Kate Boot Neurodivergent Advocacy and Therapeutic Services

19/12/2025

Working at the pace of trust has been sitting with me this week.

Mid week I started a client session naming what I anticipated may have been feeling like “a lot” or change, expectation and/or pressure for them, of late. They know I’m AuDHD. I said “I see you” and “I’m also aware how I’m here now, also asking you to give me more than you have to give”. I named the potential harm. The client, lent forwards reaching out their hand to hold mine momentarily and said “thank you, Kate, I really appreciate you saying that”. One further hand squeeze and we proceeded into their session, together.

It left me thinking; trust isn’t something you can demand, fast-track, or assume. Especially when someone is neurodivergent and has lived through trauma, trust is rarely a starting point. It’s something that emerges after safety, clarity, and consistency have been experienced — often many times over.

What I keep noticing is how easily systems confuse compliance with trust. Or silence with agreement. Or “going along with the plan” with feeling safe. For many neurodivergent people, those things are survival strategies, not signs of connection.

Working at the pace of trust means slowing down when everything feels urgent. It means explaining things clearly and more than once. It means being honest about uncertainty, repairing when things land badly, naming systems harm and recognising that nervous systems remember whole experiences, not just outcomes.

And it means understanding that when someone starts asking more questions, disagreeing, setting boundaries, or taking longer to respond, this often isn’t disengagement. It can be a sign that they finally feel safe enough to be real!

I also found myself speaking to the fact that trust can’t be extracted through pressure, withheld information, or raised stakes in meetings this week, too. Suggesting that this doesn’t build safety, it builds masking, increases uncertainty and damages professional or therapeutic relationships.

Working at the pace of trust isn’t inefficient. It’s ethical.
And for many people, it’s the difference between surviving support and actually being supported.

💜

17/12/2025

Six months of coming together in community has changed how I understand neurodiversity-affirming practice.

Not because I learned new “answers,” but because I watched what became possible when people were given time, space, and permission to show up as they are.

This group reminded me that practice is shaped as much by how we relate as by what we know, by the pauses we allow, the questions we stay with, and the care we bring when things feel messy or unfinished.

As this cohort closes, I’m holding a lot of gratitude and also a sense of continuity. These kinds of spaces matter. They change how we think, how we work, and how we stay human in systems that often pull us the other way.

I’m carrying these learnings forward into the next Liberatory Group Supervision spaces starting in 2026. See the final slide for more information, or check out my recent “supervision“ highlights. If this way of working resonates, you’d be warmly welcome. 💜

12/12/2025

Sorry folks, gotta preserve the energy where possible 💜

11/12/2025

I find myself regularly noticing how many autistic experiences are spoken about by other professionals as “behaviour,” “avoidance,” or “not engaging.” But when you understand autistic processing, a very different picture emerges.

🧠 Difficulty naming emotions neuronormative-ly
🧠 Going quiet in distress
🧠 Task avoidance and difficulties with inertia when overwhelmed
🧠 Needing predictability
🧠 Sensory protection strategies
🧠 Deep thinking and detail awareness
🧠 Communicating better with clear roles
🧠 Using silence, withdrawal or interests to cope

None of these are failures of communication. They are communication. They are the language of a nervous system working hard to stay safe.

Autistic people don’t need to communicate more clearly. Us professionals need to listen differently!

When we shift the lens—when we understand monotropism, sensory load, executive functioning, interoception, shutdown, demand sensitivity—we stop misreading autistic experience as defiance or disinterest.

✨ Autistic communication is valid.
✨ Autistic sense-making deserves recognition.
✨ Being understood shouldn’t depend on performing distress in neurotypical ways.

Our work isn’t to change autistic communication. Our work is to understand it.

05/12/2025

Hello folks 👋🏼 it’s been a little while…

Lately there’s been a surge of media attention on autism again (not that it ever really goes away) and while some coverage increases visibility, much of it reinforces old narratives rooted in blame, burden, and broken systems.

As an AuDHD speech and language therapist and someone who works closely with autistic adults, families, and teams across public health, social care and education in the UK, there are some patterns I’ve been noticing and experiencing myself:

🌸Systems react defensively when they’re unable or unwilling to adapt to neurodivergent needs.
🌸Distress is being mislabelled as “demand avoidance” instead of explored through a sensory, trauma-informed, or monotropism lens.
🌸Autism is being framed as a resource burden rather than a justice and accessibility issue.
🌸Autistic voices are excluded from conversations that directly shape our lives, services, and narratives.
🌸The real crisis isn’t autism, it’s unmet needs created by ableist structures.

The more overwhelmed our systems become, the more they lean on labels to explain behaviour instead of examining sensory needs, trauma, monotropism, communication mismatch, or the environments that create distress.

Autistic people are not suddenly more “difficult.” We’re living in structures that were never designed with us in mind.

