I’ve sat with a lot of couples where one partner’s anger doesn’t fit the moment. The row is about something small: dishes left in the sink, a plan changed at the last minute, and the reaction is enormous. The partner on the receiving end genuinely can’t work out what just happened. Often, neither can the person doing the shouting.
I’ve come to recognise this as one of the clearest signs of compliance trauma showing up in adult life.
What compliance trauma actually is
Compliance trauma comes from growing up having to fall in line, not because you agreed, but because the alternative was worse. Maybe that was outright punishment. Maybe it was a parent going cold and withdrawn until you fell back into line, or a household where the mood could tip without warning and the only safe move was to comply before it did.
It doesn’t need to look dramatic from the outside. Plenty of people carrying this grew up in homes that looked perfectly ordinary. What made it compliance trauma wasn’t the severity of any one incident, it was that saying no, or even just having a visible reaction, was never really an option.
Where the explosiveness comes from
A child in that position doesn’t stop having a reaction. They just stop being able to show it. The anger, the protest, the “this isn’t fair” doesn’t go anywhere; it gets swallowed because expressing it was too costly.
What gets swallowed in childhood doesn’t stay swallowed forever. It tends to surface later, in adulthood, often with the people who feel safest, which is usually a partner or close family. That’s why the shouting can look wildly out of proportion to the dishes in the sink. The dishes aren’t really what it’s about. The nervous system has been carrying an old, unresolved protest, and something small has finally tipped it over the edge.
What it’s like on the other side of it
If you’re the one living with this, it can be genuinely disorientating. You raise something minor and get a reaction that feels like it belongs to a different, much bigger argument. Over time you start managing around it: choosing your moments, softening how you say things, sometimes staying quiet altogether rather than risk it.
That’s a form of compliance also. Two people can end up in the same pattern from opposite directions: one complying as a child and exploding as an adult, the other complying now, in the relationship, to keep the peace.
This isn’t about blame
I want to be clear that understanding where the anger comes from isn’t the same as excusing its impact. Both things are true at once. The explosive reaction has a history and a logic to it, and it still lands on the person in the room, who didn’t cause it and doesn’t deserve to carry it.
Relational therapy holds both of those at the same time. It doesn’t ask you to forgive the anger before you’ve named what it’s actually costing you, and it doesn’t ask the person doing the exploding to just try harder without understanding what’s actually happening.
Where change actually happens
The work isn’t about learning to suppress the anger better, that’s just compliance again, dressed up as progress. It’s about building the capacity to notice the reaction as it’s rising, understand what it’s really protecting, and find a way to have the protest, the no, the disagreement, without it needing to detonate.
For the partner or family member on the other side, the work is often about recognising where they’ve been complying too, quietly, out of habit, and finding their own way to say what actually needs saying.
On neuroscience, neurosexism, circular arguments, and what actually helps in a therapy room.
It was around 2018. I was sitting in a module on my counselling training course, watching a tutor walk us through exercises built on the idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain do fundamentally different things. I was uncomfortable. I knew this had been debunked years earlier. When we broke into small groups, I said so.
The response I got was something like: “It’s just a metaphor.”
I didn’t find that acceptable then, and I don’t now. A metaphor that borrows the authority of neuroscience to push a particular way of working isn’t a metaphor. It’s a marketing claim dressed up in designer clothes.
I already knew what a brain binary viewpoint cost
By the time I sat in that training room, I’d had fifty years to think about what happens when you sort people into categories and tell them their biology explains it.
At Grammar school in the 1960s, the binary was explicit. Boys studied sciences and woodwork. Girls studied arts and home economics. I was a boy who spent every hour I could playing guitar, writing songs and poetry, drawing and painting. The school’s message was consistent. I should be heading towards sciences, engineering, towards something suitably male.
I didn’t cooperate. I followed their agenda and failed fast. I left school with almost no qualifications and spent the next decade teaching myself the things I’d actually wanted to learn. The further I got from the state system, the more accessible real education became.
That was social pressure enforcing a binary. Nobody was talking about brain science then.
The circular argument hiding in plain sight
Here’s the problem at the centre of the male/female brain industry. It has become a circular argument.
The research finds minor statistical differences in brains that have already spent decades being shaped by social conditioning. Girls steered towards language and relationships. Boys steered towards spatial reasoning and independence. Generations of different experience, different expectation, different permission. And then researchers scan those brains, find some small average differences, and present those differences as the explanation for the social conditions that produced them.
That’s a circular argument. The conditioning comes first. The differences, such as they are, come after. Nobody can tell you what brains would look like without the conditioning, because no brain has ever developed without it. And nobody can tell you what those differences might look like in fifty years, as expectations shift and more people are permitted to be more fully themselves.
Cordelia Fine, who coined the term neurosexism, spent two books systematically dismantling these claims. Researchers like Daphna Joel have since shown that when you look at actual individual brains rather than group averages, you find a mosaic: each brain is a unique combination of features, and the overlap between males and females on almost every measure is enormous. The variation within any gender category dwarfs the average difference between categories. Knowing someone’s gender tells you almost nothing reliable about how their brain works.
The binary is a social category being laundered through neuroscience.
