite fit the traditional definition, but it worked. People settled. Things shifted. Nervous systems softened. And clients kept saying things like, “This feels different,” or, “I’ve never felt this understood before.” I just didn’t have a neat name for it.

When I first heard another coach mention therapeutic coaching, it felt like coming home. Oh. That’s the work. That’s what I do. Not something I needed to pivot into, rebrand, or invent. Something I had already grown into by being in the room with neurodivergent people for years, listening carefully, and responding to what was actually needed.

Therapeutic coaching, as I understand and practise it, sits in a very human middle ground.

It is not psychotherapy. I do not diagnose or treat mental illness. I am careful and explicit about that.

It is also not traditional coaching in the sense many people expect, where the assumption is that you are already regulated enough to set goals, take action and optimise your life like a well‑behaved project.

Therapeutic coaching starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with the nervous system.

Most neurodivergent adults I work with are not short on insight. They are not lacking motivation. They are often deeply reflective, thoughtful, and painfully aware of their own patterns. What they are short on is safety. Safety to slow down, to not perform, to explore why a “tiny” thing tips them into overwhelm without being told they are overreacting or doing life wrong.

This is where therapeutic coaching matters.

It is not about becoming less of yourself, quieter, easier, more palatable. It is not about sanding down the edges or learning how to cope better in systems that keep asking you to shrink. It is about creating enough safety to become more yourself. More present. More choiceful. More able to meet the world without your nervous system constantly braced for impact.

It recognises that regulation is not a nice add-on. It is the foundation. Without it, insight does not stick and change becomes exhausting.

So what might a session might look like? Someone comes in talking about work. A meeting. An email. Something objectively small. Halfway through, they laugh and say, “I don’t know why this is such a big deal.” That laugh is rarely funny haha, more funny-shame-on-me.

In therapeutic coaching, I’ll pause right there. Not to analyse their childhood. Not to push past it. Just to notice what their body did when they said those words. The breath that disappeared. The shoulders that rose. The familiar tightening that says, “I’m about to be judged.”

That noticing is not indulgent. It is how regulation begins. We get curious and put on our explorer hat. And what we find is often very core negative stories that trickle in the smallest details of our lives: “I am not good enough”, “I am an impostor”, “I am worthless”, “I am not a priority”. Things we have told ourselves because that was the only way to make sense of our lived experience and give us back a sense of control. A sense of safety. Yes, our very over‑efficient brain will get us what we need, even if it gets there through rather twisty ways. Our negative stories feel familiar, they are ours, and there is comfort in that. But it keeps us stuck, and unhappy.

Once we bring the unconscious to the fore, we can move from being ruled by these stories to having a choice: we can continue with what has held us so far, kept us safe, but stuck, or we can make tiny steps in the discomfort of the ‘what if I’m not these things’, what if I allow myself the space to breathe, to recognise that all of this was to keep me safe, and that I am also allowed to explore new territory where I can be my true, imperfect self, without shame, without guilt. My goal is very clear: I want you to discover what it feels like to work with your brain, not against it. And that is truly transformational. 

Another thing people often comment on is how much of myself I bring into sessions.

This is not about oversharing or blurring boundaries. It is about meeting neurodivergent minds where they actually learn best.

We do not tend to learn from remote palaces. We learn from resonance. From recognition. From someone saying, “Yes, I know that feeling,” and meaning it.

When I share a small, relevant piece of my own experience, something shifts. People relax. They stop performing. They stop trying to be the right kind of client. Their nervous system gets the message that this is not a test.

From there, we can think together. Being a coach doesn’t make me a perfect human. I still struggle with RSD, my house is far from a haven of peace and tidiness, I get overexcited and overwhelmed… all the time. But I don’t beat myself up quite as much as I used to about it all. It’s never about being perfect. Perfection, frankly, is a fickle, demanding and rather boring mistress. Imperfection is where humanity resides, the quirks, the sparks, the ideas, the connections. Now that is life, rich, unpredictable, and exciting. We can learn to ride the seas together, and make the storms that little bit less cataclysmic. 

Therapeutic coaching can be short term, medium term, or longer term. Sometimes it is a handful of sessions to get through a particularly wobbly period. Sometimes it is support through burnout, diagnosis, or a big identity shift. Sometimes it is slower, ongoing work that allows patterns to reveal themselves gently over time.

The length is not the point. The relationship is.

For many neurodivergent adults, having a consistent relational space is not a luxury. It is what makes everything else possible.

People sometimes say, “It feels like you can see inside my head.” I can’t. I promise. What I do have is attention, curiosity, and a well‑trained lantern for darker corners. The ones that usually get rushed past or shamed into silence.

Therapeutic coaching is simply the practice of holding that lantern steady long enough for someone to orient themselves again.

I don’t think therapeutic coaching is a trend. I think it is an antidote to therapy systems stretched beyond capacity, to coaching models that were never designed with neurodivergent nervous systems in mind. A response to people asking, very reasonably, for support that is deep without being pathologising and practical without being dismissive.

Finding the name for the work helped me stop apologising for it.

More importantly, it helps the people I work with understand that they are not asking for something unreasonable. They are asking for something human.

And that feels like a very good place to be.