What I Specialize In

I'm a licensed therapist in California specializing in therapy for neurocomplexly wired people—those who hold multiple layers of neurodivergence, giftedness, trauma, and high sensitivity.

I work with the people who ask:

"Am I autistic? ADHD? HSP? Traumatized? Gifted? All of them?"

The answer is often: Yes. All of them. And that's why traditional therapy hasn't worked.

I use the neurocomplexity framework developed by therapist Lindsey Mackereth to help you understand your unique system—how autism, ADHD, high sensitivity, PDA, giftedness, and trauma interact dynamically across your lifespan, shaped by your available resources, burnout levels, hormonal shifts, and life stage.

This isn't about fitting into a diagnostic box. It's about understanding the whole of you.

I'm neurodivergent myself (AuDHDer), and my approach integrates trauma-informed therapy, somatic nervous system work, parts work, energy medicine, and spiritual/archetypal frameworks.

What Is Neurocomplexity?

Neurocomplexity is a framework developed by therapist and researcher Lindsey Mackereth to describe "the gestalt interplay of neurodivergent wiring, reflecting increased complexity in cognition, sensory processing, cellular response, attention, creativity, and/or intuition."

It's not a diagnosis. It's a lens for understanding why your inner world is so intense, so layered, so hard to explain.

You might be neurocomplexly wired if you:

• Are autistic AND ADHD (AuDHD)

• Are gifted AND learning disabled (2e)

• Are highly sensitive AND traumatized

• Have PDA (demand avoidance) AND autism

• Are spiritually attuned AND neurodivergent

• Have contradictory traits (socially anxious but deeply intuitive)

• Mask so well no one believes you're struggling

• Experience "shutdown" more than "meltdown"

• Are highly gifted in some areas, profoundly challenged in others

• Feel like you're living multiple lives at once

Traditional diagnostic categories don't capture this. Neurocomplexity does.

The Six Neurocomplex Domains

Mackereth's framework identifies six domains that interact dynamically across your lifespan:

1. Sensory — How you process sensory input from your environment and body

2. Cognitive — Non-linear, intense thinking and learning patterns

3. Somatic — Bodily awareness, regulation, and stress responses

4. Intuitive — Deep sensing of emotional and relational meaning

5. Creative — Imagination, innovation, and expression

6. Attentional — Regulation of focus, motivation, and engagement

Everyone has all six domains, but your unique "neurocomplex flavor" is shaped by which domains are most dominant, the survival strategies you've developed over your lifetime, and your current resource state (internal, external, existential).

This is why you can be "high-functioning" one day and completely shut down the next.

It's not that you're inconsistent. Your wiring is expressing differently based on your available resources.

Why Neurocomplexity Matters in Therapy

Most therapists are trained to treat one thing at a time.

Autism. OR ADHD. OR trauma. OR anxiety.

But you're not experiencing one thing at a time.

You're experiencing all of it, all at once, in a complex, non-linear system.

Neurocomplexity-informed therapy means:

• We don't try to separate your autism from your trauma from your giftedness

• We understand why strategies that "should" work don't

• We work WITH your system, not against it

• We honor the mystery of becoming who you are

Common Neurocomplex Presentations I Work With

AuDHD: When You're Both Autistic AND ADHD

You crave routine AND need novelty. You're hyperfocused AND scattered. You need solitude AND feel desperately lonely.

You're not "not autistic enough" or "not ADHD enough." You're both. And that creates its own unique neurology.

AuDHD people often mask even better than mono-type autistics, burn out harder, get misdiagnosed as bipolar or BPD, and feel like they don't belong in autistic OR ADHD spaces.

You belong here.

PDA: Demand Avoidance as Nervous System Protection

PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) is a profile within autism characterized by an extreme need for autonomy and a nervous system that perceives everyday demands as threats.

