Different Minds. Shared Humanity.

The question is no longer whether neurodivergence belongs in clinical conversation, but how deeply that conversation has reckoned with what neurodivergent communities have been articulating for decades. Diagnosis rates climb while therapeutic training remains anchored in pathologisation. Clinicians express commitment to affirming practice yet encounter few frameworks that translate principle into method. What’s missing is not awareness but the infrastructure for sustained scholarly and clinical engagement adequate to the complexity of neurodivergent experience itself.

The Unfolding Neurodivergent Journey establishes such infrastructure. Across nine months, the series convenes internationally recognised scholars and clinicians whose work sits at the intersection of rigorous empirical research and lived neurodivergent expertise. These are the thinkers establishing theoretical foundations, documenting the sensory, interoceptive, communicative realities previously rendered invisible by deficit frameworks, and articulating clinical approaches grounded in neurodivergent ways of being rather than approximations of neurotypical norms.

The series moves deliberately through domains essential to competent practice: from paradigmatic foundations through identity formation, family systems, lifespan development, diagnostic aftermath, communicative complexity, and embodied experience. Each domain demands its own investigation; together they constitute the integrated understanding meaningful clinical work requires.

The Case for Sustained Engagement

Psychotherapy finds itself in an epistemological transition. Neurodivergent communities—particularly autistic and ADHD adults—have developed sophisticated phenomenological and theoretical accounts of their own experience. These accounts frequently demonstrate greater explanatory power than clinical literature produced about them. Meanwhile, therapists trained in frameworks that pathologise the very phenomena clients experience as central to identity encounter predictable impasses. The gap between insider knowledge and professional training produces not merely ineffective therapy but sites of retraumatisation and systemic overwhelm.

This series addresses that gap by centring researchers and clinicians who bridge it methodologically. Several speakers are themselves neurodivergent, bringing epistemic authority that reshapes which questions get asked and what counts as evidence. Their work challenges the field’s historical privileging of outsider observation over insider expertise—a hierarchy that has obscured as much as it has revealed.

The scholarly contributions represented here are not introductory. These are researchers who established the neurodiversity paradigm as coherent theoretical frameworks, who documented through microanalysis the linguistic sophistication in communication forms dismissed as disordered, who articulated minority stress and epistemic injustice as explanatory models for late-diagnosis aftermath. Each session represents years of specialised investigation into domains where clinical training typically provides cursory treatment at best.

What distinguishes this series is its refusal of single-topic containment. Most professional development addresses discrete areas: autism assessment protocols, ADHD pharmacology, sensory accommodations. But competent neurodivergence-affirming practice cannot be assembled from isolated competencies. Supporting a late-diagnosed parent, for instance, requires simultaneous understanding of diagnostic aftermath dynamics, family systems under intersecting neurotypes, intergenerational transmission of shame and masking, identity reconstruction processes, and communicative differences that may have contributed to decades of misattunement. The series provides this integrated comprehension by design rather than accident.

Architecture: Cumulative Understanding Across Nine Months

Beginning March 2026, the series features one live three-hour webinar monthly (with one two-hour session in June), building progressively through interconnected domains.

Spring sessions establish foundational frameworks and examine early development and identity formation. How does reframing neurodivergence as natural variation—rather than deviation requiring remediation—reshape clinical conceptualisation? How do sensory and interoceptive differences shape emotional awareness, co-regulation, and early attachment? How do young people later author identity when diagnostic categories offer both liberation and limitation? And how do family systems function when neurodivergence runs through generations, creating relational ecologies conventional frameworks fail to recognise?

Summer sessions turn toward lifespan development and relational dynamics, concluding with an exploration of systemic stress and neurodivergent burnout—how chronic environmental mismatch erodes capacity and how recovery can be supported through neuro-affirming frameworks. Clinical discourse concentrates overwhelmingly on childhood, as though neurodivergent life concludes with school transitions. These sessions examine what happens as neurodivergent adults navigate employment, parenting, ageing, and elderhood in systems designed around neurotypical assumptions—addressing gaps in both research and service provision that leave ageing neurodivergent people dangerously unsupported.

Autumn sessions explore diagnostic complexity, communicative diversity, and embodied experience. Late diagnosis triggers identity reconstruction processes that follow predictable patterns clinicians rarely receive training to support. Autistic communication operates through channels and logics that appear disordered only when measured against neurotypical norms; recognising sophistication where deficit was presumed requires fundamental reorientation. And neurodivergent experience is profoundly embodied—interoceptive differences, sensory processing variations, alexithymia shape selfhood in ways therapeutic approaches predicated on neurotypical embodiment cannot address.

Each session stands as complete investigation while contributing to cumulative understanding. Participants may engage individual topics addressing immediate clinical needs or commit to the full series for comprehensive reorientation of practice.

