The sky is falling...

"We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more." - Sarah Wilson

I work with a lot of neurodivergent clients, most of them ADHD or AuDHD* and while they are all unique and experience their neurodiversity in varying ways, one thing they all agree on is their spidey senses. By this I mean, their intuition, their pattern recognition, their capacity to pick up on the energy of someone or a situation. There are few ADHDers who do not report experiencing anxiety. I'd say they all experience it, not all report it. Indeed, many are initially dismissed during the assessment and diagnosis process and are told their struggle is simply anxiety. Off they go with their prescription for SSRIs.

Why is this important? Well, funny you should ask. It is important because almost all ADHDers I know report being told they are too sensitive, too negative, over reacting or over thinking when they voice a concern or point out a problem they have noticed. They report confusion when everyone loves "such and such" at work or at school when they just get bad vibes from them. If they try to say something they are labelled nasty or mean or "the one with the problem". Only to have their suspicions confirmed months down the track.

I have experienced this myself and, like many others, I went quiet. I stopped pointing things out. I pretended I was not bothered by the person or the situation. I gaslit myself and was convinced that I was the problem; that I must not be that great a person to not see how great "such and such" is... I have left jobs for this reason. I have also lost friendships. Last year I found this great term knobstacle and it felt so validating to finally have a way to describe some of the people I encounter that I sense are up to no good. It is rare that others trust my judgement. I described this experience to my husband recently as "feeling like the alarm that everyone snoozes, only they don't appreciate the alarm once they wake up, realising they overslept and are now late."

At this point I should acknowledge that some may see me calling people knobstacles is not really a nice thing for a counsellor to do. Maybe not. Being a counsellor does not make me a robot. I am human and I encounter challenging relationships. I am equipped to respectfully navigate these challenges but in this line of work I also need to be a realist.

This is where Chicken Little comes in. Neurodivergent individuals are feeling a lot right now. The current state of the world is not a pretty picture. Recently in Australia a political poll indicated that a far right, racist political party is polling higher than the majority government. To me this confirms what "The Voice" vote indicated a few years back; Australia is a racist country. When I suggested this following the vote outcome I was shouted down by many who voted "No". And yet here we are. I believe Australia needs to own that it is racist, not keep denying it, and start to do something about it. It is an uncomfortable truth. Not only does this poll highlight our racism but it highlights our division, our failing compassion and care for our fellow person and our willingness to blame someone innocent for our own feelings of discomfort. This is what concerns me. We cannot endure discomfort.

Einat Bronstein (2026), an IFS lead trainer, explains this beautifully...

“...we are altogether a pain denying culture... we don't make room for it, we don't make space for it, we don't acknowledge it. And we also live in a culture, again, Western culture, that is a problem solving culture. We look for resolution, for solutions. There's a problem, pain is a problem, let's solve it, let's take drugs, let's do this, let's do that, as long as we can make the pain go away. Pain is already defined by our culture as a problem that needs to be solved. No one should be with pain. And if we have pain, we need to do something to resolve it.... Here's a problem, we're gonna solve it, we're gonna make it go away. It is something to be witnessed. Witnessing, in order to witness something, you need to be with it. You can't witness it if you're trying to make it disappear.”

When Covid hit and we endured different periods of lockdowns across the country there was regular commentary about returning to a "new normal". I feel this was a missed opportunity. Many held, what we now know to be false hope, that the humanity, kindness and community we witnessed (ie. looking after our family, friends and neighbours) would guide us in to a future that was simpler, less individualistic and divisive. Sadly, it appears the opposite is true. What we are seeing instead is the manosphere, excess consumption and waste, fuel crises, cost of living crises, division, overt sexism and racism, the Bondi shootings, Israel, Palestine, Iran the list goes on. Instead of learning how to exist with discomfort during Covid, we become less resilient and less tolerant. Collectively we looked for ways to numb and avoid it. For a community that have active nervous systems this is feeling more and more intense and neurodivergent individuals, particularly ADHDers, are recognising that this is not just a passing phase. This could get worse; exponentially. Many are trying to sound the alarm but are being shut down or blatantly ignored. It is impacting our wellbeing because instead of our concerns being taken seriously, we are being encouraged to stifle our anxiety and focus on the positives - "It won't be that bad". Worse yet, our need to settle ourselves and soothe is pathologised as dopmaine seeking and people are complaining about "everyone being ADHD these days" without stifling their eye rolls.