The story of brain binaries
This isn’t new. For decades, the wellness and self-help industry has been built, at least partly, on the idea that brains divide neatly into camps. Left brain versus right brain. Male brain versus female brain. The model changes; the logic stays the same. Take a real but complicated picture, flatten it into two categories, and sell people a route from one to the other.
The left-brain/right-brain model had a long run. By the time it was being taught on my counselling course, the neuroscience community had largely moved on. The actual research shows that almost everything we do cognitively involves both hemispheres working together. The division was always a simplification; it became mythology.
The male/female brain version is following the same arc, just more slowly. And when you look at who’s producing this content, it’s worth spending thirty seconds on what’s attached to it. Often there’s a workshop programme, a supplement range, or both. The bold claim about your brain type is the unique selling point. It’s what makes the product feel necessary.
What I see when it arrives in my therapy room
This material circulates heavily in relationship spaces. Couples come in having absorbed it. And when they do, it tends to function as a way out of a harder conversation.
Rather than sitting with a particular behaviour as something specific and personal, rooted in someone’s history, their upbringing, their culture, the ways they learned to survive, it gets explained away as “that’s just how men are” or “it’s my female brain.” The behaviour becomes fixed, inevitable, outside the reach of curiosity or change. I’ve noticed how often that move relieves anxiety in the short term and shuts down real work in the longer term.
I’ve also sat with clients who’ve spent time and money following these threads. They’ve done the programmes, bought the products, and ended up in a therapy room saying none of it worked. The question they usually arrive with is: “What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with them. Something is wrong with the premise they were sold.
What actually helps
The wellness industry’s version of this problem and the neuroscience industry’s version share the same shape. Both offer you a category to belong to, a framework that explains you, and then a product or a programme to help you work within it. Both require sustained effort: researching, optimising, tracking, striving. The category does the work of making the striving feel necessary.
What I notice in the therapy room runs in the opposite direction entirely. The moments that matter tend to involve people becoming less busy, not more. Less convinced that the right framework will finally unlock them. More able to simply be present to what’s actually there.
Nervous system regulation isn’t a metaphor or a supplement. When someone feels genuinely safe, something opens that no brain category can open for them. That’s the ground on which real change happens, and it can’t be reached through effort. It can only be reached by reducing the pressure, relaxing into life rather than powering headfirst into it.
Your brain isn’t male or female. It’s uniquely yours, shaped by everything that’s happened to you, still capable of change. That’s a considerably more demanding thing to sit with than a binary. It’s also the only place the real work starts.
A Guardian report this week shows misogynistic abuse of female teachers rising sharply. The response from the Department for Education is more guidance.
Misogyny in schools is getting worse. A union survey of 5,000 teachers found that misogynistic abuse of female staff has climbed from 17.4% in 2023 to 23.4% this year. Nearly a quarter of female teachers, in a profession that is over 70% female, report being targeted. Called “love.” Told to “calm down.” Sexualised. Mocked. One teacher had nude AI images made of her by a student. This week, The Guardian reported on the crisis, and the Department for Education responded with more guidance. That’s not going to be enough
The Department for Education’s response was to say that misogynistic views are not innate, they’re learned, and to point toward updated relationships and health education guidance. They’re not wrong that these views are learned. But they’re looking in the wrong place for where the learning happens.
The school created the problem it’s now trying to solve
I was a boy who didn’t fit in. In the 1960s, that was very clearly defined. Boys did woodwork and science, girls did cooking and needlework. I was more interested in music and art and was, quite literally, not permitted to pursue them. So I stopped trying to comply. I found my sense of belonging elsewhere, in pop culture, in rock music, in the Woodstock generation. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and a culture grounded in the language of peace and connection.
The culture boys are swimming in online today is very different from what it was. But the school experience that drives them toward it isn’t.
OFSTED, the national curriculum, and the relentless pressure of assessment-driven learning all create a culture where personal passion, creative expression, and emotional authenticity are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Emotional support, where it exists at all in schools, is frequently used as a tool to return pupils to compliance with the system rather than to genuinely meet them where they are.
You can’t squeeze out everything that makes a boy feel like himself, offer him nothing real in its place, and then be surprised when someone else steps in to fill the vacuum.
The manosphere borrowed its language from us
In the 1990s I got involved in the mythopoetic men’s movement. Robert Bly had published Iron John, and something in it resonated. Men and women gathering in fields, sitting around fires, drumming, singing in four-part harmony, finding what Bly called the wild man, the deep self that modern life had buried. It wasn’t macho. It wasn’t about dominance. It was about recovering something authentic that the world kept asking you to suppress. I recognised that hunger immediately.
Later, I drifted into the business coaching and self-development world. Same language, different destination. Boundaries, accountability, inner work, potential, healing: all of it is still there, but now in service of personal success, financial freedom, and breaking through your limitations to get what you want. I never quite bought it. There was always something hollow at the centre of it. But I watched a lot of men buy it completely, and I understood why. It sounded like the real thing. It used all the same words.