The Sessions

March 18, 2026 | Steven Kapp, PhD

The Neurodivergent Tapestry: Rethinking Difference & Strengths

The neurodiversity paradigm has moved from activist origins into clinical discourse—but what does it actually mean for practice? This opening session examines how reframing neurodivergence as natural human variation reshapes everything from assessment to intervention. Dr. Kapp, an autistic scholar and leading researcher, traces historical roots of pathologisation, illustrates what shifts when we begin from cognitive pluralism, and offers frameworks for strengths-based practice that acknowledges real struggle without locating it in inherent pathology.

May 14, 2026 | Nick Walker, PhD

The Developing Self: Identity Formation, Neurodivergence, and Intentionality

Dr. Nick Walker—one of the principal architects of the neurodiversity paradigm—introduces the concept of intentional neurodivergence, exploring how identity can be consciously shaped, rather than passively inherited. This session invites participants to consider neurodivergence as an active, creative process of self-authorship that transcends both pathologising and essentialist frames. Drawing from depth psychology, somatic practice, and neurodiversity studies, Walker offers a paradigm-expanding perspective on what it means to develop, inhabit, and evolve a neurodivergent self.

May 21, 2026 | Kelly Mahler, OTD

Early Worlds & First Challenges: Supporting Interoception Development Through a Neuro-Affirming Lens

Before language or logic, children come to know themselves through sensation and connection. In this session, occupational therapist Dr. Kelly Mahler explores how interoception—the sense that helps us notice and interpret internal body signals—develops through early relational and environmental experiences. Viewed through a neuro-affirming lens, she examines how compliance-based approaches can disrupt body trust and emotional attunement, while curiosity and co-regulation strengthen a child’s emerging sense of safety and self. Grounded in developmental science and clinical practice, this session offers practical strategies for supporting families and educators in cultivating environments that honour bodily awareness, sensory diversity, and authentic emotional growth.

June 4, 2026 | Samantha Hiew, PhD

Neurodivergent Family Systems: Intergenerational Patterns & Relational Dynamics

Neurodivergence doesn’t exist in isolation—it runs through family systems, shaping relational dynamics conventional frameworks often overlook. Dr. Hiew examines multi-neurotype households where communication styles and sensory needs collide, where parent executive-function challenges intersect with a child’s need for structure, and where undiagnosed neurodivergence creates invisible labour and inherited shame. Drawing on research and lived experience as an AuDHDer diagnosed at 40, she offers strategies for building shared neuro-affirming language, supporting co-regulation across different nervous systems, and facilitating family conversations centred on validation rather than correction.

July 8, 2026 | Sandra Thom-Jones, PhD

Neurodivergent Life Paths & Transitions: Adulthood to Elderhood

Clinical discourse focuses on childhood—but what happens as neurodivergent people navigate career development, parenting, ageing, and elderhood? Dr. Sandra Thom-Jones addresses this glaring gap with unparalleled expertise as an autistic academic who spent decades in senior leadership. This session maps employment challenges, parenting complexities, self-advocacy evolution, and the urgent needs of ageing autistic adults facing healthcare systems and aged-care facilities catastrophically mismatched to their neurology. Essential training for supporting neurodivergent clients beyond young adulthood.

September 8 2026 | Carole Jean Whittington

Spicy Burnout & the Autistic Nervous System: From Risk to Recovery

Autistic burnout isn’t stress mismanagement—it’s full-system depletion caused by chronic mismatch between capacity and demand. Drawing from her four-year global research study and Whittington Well-Being Assessment Suite, Carole Jean Whittington introduces a comprehensive framework for understanding, measuring, and recovering from what she terms “Spicy Burnout.”

Participants will explore the five roots of autistic burnout, twenty early warning signs, and six levels of the Spicy Pepper Scale to identify autistic burnout risk across five key domains: Complexity Identifier, Stress Profile, Masking Style, Spicy Pepper Level, and Sleep Profile. Clinicians will leave equipped with practical tools for recognising early indicators, designing individualised recovery maps, and guiding clients toward their Optimum Steady State—a sustainable balance of energy, regulation, and well-being.

October 26, 2026 | Monique Botha, PhD

Coming into Focus: Late Diagnosis, Identity Reclamation & Therapeutic Repair

Late neurodivergent diagnosis rarely arrives as simple information—it detonates through decades of self-understanding. Dr. Monique Botha’s research on minority stress and epistemic injustice illuminates how late-identified adults have spent lifetimes being systematically disbelieved about their own experience. This session traces the complex aftermath: grief, relief, anger, identity fragmentation. Participants are invited to explore therapeutic perspectives that counter internalised pathology, foster narrative and relational repair, and acknowledge the parallel journeys of parents who recognise their own neurodivergence through their children’s assessments.