Many ADHDers, including me (until now), are keeping their worries about the future ahead to themselves. We are confused that the people around us cannot see what we are seeing. We are confused that people around us do not seem to care about human decency anymore. We are confused that the mental health world is telling us we are disordered. We are losing hope. We feel like Chicken Little. A line from the movie Leave the World Behind captures what many neurodivergent feel, that is "I think we know we're living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore, and keep ignoring, how awful we really are." (Alam, 2023).

Recently, I had the privilege of hearing author, Sarah Wilson, speak about her new book I Eat The Stars (2026). Sarah has been researching and speaking out about system collapse. It is a grim prediction that I will not go deeply in to here. Instead, what I found valuable in Sarah's talk - even though it was confronting to hear - was her perspective on hope. She claims she has lost hope but clarified that the hope she has lost is for a predictable, positive and safe future. She believes it is no longer good to deny the possible reality that the future ahead will not be sunshine and roses. It is not useful to keep attempting to effect change that is solely focused on the sunshine and roses because this cannot be guaranteed. That is not to say that we do not keep attempting to effect change but Sarah argues that we need to focus on the present rather than spending our precious time with our minds in the future. This risks forced and false optimism or false hope. This falsehood will be harder to recover from than a realistic hope. A hope that humanity will remain intact.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), the main modality I work from, we aim to be a hope merchant for clients; to build capacity in their internal world and promote the healing of burdened parts. My personal experience of this has helped me to connect with fearful, worried and terrified parts of me and find a sense of calm in myself knowing that while things may get worse, be really challenging and possibly dangerous, I can get through it. This, coupled with hearing Sarah speak, now has me reflecting on what hope means in a counselling relationship with a client. The questions I am pondering are:

• Should we be encouraging clients to find strategies to dampen or avoid their distress rather than helping them approach it gently and safely?

• Should we be dosing people up on various medications to buffer their experience of their emotions instead of helping them feel them fully and understand them?

• Are we encouraging them, as Steve Biddulph suggests in his book Wild Creature Mind (2024), to ignore their own instincts? Instincts that have evolved over time to keep us safe.

• Should we instead be helping people to connect with and understand what their emotion distress is - a normal human reaction to adverse events?

• If adverse events are going to keep happening maybe we need to face the feelings head on instead of avoiding them?

• When we treat trauma we believe that you cannot effectively heal trauma while the person is still in the environment where they have been traumatised. I now wonder if we need to rethink this?

• Should we be encouraging our neurodivergent population to connect more deeply with their natural way of being, trust their warnings and anxieties instead of encouraging them to fit the neuro-normative mould (in a sense, silencing them)?

• Should we be listening to our neurodivergent population more closely and respecting their concerns in the patterns they are seeing? Animals behave differently before a natural disaster because they sense something. We forget that we too, are animals.

The more we keep denying discomfort, the bigger it is likely to get and the harder it will be to face when we have no choice left but to face it.

We often here about resilience. We need to be more resilient but resilience is not stoicism and it is not avoidance. According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary, resilience is "...successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences with mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility". In a recent professional development workshop I attended I heard it said that a common misconception of counselling/therapy is that it will stop us feeling things. The hard truth is that counselling helps us to feel everything with confidence knowing that we will survive it. This is the complex beauty in the work. This is what motivates me to keep offering hope to all my clients, not just the neurodivergent ones; albeit now it will be a more pragmatic hope. A hope that provides no guarantee that life will be free of discomfort but we will be OK. A hope that humanity will remain intact.

*Note that I focus on some ADHD aspects of these two profiles across this blog post, this is not intended to discount the valuable and relevant autistic qualities.

Alam, R and Esmail, S. (2023). Leave The World Behind. Esmail Corp, Higher Ground Productions, Netflix Studios, Red Om Films.

Biddulph, S. (2024). Wild Creature Mind. Pan Macmillan

Bronstein, E. (2026). IFS Talks: An Internal Family Systems Therapy Podcast. Apple Podcasts.

Wilson, S. (2026). I Eat The Stars: How To Live Fully And Beautifully In A Collapsing World. Penguin Books.