What the manosphere did was take that already-drifting language and push it further still. The message became clear. The therapy world, the self-development world, the whole culture of emotional intelligence and healthy relationships, all of it has been lying to you. We’re telling you the truth. The truth being that dominance is natural, that women respect power, that your softness has been manufactured to serve someone else’s agenda.
It’s a con, but an effective one. I can see the path that leads a young man toward it, because I walked a version of that path myself. If no one’s ever offered you something genuine, the counterfeit is harder to spot.
I know what boys actually need, because I’ve seen it work
In the 1980s, I worked in a residential therapeutic community for fifty boys who had nowhere else to go. These were boys whom the system had completely failed. What they responded to wasn’t more structure, more targets, more guidance. It was space.
I remember one twelve-year-old who couldn’t manage relationships with his parents or foster carers, who sat in his seat staring out of the window each day. One day, he started drawing the tree outside the window. It was very accomplished. Then I let him take his sketchpad outside. Then to the farm, to draw the buildings and the animals. He began to engage with education for the first time in his life. By the time he was sixteen, he’d found pottery, done it entirely on his own terms, and got a GCSE in it. It was the only one he got. It was his.
That’s what genuine support for boys and men looks like. Not forcing them into a role. Not offering them a different version of the same compliance. Seeing them for who they actually are, and allowing them to develop, from the inside out, a real sense of themselves and their responsibility to the people around them.
Boys don’t need to be told to earn more, dominate more, or control more. They don’t need a better curriculum on healthy relationships delivered by a teacher who’s been given half a day of training. They need someone to sit with them in their actual experience and take it seriously.
So what now
I married at nineteen with no real model for intimacy or a relationship. I had no idea what it meant to actually be present with another person. It took years, therapy, a different kind of culture, and a great deal of my own work to begin to understand it. I was lucky. I found people and spaces that offered something real.
Most boys today aren’t finding those spaces in schools. They’re not finding them anywhere that matters. They’re finding Andrew Tate.
If we want to change what boys are learning about masculinity, we need to look honestly at what we’ve failed to offer them: creative expression, emotional authenticity, genuine belonging, and the experience of being seen as an individual rather than a compliance problem.
More guidance from the Department for Education won’t touch it. Less government pressure on schools to perform arbitrary assessment targets might begin to. Adults, parents, educators and practitioners who are willing to be genuinely present with boys rather than managing them. That’s where the real work is.
The manosphere is filling a vacuum. The question is who created it.
We’re living through a genuinely messy time for neurodiverse children and their families. Messy, because for decades, autism was understood as an illness, something broken, something to be managed. All the systems and institutions built around that understanding share the same basic premise: diagnose, then train the child to be acceptable in society. Train them to mask. Make allowances. Fit them in.
Then, over the last twenty years, the concept of neurodivergence arrived. Autism, ADHD, OCD, PDA and plenty of other presentations began to be understood not as illnesses, not as problems to fix, but as different ways the brain can function. Different ways of thinking, different ways of experiencing the world. The argument shifted: we should accommodate these children, not make them feel like outsiders.
The messiness comes from the fact that the people and institutions working with neurodiverse children are often still soaked through with the older medical model. A child might attend a school, trying hard to secure accommodations, only to step into a CAMHS assessment still rooted in diagnosis and compliance. Individual teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists: some work from a neurodivergent framework; others still work from a medical one. The child and the parent are left trying to work out which lifeline to grab.
The medical model focuses on behaviour and fitting in. The neurodivergent model focuses on identity, authenticity, and accommodation. These are not minor differences in approach. They lead somewhere quite different.
What masking actually costs a child
The practical outcome of the medical model, for a neurodiverse child at school, is that they spend the day masking. They walk into a noisy form room where the social dynamics are chaotic and unpredictable. They’re overwhelmed within minutes. They don’t understand the social banter, the shifting roles, the unspoken rules that neurotypical children navigate without thinking. They’re looking for clarity and predictability, and all they get is noise.
But they’ve learned to hold it together. To sit there. To get through. And then they come home.
At home, they can’t mask anymore. The exhaustion tips over. Something as simple as sitting at the table for a meal is too much. The meltdown happens here, with the people who love them most. And parents are understandably confused: how can this be the same child who held it together all day at school?
Over time, the costs run deeper. A child who has to perform constantly, who is never simply allowed to be, begins to internalise the message that something is wrong with them. That they are the problem. They may start to withdraw, to isolate, to disengage from the world. And who could blame them?
Something I know from the inside
I understand something of this from my own experience. At ten, I was the annoying child who was top of the class but couldn’t sit still. In the earlier years of primary school, there had been art, movement, creative work, and I’d been fine. But by the final year, it was pencils and desks all day. I still carry a small mark on the palm of my hand from where I stabbed myself with a pencil out of sheer restlessness. I can see it as I write this.
The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. I was put on a very strong sedative as I moved into grammar school. This was the mid-sixties; ADHD wasn’t yet a concept. But the diagnosis of anxiety led to heavy medication, and the medication suited the school rather better than it suited me. I went from a restless, engaged, bright spark to a daydreamer staring out of the window. Compliant. Invisible. Easy to manage.
