My Philosophy

My work starts from a simple assumption: people do not act with complete information. We make decisions from the nervous system, knowledge, capacity and understanding available to us at the time. That means mistakes are inevitable. I am less interested in deciding whether someone is a good or bad person than in understanding what happened, what was possible for them in that moment, what the impact was, and what they do once they know more.

For neurodivergent people, this matters particularly. Autistic and ADHD people are often judged through neurotypical expectations about communication, attention, emotional expression, organisation or relationships. Directness can be interpreted as hostility, withdrawal as punishment, forgetfulness as lack of care, sensory limits as selfishness. I do not assume that the socially dominant interpretation is automatically the correct one. Difference needs investigation before it is given a moral explanation.

Impact and interpretation are not the same thing

If something I do hurts another person, their experience matters whether or not I intended the harm. I do not need to argue them out of what they felt.

But validating someone's experience does not require accepting their interpretation of my motives, character or inner world.

Someone can genuinely feel rejected without my having intended rejection. Someone can experience my need for space as abandonment without my withdrawal having been designed to punish them. Both realities can be examined without one person acquiring authority over the other's mind.

I therefore work from the principle that each person has authority over their own experience, but neither person has automatic authority over the meaning of the whole interaction.

This becomes particularly important in couples therapy. Understanding needs to travel in both directions. A neurodivergent partner should not automatically carry the responsibility for translating themselves, changing their behaviour and repairing every misunderstanding simply because neurotypical communication is more socially familiar.

Accountability without moral perfection

I do not think ethical behaviour requires constant conscious monitoring of every possible consequence. For many neurodivergent people, that would mean running an enormous internal decision tree before speaking or acting: What might this mean? How might it be interpreted? What should I say instead? What if that is also wrong?

That kind of permanent self-surveillance is cognitively expensive and can become another form of masking.

People need permission to make mistakes.

Permission to make mistakes is not permission to disregard harm. What matters greatly is afteraction: what happens when new information becomes available.

Can I hear that something affected you differently from how I expected? Can I remain curious rather than immediately defend myself or collapse into shame? Can I revise my understanding? Can I make a repair, change an agreement or behave differently next time?

An unintended mistake and the repeated continuation of known harm are not the same thing.

Agency and authorship

I am interested not only in whether someone made a choice, but in where the intention behind that choice came from.

People can learn to organise themselves around another person's expectations through fear, shame, repeated correction or the need to maintain safety. Eventually an externally imposed expectation can feel like one's own preference.

This is one reason I am cautious about therapy becoming prescriptive. A therapist has considerable interpretive power. Therapy should not replace the client's existing rules with the therapist's preferred rules.

My role is not to decide what your life should look like. It is to help us understand what is happening accurately enough that you have more genuine choices.

Capacity before judgement

When something repeatedly goes wrong, I want to know why.

Is the person unwilling, or is the demand currently beyond their capacity? Is this an executive-function problem, sensory overload, burnout, fear, conflicting needs, a communication mismatch, an old protective response, or something else?

Explanation does not remove responsibility. It makes responsibility more precise.

If we understand the mechanism, we can stop demanding impossible change and start looking for something that is actually doable.

For me, this is the purpose of formulation: not to excuse behaviour and not to condemn it, but to understand reality well enough to act on it.

Ultimately, I want therapy to help people become more able to live from their own authorship: understanding their nervous system, recognising their limits without shame, remaining accountable for their impact on others, and making choices that increasingly feel like their own.