Therapy for burned out neurodivergent women in Denver, CO

Here’s the thing that’s bringing neurodiverent women into my therapy practice in Denver, CO: Burnout and anxiety. The neurodivergent women I meet with are high-achieving and high-performing professionals.

Here’s what that means to me as your therapist:

1. You are high masking, which takes a hell of a lot of mental energy
2. You have systems on systems to stay organized and focused (more mental energy)
3. Taking on more responsibility at work is both rewarding and scary, because you’re continually testing the systems you have in place and hoping the people around you don’t realize that you’re “falling apart” and “not cut out for the job”
4. The more your career grows, the harder it becomes to stay on top of things at home (and vice versa). You feel like you’re always failing in some part of your life

When you’re a high-performing neurodivergent woman, you have been working over-time to appear pulled together

I say this with compassion, because I am you. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s when the systems I had in place (that I didn’t realize other people didn’t need) stopped working for me. Suddenly, I was failing in ways I had fought hard against with a million systems, planners, and post-it notes.

You have been trying to make up for being neurodivergent and that extra load is burning you out. When you’re worried about falling apart and catastrophizing the consequences at work, it looks like anxiety. But in reality, you have a deeply held belief that there’s something wrong with you. This was reiterated to you throughout childhood when you were called “too much,” “too sensitive,” or “too unfocused.” These negative beliefs about yourself stem directly from how your neurospiciness was received by the world around you – so of course you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop at work.

Therapy for neurodivergent women in Denver, CO is multifaceted

The best therapy for neurodivergent women in Denver is going to offer strategies for managing ADHD, therapy for burnout, and EMDR to process painful early experiences that contributed to the negative beliefs you hold about yourself.

Therapy for neurodivergent women begins with therapy for anxiety and burnout

We’ll start with the present, because that’s what’s causing your current stress, anxiety, and burnout. We’ll work through the systems that are no longer serving you and identify ways to manage your growing responsibilities at work and home.

I worked with someone who used a planner and post-its, but it wasn’t until we worked together for a few weeks that we realized we had different definitions of what a planner is. For me, a planner is a big book that I open to show a week at a time, with each day broken down by the half-hour from 7am to 9pm. For her, it was a book with a month listed out. Meaning, she and I had very different abilities to operationalize tasks and maximize time. She jumped to the negative beliefs “I can’t do this” and “I’m not good enough” whenever she couldn’t finish something or organize her day properly. Once she hit that point, it was game over. She felt her day was ruined and she couldn’t get back on track.

In reality, she needed a better tool to find success. Challenging thoughts and behavior supports people with ADHD and is aligned with cognitive behavioral therapy, where we look at negative beliefs, behavioral consequences, and behavioral activation strategies to support you and your brain.

Neurodivergent women in Denver hold negative beliefs that we can target with EMDR

In my experience, neurodivergent women have deeply engrained beliefs about themselves. You can accumulate accolades, but struggle to internalize a sense that you’re competent and capable. EMDR works beautifully to support your brain and nervous system to align in recognizing how kick ass you are. Because this experience is complex, built up over years of feeling “not good enough,” and often results in feeling disconnected from your body (common for people with autism and ADHD), we will slowly begin by helping you re-attune to your somatic experience. I say slowly because your whole system needs to feel safe enough to proceed. Once you get there, we’ll begin reprocessing to get the deeper healing you need to really feel secure and confident moving forward.