When I came off the medication, I’d already learned the lesson. On the few occasions I allowed my real self into the classroom, it didn’t go well: too loud, too much, too cocky. So I daydreamed my way through secondary school. That was masking. And it cost me my education, more or less. I wasn’t interested in what they were putting in front of me; I was interested in music, drama, art, and poetry. My mother understood this, and I’m grateful to her for protecting those interests and allowing me to follow them. They became my life.
I’m not claiming a diagnosis. I’m saying it feels familiar. And that familiarity matters to how I work now.
Forty years of watching the same mistake
Forty years ago, I worked in an extraordinary therapeutic educational environment where the curriculum followed each child’s special interests and emotional needs. That approach was gradually lost to UK education for children we’d now describe as neurodiverse, squeezed out by behavioural frameworks driven by cost and accountability. I struggled to work in mainstream education, where compliance was consistently held above the individual needs of the child.
For the last eight years, I’ve been in private practice as a psychotherapist. It’s a genuine relief to work again in a way that puts the child’s needs first.
What a relational space actually offers
What I offer is not strategies. It’s not tools for managing behaviour, techniques for fitting in, or new ways of masking what’s going on. It’s a relational space. A space where a child doesn’t have to conform to any particular way of being.
There’s no diagnosis required, and no diagnostic category changes how I meet a child in the room. I meet the person, not the label.
What it looks like in the room
One child spends most of the session blowing bubbles while we talk. Another’s eyes light up the moment they spot the spinny office chair: they can have it, and they know it. Children bring their favourite soft toy, or a precious object from home. One liked to stand on their head in the corner before settling. Another bounced a ball around the room throughout every session.
In the therapy room, a child learns that they have agency. They can affect the space they’re in. They can decide whether the light is on or off. They can get up and walk about whenever they want. They can make noise, hide under the table, lie stretched out across all the cushions. And whatever they do, I’m still there, listening, giving them space in the way they want to use it.
For some children, it takes time to get used to that. Some never quite manage it; they’re so conditioned to compliance and controlled spaces that the freedom itself is overwhelming. But when a child really is being themselves in the room, it’s a remarkable place to be. I’m seeing a side of them that many other people don’t. And just by allowing them to be fully themselves in that space, something changes. I don’t know what that is, and they don’t know what that is. But we both know that it’s giving them something.
Children who arrive in crisis, who’ve been suspended, excluded, and had the riot act read to them, often end up in a completely different place after a sustained period of this kind of work. I haven’t taught them any skills. I’ve just allowed them to work out for themselves what overwhelms them, what helps them feel connected, and what safety actually feels like.
Why parents are part of the work
The room alone doesn’t do it. What happens in the therapy space needs to connect with what happens at home. At a minimum, parents need to understand that I’m not working towards compliance. I’m not reinforcing the institutional approach. I’m working in a different direction entirely, and home needs to be on board with that.
The main thing I work on with parents is regulation and co-regulation. A child comes home from school having masked for most of the day. They’re exhausted. They need demand reduction. They need to be allowed to be messy, noisy, and a bit uncontrolled, within boundaries. If you can give them that, and you can stay calm while you do it, you’re giving them what they need. They need you to be calm so they can be calm. They need you to be warm so they can feel safe. That’s co-regulation, and it’s one of the most powerful things a parent can offer.
If you’re reading this as a parent
Whatever stage you’re at, whether you’re trying to keep your child in school, trying to get them back into school, or simply exhausted from the sheer energy of keeping going with something that doesn’t seem to be working, this kind of relational support exists.
I work with a small handful of children in person in Bude, North Cornwall. If that’s within reach, I’d be glad to talk. If it isn’t, the thing to look for is a therapist who is neurodivergence-aware and comfortable with unmasking: someone who isn’t going to teach your child to perform differently, but is willing to sit with them as they are, and trust that to be enough.
That kind of space is rare. But it exists, and it’s worth finding.
Understanding feelings beyond Western psychological models
When I first met my in-laws, I encountered what looked like a real-life example of familiar gender stereotypes around emotional expression. My wife had prepared me to meet her mum, a Relate counsellor, and her dad, a retired farmer. She told me she spoke easily with her mum about emotional matters and had very little conversation with her dad. The picture was clear: Mum was emotionally expressive, Dad was quiet and did not show his feelings.
When I actually met them, my experience was different. I felt an immediate connection with my father-in-law. He was practical and economical with words, yet clearly emotionally alive, closely connected to his grandchildren, and engaged in making sculptures and artwork. He did not talk much, but his emotional presence was unmistakable. With my mother-in-law, conversation flowed more readily, but it took me longer to feel the same sense of connection.
In my psychotherapy work, I often find myself returning to this early encounter. When I hear the familiar description of men as emotionally repressed and women as emotionally expressive, it does not sit easily with my clinical experience. I am left wondering whether this is simply an individual bias that therapists sometimes hold, or whether it reflects something more deeply embedded in the foundations of psychotherapy itself.
How psychology emerged
Western psychology developed within nineteenth-century European society, where gendered assumptions about emotional life were already well established. Men were culturally associated with rationality, restraint, and stoicism, while women were linked with emotional expressiveness, vulnerability, and relational sensitivity.