November 18, 2026 | Kristen Bottema-Beutel, PhD

Beyond Words: Complexity and Creativity in Autistic Language

Communication in neurodivergent contexts is not a skill to be corrected but a dynamic process of mutual understanding. Drawing on her groundbreaking research, Dr. Kristen Bottema-Beutel challenges deficit-based interpretations of autistic and neurodivergent communication, demonstrating how misattunement often arises from differences in perceptual and cognitive style rather than social failure. This session explores diverse expressive modalities—including gestalt language processing, non-speaking communication, and alexithymic expression—and highlights meaning embedded in rhythm, tone, pacing, and movement. It underscores the therapist’s role as translator and collaborator, cultivating spaces where communication becomes co-regulated and co-created rather than normalised.

December 3, 2026 | Megan Anna Neff, PsyD

Mapping the Inner Landscape: Embodiment, Interoception & Internal Systems

Neurodivergence is profoundly embodied—experienced through sensory overwhelm, interoceptive differences, alexithymia, and nervous system dysregulation that often precedes emotional awareness. Dr. Neff, a clinical psychologist who discovered her own AuDHD at 37, explores how interoceptive impairments and sensory processing differences shape self-concept and regulation capacity. This closing session integrates parts-based and somatic approaches, distinguishes coping-based embodiment (masking, suppression) from restorative embodiment grounded in self-trust, and offers grounded strategies for helping clients develop sustainable relationships with their bodies without forcing neurotypical patterns.

Who This Series Serves

This series is designed for practicing psychotherapists, psychologists, and counsellors who recognise that competent neurodivergence-affirming practice requires more than surface-level accommodation. It serves clinicians who:

• Experience the limitations of deficit-based training when working with neurodivergent clients who reject pathologising frameworks
• Seek theoretical and empirical grounding for affirming practice beyond well-intentioned but methodologically vague gestures toward “acceptance”
• Recognise that meaningful clinical competence in neurodivergence demands understanding across multiple domains simultaneously—developmental, systemic, embodied, relational, cultural—rather than isolated skill acquisition
• Want direct access to the researchers and clinicians establishing best practice rather than secondary accounts of their work
• Are developing or deepening neurodivergence specialisation in practice
• Need to understand neurodivergent experience across the lifespan, not merely childhood presentations

• Work with clients experiencing chronic stress, masking fatigue, and neurodivergent burnout who require sustainable, systems-informed recovery frameworks.

The Speakers: Epistemic Authority and Methodological Innovation

The Unfolding Neurodivergent Journey brings together internationally recognised scholars and clinicians distinguished by dual expertise: rigorous research credentials and deep understanding derived from lived neurodivergent experience. Several speakers are themselves neurodivergent, offering insider perspectives that transform how research questions get formulated and what phenomena become visible for investigation.

This combination reflects deliberate methodological commitment. The field has too long separated “objective” research from “subjective” experience, privileging outsider observation over insider knowledge in ways that have produced systematic epistemic distortion. The most generative scholarship now emerging bridges this false dichotomy. The speaker panel represents precisely this integration: researchers who established theoretical foundations of the neurodiversity paradigm, who conducted groundbreaking microanalytic work on communication and social interaction, who articulated explanatory frameworks like epistemic injustice and minority stress, who authored definitive examinations of neurodivergent adult life, who advanced understanding of systemic stress and burnout through global research, and who built global communities around affirming practice.

Beyond Continuing Education

Neurodivergence-affirming practice is not an add-on to traditional psychotherapy—it is a reorientation of how the field understands difference itself. It asks clinicians to examine not only their techniques but their underlying assumptions: what therapy is for, whose perspective shapes treatment goals, what constitutes meaningful support versus superficial accommodation, and how power operates in clinical relationships when neurotype itself becomes therapeutic focus. A neurodiversity-affirming orientation also

requires attunement to the physiological and systemic costs of chronic misfit—the exhaustion, masking, and burnout that emerge when support structures fail to align with neurodivergent needs.

The Unfolding Neurodivergent Journey offers sustained engagement with the frameworks, evidence base, and clinical approaches now constituting best practice. Participants develop not merely knowledge but clinical literacy: capacity to recognise when conventional interventions may cause harm, to think through neurodivergent presentations with nuance rather than applying diagnostic heuristics, to support clients in ways that honour rather than pathologise neurological difference.

This represents the depth of training necessary for providing care that meets the standards neurodivergent clients increasingly articulate—and deserve.

On Timing

The gap between what neurodivergent communities articulate about their experience and what clinicians receive in training has become untenable. Awareness has expanded dramatically; clinical competence has not kept pace. The clients currently in practice—or whom clinicians hope to serve—increasingly distinguish between well-intentioned clinicians and competent ones, between those who express support and those equipped to provide it.

The Unfolding Neurodivergent Journey represents infrastructure for developing genuine competence rather than performative allyship. We engage this work because single trainings cannot address the complexity involved, because the field requires sustained scholarly engagement adequate to neurodivergent experience itself.

Presented by nscience Academy — advancing the global dialogue at the confluence of psychotherapeutic research and the art of clinical practice.

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