You might:

• Shut down when asked to do something—even things you want to do

• Feel trapped by schedules, expectations, or plans

• Use humor, negotiation, or avoidance to escape demands

• Experience complete system collapse when feeling controlled

Internalized PDA is when the demand avoidance turns inward:

• Resisting your own goals

• Self-sabotage when you're on the verge of success

• Inability to follow through on things YOU want to do

• Feeling like your nervous system is working against you

This isn't laziness. This isn't lack of willpower. It's your nervous system protecting your autonomy.

PDA often goes unrecognized because it's frequently misdiagnosed as ODD, anxiety, or "just being difficult." Masking is extremely high in PDA individuals, and many PDA people are highly socially skilled—using social strategies to avoid demands while the internal experience remains invisible to others.

We work with:

• Understanding PDA as nervous system protection (not defiance)

• Building nervous system capacity to tolerate demands

• Differentiating helpful structure from controlling demands

• Working with the parts that need absolute freedom

• Reducing internalized demand avoidance (being able to follow through on your own goals)

Gifted + 2e (Twice-Exceptional)

You're brilliant in some areas. Profoundly challenged in others.

You might have an advanced vocabulary but struggle with executive function. You might be a creative genius but can't remember to eat. You might see patterns no one else sees but can't navigate basic social interactions.

Traditional education and therapy don't know what to do with you. Neurocomplexity does.

Late Diagnosis: When the Realization Comes Late

Maybe you just figured it out.

Maybe it was a TikTok, a friend's offhand comment, your child's diagnosis, or suddenly all the pieces clicked.

Late diagnosis brings relief, grief, rage, and confusion all at once.

You spent decades masking. Decades thinking something was wrong with you. Decades adapting just to survive.

And now you have to figure out who you are underneath all of it.

The Parent Realization: When Your Child's Diagnosis Awakens You

For many people, the autism or ADHD diagnosis doesn't come until they have children.

Sometimes it's because your child gets diagnosed and suddenly you're reading the criteria and thinking, Wait. This is me. Or parenting breaks you, and you realize the strategies that got you through adulthood don't work anymore. Or you recognize your nervous system in your child's experiences.

This realization is both devastating and liberating.

Devastating because you grieve the childhood you didn't get, you're furious at the systems that failed you, and you have to parent a neurodivergent child while also newly understanding your own neurodivergence.

Liberating because everything finally makes sense. You can stop blaming yourself. You can build a life that actually fits your nervous system. You can break the cycle for your child.

Parenting while newly diagnosed is its own kind of initiation. You're learning who you are while trying to advocate for your child. You're dysregulated while trying to co-regulate. You're unmasking while your child needs you to hold it together.

We work with the grief and rage of late diagnosis, parenting neurodivergent children when you're also ND, building regulation capacity for yourself AND your child, letting go of neurotypical parenting scripts, and breaking generational cycles of shame and masking.

(Related: Motherhood, Matrescence & the Mother Wound)

Burnout as Diagnosis

For many neurodivergent people, burnout is what leads to diagnosis.

You spent years over-functioning, masking constantly, pushing through sensory overwhelm, people-pleasing to stay safe, ignoring your body's signals.

And then one day—you can't anymore.

This isn't depression. This is autistic/ADHD burnout.

Burnout feels like complete physical and emotional exhaustion, loss of skills you used to have, sensory sensitivity at an all-time high, inability to mask anymore, shutdown or collapse.

Burnout is your nervous system saying: "I can't pretend anymore."

And that's not failure. That's your body protecting you.

The Overlap: Neurodivergence and Complex Trauma

Here's what many therapists miss: neurodivergent people are more likely to experience complex trauma (C-PTSD).

Because you grew up in a world that punished you for being "different," forced you to mask your natural self, overstimulated your nervous system daily, invalidated your sensory and emotional experiences, and made you feel wrong for existing as you are.

This creates developmental trauma—even in families that weren't overtly abusive.

You may recognize chronic shame, dissociation, fawning (people-pleasing to stay safe), emotional flashbacks, hypervigilance or shutdown, and deep mistrust in relationships.