Early psychological theory did not invent these distinctions, but it did formalise them, translating prevailing social understandings into explanatory models of the mind. In doing so, particular ways of organising and expressing emotion became woven into the foundations of psychological thinking. Although social conditions have changed significantly since then, elements of those original assumptions continue to shape how emotional health and maturity are implicitly defined within psychotherapy.
More recently, while attending a psychotherapy training focused on relationships, I was struck by how readily gendered assumptions about emotional expression surfaced in discussion. Several participants spoke of emotionally expressive women and emotionally restricted men as if these were near-universal clinical truths. When I questioned this, some colleagues explained that they were simply describing what they observed in their therapy rooms.
What stayed with me was the contrast between that confidence and my own experience. This is not a pattern I consistently recognise in my practice. That difference left me wondering whether we are sometimes seeing through the lens we have been trained to use.
If particular ideas about emotional expression are repeated within training, supervision, and theory, they can begin to feel self-evident. Over time, what may have started as a cultural assumption risks becoming a clinical expectation, shaping not only how we interpret clients but what we notice in the first place.
Why This Model No Longer Holds
When the early architects of psychological theory were developing their models, they were working within a society organised around very rigid gender roles. Economic and relational dependency structures were tightly defined. Norms around sexuality and identity were restrictive, and expectations about how emotion should be expressed were narrow and highly regulated.
Contemporary Western society looks very different. Women’s roles have expanded far beyond domestic and emotional labour. Many men now participate more actively in family life and express masculinity in a wider range of ways. Emotional expression among men is more visible than in previous generations. Greater recognition of gender diversity and non-binary identities reflects a broader questioning of earlier binary frameworks that did not capture the full range of human experience.
At the same time, public conversation around mental health, vulnerability, and sexuality has opened considerably. These developments signal a shift in how emotional life is lived and understood. The social scaffolding that once supported earlier assumptions about gendered emotional roles is no longer stable.
Culture has changed, and emotional life has shifted with it. The question for psychotherapy is whether its underlying models have evolved at the same pace, or whether aspects of the field still carry assumptions shaped within a very different social landscape.
The global perspective
Victorian European emotional norms were never universal to begin with. From a global perspective, they represented one cultural pattern among many, shaped by particular social, economic, and moral structures. Yet during periods of colonial expansion, European relational and emotional frameworks were carried across the world, where they often came to be treated as standards rather than as culturally specific ways of organising human life.
Many societies organised family and community life differently. Identity was often located more collectively than individually. Emotional regulation could be embedded in roles, rituals, and communal practices rather than centred on verbal self-disclosure. Ways of understanding and expressing emotional life did not always follow the same gender divisions assumed within European models.
Psychotherapy emerged from within this historically and culturally specific context. Over time, elements of that emotional template travelled widely and, in some settings, came to be regarded as psychologically universal rather than culturally situated. Recognising this history does not invalidate Western psychology, but it does remind us that it represents one model among many.
For practitioners today, this invites a broader stance: openness to multiple forms of emotional organisation and expression across cultures, genders, and generations, and a willingness to question whether inherited frameworks fully capture the diversity of human emotional life.
When Therapy Recognises Only One Emotional Language
These questions are not abstract for me. They have been pressed into my work by the clients who come into my room.
I think of an autistic young person I have worked with who finds verbal emotional expression extremely difficult. In ordinary conversation, he appears silent, withdrawn, or unresponsive. In school, this silence is often interpreted as refusal, resistance, or poor behaviour. When he becomes overwhelmed, his distress can look like destructiveness, when in fact it is an attempt to regulate an internal state that has become unmanageable.
Yet when we work with images, picture cards, or stories, his emotional world becomes unmistakably clear. Through metaphor, visual language, and narrative, he communicates fear, attachment, frustration, and longing with precision. His difficulty is not an absence of feeling but a mismatch between his way of organising emotional life and the narrow channels through which emotion is often expected to be expressed.
Work with autistic children and adults has repeatedly required me to widen my understanding of what emotional communication can look like. The same has been true in my work with gender-diverse and queer clients. Here too, inherited models of identity, relationship, and emotional expression often fail to capture lived experience. Assumptions about how men, women, or partners “should” feel or relate do not always fit. Therapy then becomes less about applying a template and more about learning the particular emotional language of the person in front of me.
These encounters have made it increasingly difficult for me to hold onto a single, standardised picture of how emotion ought to appear in therapy. They have pushed me towards a more individualised and culturally aware stance, where the task is not to measure clients against a fixed model of emotional maturity, but to recognise how emotional life is organised for this person, in this body, in this social and cultural context.
Can Psychotherapy allow itself to evolve?
Psychotherapy does not exist in isolation. It is embedded within large professional bodies, training institutions, regulatory frameworks, and healthcare systems. It intersects with medicine and mental health services, each with their own established practices, languages, and expectations. These structures bring important strengths: accountability, ethical guidance, and shared standards. At the same time, they can make theoretical and cultural evolution slow.
This raises a genuine question. As our understanding of identity, culture, neurodiversity, and emotional life expands, can psychotherapy adapt from within these systems, or does meaningful change require movement at their edges? How flexible are the conceptual frameworks we have inherited, and how easily can they make space for forms of emotional organisation that do not fit older models?
