Audhd

Neurodivergent-affirming care for AuDHD burnout is not primarily an attitude shift. It is a structural shift. It treats burnout as a boundary rather than a breakdown. It treats capacity loss as information rather than failure. It treats masking as labor. It treats sensory safety as foundational. It refuses urgency as a solution. It recognizes... See more

Affirming care recognizes that urgency is not neutral for AuDHD nervous systems. Many AuDHD adults survived by relying on last-minute pressure to mobilize attention and energy. That strategy can work until burnout removes access to it. Once that happens, trying to force urgency back into place does not restore functioning. It deepens collapse.

Affir... See more

Non-affirming care often begins with symptom checklists and compliance expectations. Affirming care begins with mechanism. It asks questions that reveal the shape of your life, not just the presence of distress.

It wants to know what demands have been non-negotiable for you. It wants to know what you have been forcing yourself through. It wants to... See more

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you... See more

But burnout is one of the body’s final defenses against unrelenting, unsustainable demand, and it is only by reevaluating those demands and abandoning a huge number of them that we can actually begin to heal — and heal as the people we are, not the hyper-reliable workhorses we long to be.

These are fair questions, and ones that I hear a lot, from survivors of Autistic burnout and “regular” clinical burnout alike. No matter how profoundly drained and depressed a burned-out person might be (and no matter how much mistreatment got them to that point) they are usually desperate to return to their old, pre-burnout baseline as swiftly as... See more