How Emotion-Focused Therapy Meets Neurodivergent Needs
A Few Reasons Why Therapy Is often irrelevant for Neurodivergent people and how EFT addresses some of these needs.
Sometimes it feels like if you don’t get benefit from therapy, there must be something wrong with you. Cue all the memes of “a man would rather do X than get therapy”, right? But the fact is, when you’re neurodivergent, therapy can frequently feel irrelevant or even harmful. That’s why clinicians like myself, who work with a lot of people with autism, ADHD, and trauma-related brain differences, need to choose our approaches carefully. It’s also one of the reasons why I believe Emotion-Focused Therapy holds so much promise.
First, why does therapy often miss the mark?
There are so many reasons for why it is difficult for neurodivergent people to find a good fit with counselling. For example, there’s the outdated view that neurodivergence is a “disorder” that needs to be modified or controlled rather than creatively accommodated for. For another example, the norms of therapy are often at odds with the needs of people with ADHD, autism, and trauma-related neurological differences. What if you’re someone who needs sensory stimulation in order to focus? What if you end up with a therapist who misinterprets your need to move as an attempt to sabotage the session, rather than dive into it more deeply?
I’m guessing that the last thing you need is to be misunderstood, particularly by someone who’s supposed to help you feel safe.
Ultimately, I believe there is one particularly significant reason why therapy can feel irrelevant for neurodivergent people. That is that many therapeutic approaches target your thought processes and behaviours. For some people, this work can be so helpful. But if you’re already someone who is highly analytical and naturally pattern-seeking, you may not need help understanding yourself. In fact, you may have heard this from at least one therapist: “Wow, you’re so self-aware!”
Where Emotion-Focused Therapy comes in
If many therapeutic approaches are based in helping you to better understand yourself how is Emotion-Focused Therapy different? Very briefly, EFT is an approach based in attachment science that allows you to form a closer, healthier relationship with your own emotions. An EFT session creates experiences that transform your sense of self and ability to relate with others. To this end, EFT work focuses on body sensations, memories, story-telling, imagination, and learning to lean into life-giving bonds with trusted people. When EFT succeeds, it results in a more resilient self who relies on inner guidance to make better choices and have more meaningful relationships.
The benefits of Emotion-Focused Therapy for neurodivergent people
Research is beginning to show that EFT might be particularly beneficial for neurodivergent individuals. That’s because it targets needs in this group that other approaches might skim over.
To start, neurodivergent people often grapple with difficulties like intellectualization and alexithymia (i.e., the struggle to identify and articulate emotions). Are you someone who can endlessly contemplate your inner experience, but you don’t realize there’s a bubbling in your stomach when you’re afraid? If you’re anything like how I used to be, you might assume you’re in touch with your emotions because you can easily think about them. But EFT could teach you the life-changing difference between these two things (Robinson, 2018).
Moreover, a huge percentage of neurodivergent individuals have experienced interpersonal trauma. For example, quantitative research indicates that as many as 90% of autistic people have suffered intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and domestic abuse (Douglas & Sedgewick, 2023). But even if you have never lived with an abusive partner, you probably know what it feels like to be rejected, excluded, and bullied. These painful interpersonal experiences damage our sense of self and our ability to connect with others. When you’re working with a good EFT therapist, it’s possible to start healing these “attachment wounds”.