In many ways, change is already underway. A number of contemporary approaches place greater emphasis on embodiment, relational experience, and individual patterns of regulation and meaning-making. Perspectives such as Polyvagal Theory and Internal Family Systems, among others, foreground lived experience, internal diversity, and context rather than a single template of emotional development. These approaches are not abandoning earlier insights, but they do signal a shift towards recognising that emotional life is organised in multiple ways.
Perhaps the question is not whether psychotherapy should step outside its institutional structures, but whether those structures can remain porous enough to allow new understandings to reshape practice. If psychotherapy is to remain responsive to the people it serves, it may need to hold its models more lightly, recognising them as evolving maps rather than fixed descriptions of human emotional truth.
How Theories Reflect Their Time
The scientific impulse to observe, categorise, and name patterns in human behaviour has brought enormous value to psychotherapy. It has helped the field develop shared language, structure, and rigour. Yet scientific understanding does not arise outside of history. What is studied, how it is measured, and how findings are interpreted are all shaped by historical context.
A psychology examining emotional life in the early twentieth century was observing people living within very different relational structures, gender expectations, economic arrangements, and moral norms than those that shape contemporary life. When those observations became models, and those models became theory, they carried with them the imprint of their era.
This does not make earlier psychological frameworks invalid, but it does mean they are historically situated. The emotional life of people living in today’s plural, interconnected, and rapidly changing societies cannot be assumed to organise itself in the same ways as those living in more rigidly structured social worlds a century ago. If the conditions of life change, the patterns of emotional expression and regulation change with them.
For psychotherapy, this suggests that our theories function less like timeless laws and more like evolving maps. They are useful, but always drawn from a particular vantage point. As the terrain shifts, the map may need to be revised.
Psychotherapy is not a fixed territory but an evolving field shaped by ongoing dialogue, experience, and social change. Within it, there are always different tendencies: some practitioners drawn towards established frameworks and shared standards, others more inclined to explore emerging understandings and to listen closely for forms of emotional expression that fall outside familiar models. Both movements play a part in the life of the profession.
For my own part, my work has increasingly drawn me towards a stance of listening across difference, by attending to the particular ways emotional life is organised for each person, rather than assuming it will fit a pre-existing template. This is less a rejection of established models than an effort to hold them lightly, as guides rather than prescriptions.
The language of emotion is as diverse as human language itself.
All images were created by the author with traditional and AI tools.
Many of us have moments or ongoing feelings that we don’t fit in. It can be the way we think, look, feel in our bodies, eat, and react to situations, smells, or noises. Maybe you can’t concentrate or sit still for as long as others or get overwhelmed with anxiety while others sail happily along.
For far too long, anyone who looks, behaves, eats, acts, dresses, talks, thinks, moves, plays, walks, or has sex differently to some arbitrary norm has been hidden from view, imprisoned, institutionalised, medically or psychologically abused. The list could go on. I think you get the picture. I am pretty cross about this.
The binary way of looking at people suits the white patriarchy. If you roll your eyes at this statement, just think about it. Slavery would never have had any traction if there wasn’t binary black-and-white thinking from white men. This thinking gave them control, power and money.
Queer acceptance
There was a death penalty against Gay men from the reign of Henry VIII until 1835. After that, Gay men were imprisoned or given invasive medical or mental health treatment.
The noted computer scientist, mathematician, and war-time code-breaker Alan Turing (1912–1954), convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency”. Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce his libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections
The message was clear: there was something wrong with homosexuals, and they needed to be executed, contained or cured. This attitude is very pervasive and still held by some. Since the year 2000, there has been legal acceptance of the gay community, but we still have a way to go for social acceptance.
Transgender individuals are still persecuted. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association updated the DSM-5, replacing “Gender Identity Disorder” with “Gender Dysphoria,” reducing the pathologization of transgender identities. However, in the UK, conversion therapy remains legal, and the government continues to restrict individuals’ rights to transition.
Neurodiversity acceptance
Dr Temple Grandin was diagnosed with autism at age 3, and the doctor recommended she be taken away from the family and institutionalised. Her mother had other ideas. Temple Grandin is now sounding the alarm on education systems that fail to recognize neurodiversity and may let visual thinkers like her fall through the cracks.
Temple and her mother accepted that she was different. Temple discovered her strengths, particularly in working with animals, and went on to become an internationally known speaker, writer, and academic.
Historically, society has treated anyone showing signs of diverging from the norm in thinking or behaviour as a pariah. They have been shut away from society because they go against deeply ingrained expectations and challenge the prevailing social order.
In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association revised the diagnostic criteria for autism. This greatly broadened the spectrum. It now ranges from brilliant scientists, artists, and musicians to an individual who cannot dress himself or herself. Over the years, the diagnostic criteria have kept changing. It is not precise like a lab test for strep throat. Labels such as autism, ADHD, sensory processing disorder or learning disability are often applied to the same child. In older children with no speech delay, the diagnosis sometimes switches back and forth between autism and ADHD.
It is time to accept there is no normal. We are all unique individuals and need to be accepted as such and accept ourselves. This would allow us to stop looking for cures and fixes and give everyone the space to live their lives as they see fit.