If you’re autistic, or supporting autistic people I hope this post gives you language, validation, and permission to question the narrative. Where we can, if it’s safe to do so, we can question the status quo and name the harms autistic people experience 💜

01/10/2025

Lately in my practice I’ve been struck again and again by how environments, not bodies, create the biggest barriers.

Whether it’s a child in school who only realises they’re overwhelmed once meltdown hits, or an adult forced into a busy work task without time to arrive and regulate. It isn’t their interoception that’s “failing.” It’s the systems that demand instant adaptability and punish difference.

From a neurodiversity paradigm perspective, interoception is simply one way that brains and bodies vary. But when schools, workplaces, and services don’t flex, those natural differences are made disabling.

And when we look through an intersectional lens, we see how these disabling environments stack with racism, classism, ableism, sexism, q***rphobia and more; intensifying exclusion for people who hold multiple marginalised identities.

Justice means shifting the focus: away from trying to “fix” people, and toward reshaping environments, expectations, and systems. Because thriving isn’t about overriding our needs, it’s about being in spaces that honour them.

✨ If you’re a teacher, employer, or clinician: pause and ask, what would it look like if the environment carried more of the load, so the person didn’t have to?

Would love to hear your answers 💜

28/09/2025

28/09/2025

Gestalt Language Processing Reframed: Monotropism, Interests & Connection

Helen Edgar from and I have been deep in planning mode for our GLP Conference session - and we’re so excited to share where our thinking has taken us!

We’re bringing together two big ideas:
✨ Gestalt Language Processing
✨ Monotropism - the theory that autistic minds focus deeply on a small number of interests at a time, shaping how attention and communication flow.

Monotropism isn’t new - it was developed by Dr Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser in the 1990s and first published in 2005. It’s increasingly recognised in the autistic and neurodivergent community as a core part of understanding autism.

We’ll be sharing a visual that compares more traditional views of GLPs with a monotropism-informed, neurodiversity-affirming reframing - one that’s grounded in connection, interests, and how attention works in a monotropic mind.

We’d love to see you there, so come along and join us at the GLP Conference this October! Link to register is in my bio 💕

27/09/2025

Today I had the privilege of participating in some much needed research with ***routloud and 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

The project centres q***r experiences of sexual expression for people in the South West and it made me think hard about the intersections of AuDHD, q***rness, and disability, and how often our knowledge about our own lives is erased or mistrusted.

In therapy, this shows up as epistemic injustice:
❌ people being disbelieved when they share their needs
❌ people lacking language for their lived realities
❌ people being forced into deficit-based frameworks that don’t fit

For those of us navigating multiple intersecting identities, the weight of this injustice compounds. And yet, it’s in these spaces that some of the most powerful wisdom lives. I heard that today, sitting in community with some pretty awesome human beings ❤️

Whilst I felt seen and in community with these people, I was also acutely aware of both my own privileges and the role I hold as an SLT. This post explores what testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007) can look like when AuDHD, q***rness, and disability overlap and how therapists can start to dismantle these patterns in everyday practice.

Because neurodiversity-affirming practice isn’t just clinical technique, it’s Disability Justice, it’s social justice, it can create epistemic justice for folks living at the sharpest intersections.

✨ I’d love to hear: where have you noticed epistemic injustice showing up in your practice or community?

Huge thanks to everyone involved today and to the research project team for inviting me to facilitate a focus group and take part in the research.

K 💜

***r

24/09/2025

Ipseity is a beautiful word. It’s the quality of being oneself and embracing individuality, of what makes us unique.

It’s a word you can find in the Monotropic words e-book Flappy Inky Feathers, Autistic Realms, and I created at the start of this year.

The book continues:

“The only person who can be you is you. Nobody else can be better at being you than you!
Embracing our uniqueness is a powerful political act for Autistic people. It’s a rejection of traditional narratives about Autism which fail to capture the beauty of our experiences; this includes monotropism.”

Life would be incredibly dull if everyone was a carbon copy of their neighbours. We need infinite variety in infinite combinations. This is how we grow as a species. Our brains have endless natural variations. This is a Good Thing.

The way we experience the world can be beautiful. The small details, the joy in sensory experiences, the wonderful expressions of empathy, the bliss we feel in a monotropic flow state. Our lives and our experiences have intrinsic value just as we are.

23/09/2025

FREE WEBINAR: MONDAY 29TH SEPT 7-8PM

I've spent the last 12 hours or thinking what I might be able to do to put some positivity out into the world given everything that is happening.

This is one way... I'd like to invite you to attend a free webinar where we will explore Nurturing Self-esteem in Autistic Young People.

Monday 29th September 7-8pm, recorded for those who can’t attend in person (I won’t record the Q&A bit at the end though)

Book on here for free: https://www.gr0ve.org/online-groups/

I don't have time to make a new webpage for this - sorry - scroll down and you'll see it listed to book for free at the bottom - I'll send the link out on Monday.