This isn't "just" autism or ADHD. This is your nervous system adapting to a hostile environment. And it requires trauma-informed, nervous-system-aware care.

(Related: Complex Trauma, C-PTSD & Inner Child Healing)

Unmasking as Spiritual Journey

When you stop performing "normal," you begin the journey home to yourself.

Unmasking isn't just about autism or ADHD—it's about shadow work (reclaiming the parts you buried to survive), healing trauma (collective and individual), reclaiming your authentic soul expression, and breaking free from systems that never fit you.

Neurodivergence isn't a deficit—it's a different way of being embodied. More soul enticement. More light. More truth. More authenticity.

Neurodivergent people are often the ones breaking down harmful structures, imagining and creating new ways of being, refusing to participate in systems built on conformity, carrying sensitivity that the world desperately needs.

Unmasking is a spiritual death and rebirth. You grieve who you pretended to be. You rage at what you had to do to survive. You slowly, carefully, reveal who you've always been underneath.

And on the other side? You find your people. Your purpose. Your power.

This isn't just therapy. It's soul reclamation.

The Medusa Complex: When Your Intensity Is Pathologized

For those who've been told they're "too much" and "not enough" at the same time.

Your intensity isn't a disorder. Your power isn't monstrous. You've just been living in a world that fears what it can't control.

Many neurodivergent people carry what I call the Medusa wound—punished for the very gifts that make them powerful. Turned into a "problem" for being exactly who they are.

You might have been labeled "difficult," "intense," "dramatic," or "too sensitive." You might feel like people are threatened by your honesty or insight. You might carry shame for your natural intensity, depth, or power.

This work is about reclaiming that power without apology. You're not too much. The world is just too small.

What Does "Neurodivergent-Affirming" Actually Mean?

✓ I don't pathologize your neurotype. Your brain isn't broken. Society is inaccessible. ✓ I honor your communication style. Verbal, written, silence—all valid. ✓ I move at your pace. No neurotypical timelines. ✓ I understand sensory needs. Video off, breaks, pacing—we work with your nervous system. ✓ I see the overlap with trauma. Neurodivergence + developmental trauma often go together. ✓ I use the neurocomplexity framework. We work with the whole system.

How I Work with Neurodivergent Clients

Depending on what's alive for you, we might map your neurocomplex system together—understanding which domains are dominant, what your resource states look like, how your wiring expresses differently across contexts. We might work somatically to help you land back in your body, or use parts work to meet the younger parts, the masking parts, the protectors. Energy medicine is often woven in, especially for HSPs and empaths carrying energy that doesn't belong to them. Dreamwork, ritual, and depth work are all available as portals when the timing is right.

For those who are curious, we can also explore your chart's neurodivergent signatures as a framework for understanding your wiring as sacred rather than pathological. If astrology calls to you more broadly, that work lives at Fourth House Alchemy as a standalone reading or ongoing spiritual consultation—separate from therapy.

What Healing Can Look Like

This work isn't about "fixing" your neurodivergence or making you more palatable to neurotypical society.

This work IS about:

• Understanding your system: How your wiring works, why you struggle where you struggle, why you thrive where you thrive

• Unmasking safely: Discovering who you are underneath the performance

• Nervous system repair: Healing from years of chronic stress and overwhelm

• Identity reclamation: Reconnecting to the parts of you that were exiled

• Building a life that fits YOU: Not one designed for neurotypical nervous systems

Neurocomplexity as Spiritual Awakening

I believe that being neurocomplex—gifted, 2e, PDA, AuDHD, highly sensitive—is not a disorder. It's a spiritual awakening. An evolutionary adaptation happening at the nervous system level.

Neurocomplex people are the ones who feel too much, who see the patterns no one else sees, who can't "just go along" with systems that are harmful, whose bodies say "no" before their minds can articulate why.

We are not broken. We are breaking open.

And we are the ones who will help create what comes next.