My journey of acceptance
I was — too touchy — too sensitive — can’t sit still — too anxious — a romancer.
I was diagnosed, given the label of having anxiety and heavily medicated.
This was medical abuse. It worked for society, but it didn’t work for me.
Then, the school stepped in with canings for being too rebellious.
I shut down and switched off but didn’t lose my soul. Looking back, it occurred as a going inward. Society wanted me to go to University and get a nice, safe job in science or engineering, and I was having none of it. To begin with, I strung them along, but around age 16, I’d had enough.
I was very clear that I wanted to work in the music industry. I didn’t make any effort to play along with the science courses I’d been forced to take in the sixth form, but I was imprisoned. Outside of school, I thrived writing songs, winning talent shows, and learning to sing in choirs.
Reaching 18, I was free. I left for London with £30 in my back pocket, and a week later, I had a job and a bedsit. Now, my education began. I could choose what to study, where, when, and at what pace. Given this freedom, I discovered a hunger for learning that has served me well.
As I hit my twenties, I accepted that I would be unlikely to fit into a standard job or career, and I created my own, which has changed with the wind over the past 50 years but has given me great contentment and satisfaction.
The importance of embracing identity and nurturing acceptance rather than seeking cures or fixes cannot be overstated. Our societal norms have long been dictated by a binary perspective that suits the white patriarchy, marginalizing those who don’t fit into these narrow definitions, classifying them as sick, disabled or criminalising them.
Emphasizing the Importance of Acceptance:
It is time to recognize that there is no “normal.” Each of us is unique, and our differences should be celebrated, not cured, punished or hidden away.
Embracing identity means acknowledging and celebrating our differences. This allows everyone the freedom to live authentically.
By accepting ourselves and others, we create a society that values diversity and fosters true inclusion.
Embrace your identity. Celebrate diversity. Reject the binary and nurture acceptance.
How One Psychotherapist’s Self-Discovery of ADHD Challenges Conventional Diagnosis and Celebrates Neurodiversity
All Images created by the author using a variety of drawing, editing and AI tools.
Neurodiversity has only been a concept since the turn of the century and has been commonly used by professionals since 2010. This suggests that most education or mental health professionals have had to and, to a large degree, are still playing catch-up.
The only training they will have had will have been firmly rooted in the medical model of diagnosing autism, dyslexia, ADHD and other neurodevelopmental conditions in order to treat, cure or mitigate the symptoms.
The professions have had to make a massive shift in their thinking to embrace the neurodiversity model. As with any paradigm change, there will be dinosaurs and pioneers.
Some pioneers may have had their wings clipped by being taught by dinosaurs. Some major educational and mental health institutions are still controlled by dinosaurs, who may well temper the enthusiasm of new recruits flushed with pioneering spirit.
Before sharing my personal journey, I will outline a research conversation I had with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s language mode, which clarified how and when neurodiversity appeared as an idea. I asked questions regarding the history of the term Neurodiversity.
Before 2000, the professional training regarding neurodiversity, particularly in fields such as psychology, education, and healthcare, was primarily influenced by a medical model of disability. This perspective framed neurological differences — such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurodevelopmental conditions — as disorders or deficits that needed to be treated, cured, or mitigated. The focus was often on identifying symptoms, diagnosing conditions, and implementing interventions aimed at helping individuals to adapt to societal norms or to “overcome” their differences.
The medical model has existed for around a century and still persists in some sectors despite a huge shift in understanding and research.
By the 2010s, “neurodiversity” had become a significant and recognized term in discussions about autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurodevelopmental differences, extending into fields such as education, employment, and mental health. It emphasizes the understanding that neurodevelopmental differences should be recognized and respected as a social category, akin to ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I am constantly aware of the friction between this medical model of dysfunction and the neurodiversity model of celebrating uniqueness.
On my own self-awareness journey, I have begun to recognise that there are parts of myself and my patterns of behaviour that could easily be interpreted as ADHD; however, these symptoms could also be interpreted as a trauma response, General Anxiety Disorder or a number of other diagnoses.
I took several online ADHD tests and consistently scored medium to high. It reaffirmed my suspicion that these tests were as reliable as gauging opinions over tea and scones with my mother and her friends.
While it wasn’t shocking to score high, I don’t feel the need for validation from a supposed professional. The whole process of diagnosis and labelling feels like it belongs to an outdated medical model when it comes to addressing mental health.
Image created by the author using a variety of editing and AI tools
Back in 1965, at the age of 11, I was taken to the doctor. While I was considered bright at school, I couldn’t sit still. I was hyperactive and found it challenging to focus during dull lessons. This was two decades before ADHD was recognised in the UK.
In the eyes of the medical model, my behaviour probably appeared to be some form of anxiety disorder. I don’t recall feeling anxious, but how else could they explain this restless, nervy kid? So, they opted to sedate me, a treatment that, in modern terms, seems completely inappropriate and verging on barbaric.
What’s even more astonishing, however, is that despite these traits now being viewed through the lens of neurodiversity, 60 years later, there are still mental health practitioners and educators who only possess tools aligned with that outdated medical model, which tends to pathologise people, including those who are autistic or neurodiverse.
Recognising uniqueness
The alternative approach to diagnosing, putting into boxes, pathologising, judging and dismissing is to recognise and celebrate uniqueness.
This has always been the case with humanistic and holistic counselling or psychotherapy. We treat every client as a unique individual. We help to uncover and celebrate the authentic self. Diagnosis has no part in this process.
Clients often come to us previously diagnosed by professionals aligned with the medical model. It can be useful for the client as it gives them some search terms for internet research, but there is also a danger that they might focus solely on the pathologised parts of themselves.
It’s like they have been stamped with a barcode for easy internet access, and they slowly morph into a walking, talking version of that barcode.
Or, a gardener gives you an extensive list of all the weeds in your garden but neglects to mention all the beautiful, thriving plants that are also there. Armed with their list, you get a weedkiller that will destroy all the weeds, and your treatment takes down all the beautiful plants with it.
How I preserved my uniqueness
Teachers saw my creative leanings as a bunch of weeds. At options time, they refused to allow me to do Music, Drama, and Art. I was forced to study science and academic subjects. The result was that I gave up trying and left school with a miserable handful of mediocre results.
Twenty years on, I taught myself jazz piano to a professional standard, became a music technology teacher, worked professionally as a performing storyteller, and began creating my business as a drum circle facilitator. Forty years later, I am earning money by writing about therapy, art, and creativity.
No matter how I look at it, the whole school system seemed designed to prevent me from fulfilling my full potential. It invalidated my creativity and passion in training me to comply with societal norms.
I am very grateful that my creative leanings and passion were supported at home and in the community through Drama clubs, Choirs, and youth Club talent competitions. We had a beautiful baby grand piano that I spent much time with, and my need to emulate Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing was mostly tolerated.
So, free from the constriction of school, I was able to fly a little freer, but the legacy of that time was that I have always felt that society would frown upon my need to go my own way, create my own path, and ultimately be myself—until now, of course.
Embracing Neurodiversity: Celebrating Uniqueness and Unlocking Potential
In my work as a counsellor, I come across children and adults of all ages who are diagnosed, self-diagnosed, and undiagnosed with a whole range of things related to Neurodiversity.
They are all unique and have a clearly individual understanding of how their minds and bodies work a little differently from what they perceive to be the societal norm. They all also have unique and different perceptions of societal norms.
People often fixate on discovering what’s wrong with them. But when did we lose sight of what’s right? Imagine if we redirected that energy towards uncovering and nurturing our unique talents instead of striving to fit into an arbitrary ‘normal.’ Such a shift could propel humanity forward in a gigantic evolutionary leap.
Turning an ocean liner around.
Shifting paradigms from viewing people as problems in need of fixing to valuing their unique differences is a monumental undertaking. It’s akin to steering an ocean liner in a new direction — a slow, laborious task demanding patience, persistence, and substantial effort.
When trying to redirect something as vast and entrenched as societal perception, there will be challenges from all sides. In Mental Health and education, challenges persist, and outdated models have been engraved into the DNA of our mental health and educational institutions.
Where can we begin?
As with any massive process of change, we have to start with ourselves. Are you celebrating your own uniqueness or constantly trying to fit in? Once you appreciate what it looks like for yourself, you can begin to recognise environments where it is happening for others.
Is your local school an environment that nurtures creativity, individuality and diverse ways of thinking? Does it foster growth and success for all individuals or just those that fit in?
Does your workplace plod along a well-worn path of expectations, or is it open to flexible working patterns and accepting diverse approaches?
Our uniqueness is a source of strength
I hope I have been clear that I am not claiming to have ADHD or not to have it. I really am not bothered about the boxes the medical profession tries to force us into. I am not an advocate for getting or not getting a diagnosis that is entirely up to the individual.
We shouldn’t need a certificate to show that we should be accepted for our strengths and diversity. I can see a future where neurodiversity is fully embraced and individuals are empowered to thrive authentically, contributing their unique talents to a more inclusive and understanding society, but I can’t predict a timeline for that.
I caught a glimpse of this paradigm shift 35 years ago while working at The Cotswold Community, a therapeutic children’s home for boys. There, a child-centred approach permeated every aspect of care and education. Tailored programs were created for each individual, both in their daily care routines and academic curriculum.
I witnessed children flourishing in this carefully managed environment. The work was held fast by a highly skilled therapeutic team working on psychodynamic principles headed up by Barbara Dockar Drysdale. Any sniff of behavioural principles, punishment or reward was swiftly banished under her watchful eye.
Sadly I had to leave for family reasons and I have been searching in vain for a similar environment in the intervening time. I have seen behavioural approaches take hold in all sectors of education and mental health, often for economic reasons, and the results have been catastrophic for many.
My hope is that the neurodiversity movement is at the forefront of a period of profound change where the medical, evidence-based approach to mental health is eclipsed by humanistic, experience-based models where individuals are empowered to thrive authentically, contributing their unique talents to a more inclusive and understanding society.
Each step towards embracing neurodiversity brings us closer to realizing the full potential of every unique mind.
