Connect Counseling and Consulting

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Empowering & with growth-focused coaching & courses. 🌿 We champion authentic journeys, offering support for every unique family story. 🏳️‍🌈

05/13/2026

One of the first tools we learn in clinical training is how to use silence therapeutically.

What the training doesn't say: silence assumes a nervous system that can tolerate ambiguity without going into threat response.

For many neurodivergent clients, unstructured silence doesn't feel like space. It feels like something went wrong. Narrating the silence changes everything.

'I'm going to take a moment to sit with what you just shared.' Four seconds with a frame is a fundamentally different experience than four seconds that just appears.

05/13/2026

A sliding scale isn't charity. It's a clinical and ethical commitment to access.

New post on the ConnectLab blog: what an equity-based sliding scale actually is, why it matters under WA ethics codes, and how to build one that's financially sustainable.

Read at connect-counseling.co/blog/equitybasedslidingscale

05/12/2026

Performing neurotypicality has a clinical cost for both our clients and us.

It means spending cognitive bandwidth on looking normal instead of being present. And when we treat social compliance as a marker of progress, we’re not helping clients heal. We’re helping them hide better.

Eye contact. Sitting still. Processing on a neurotypical timeline. These are not neutral treatment goals.

Affirming care means asking: is this client learning to exist more comfortably, or to move more convincingly?

There’s a difference between coping and disappearing.

Share this with a colleague as the reminder of the great work you’re doing with holding space for your ND clients.

ADHDtherapist cliniciansofinstagram

Nobody handed me a clear side-by-side when I was deciding where to build my practice.So here's the one I wish existed: a...
05/11/2026

Nobody handed me a clear side-by-side when I was deciding where to build my practice.

So here's the one I wish existed: a real look at the tradeoffs between group practice, cooperative, and private practice without the spin.

Share this with a supervisee navigating this decision.

Tara wishes you a happy Friday! Quick reminder that the free WA State CEU tracker is sitting in my bio waiting for you o...
05/08/2026

Tara wishes you a happy Friday! Quick reminder that the free WA State CEU tracker is sitting in my bio waiting for you once you join my newsletter. Unsubscribe any time!

It takes 2 minutes. It tells you exactly where you stand on your license renewal requirements.

Get it here: https://connect-counseling-and-consulting.kit.com/fd1d68a528

(And while you're there — the Responsive Boundaries async CEU is also about to open 👀)

05/07/2026

For years I thought I was just being professional.
Sitting still in sessions because movement felt unprofessional. Keeping my tone even because directness made people uncomfortable. Processing internally and presenting finished thoughts because thinking out loud had been called too much in my training.

I thought I was adapting to the therapeutic relationship. I was masking.

What changed when I got my own neurodivergent diagnosis wasn’t just self-understanding. It was clinical understanding. Because I had been asking my neurodivergent clients to do the exact thing I was doing — perform a version of themselves that fit the room, rather than actually be in it.

When I stopped masking in my own practice the clients who had been “resistant” or “hard to engage” started showing up differently. Because I was.

Unmasking is not unprofessional. Masking was never clinical neutrality. It was passing.

Save this if it landed. Follow for more

If you’re interested in doing deeper work on unmasking your therapy boundaries and creating a safer space for ND clients, sign up for the waitlist for Responsive Boundaries, an NBCC and NASW approved self-led course coming this month. therapistsofinstagram autistictherapist neurodivergent unmasking

05/06/2026

Clinical neutrality is often taught as a virtue. For neurodivergent clients, it frequently functions as harm.

When a therapeutic framework assumes neurotypicality as the default, a "neutral" stance does not mean no position — it means an invisible one that centers neurotypical norms without naming them. I wrote about what this looks like in practice, why it matters clinically and ethically, and what genuinely ND-affirming practice requires instead.

New post on the blog.
connect-counseling.co/blog/when-good-therapy-becomes-a-barrier

05/06/2026

Sit with this one for a second.

'Noncompliant' is one of the most traditional labels a clinician can put in a chart.

It follows clients across their entire care history. It primes every future provider to arrive with a different set of assumptions before the client opens their mouth.

And in my experience, when I actually dig into what's behind that label, almost always what I find is a client whose needs the system wasn't designed to meet.

Not a client who failed to comply.

A system that failed to adapt.

💬 What do you find when you look behind 'noncompliant' in a client's history?

05/04/2026

Me: has literally studied attachment theory.
Also me: I'm fine, I don't need anyone, I'll figure it out myself, no really I'm good, why would I ask for help, that's fine, everything is fine.

The pipeline from "I understand this intellectually" to "I will now apply none of it to my own life" is so short and so fast.

Hyperindependence as a trauma response is one of the things I see most often in neurodivergent and high-achieving clients, and quite frankly in clinicians. We're very good at holding space for other people's vulnerability and absolutely terrible at our own.

If this is you, you're not alone. Which I know you won't ask for help with. But still. :)

Save this for the next time someone asks if you're okay and you say yes when you mean no.

Follow for more! connect-counseling.co

Most of us were trained to see communication breakdowns in therapy as a client problem.The Double Empathy Problem refram...
05/04/2026

Most of us were trained to see communication breakdowns in therapy as a client problem.

The Double Empathy Problem reframes that entirely.

Breakdowns in communication are often the result of two people with genuinely different perspectives and experiences trying to meet — and being given unequal responsibility for doing so.

When we put all the burden of adaptation on the client, we're not being neutral. We're siding with the structure.

This is one of the frameworks at the heart of neurodivergent-affirming clinical practice.

Save this. Share it with a colleague or supervisor who needs to hear it.

05/01/2026

Resistance to therapy is often a reasonable response to an unreasonable system.

When a client pushes back, disengages, or refuses to do the work — before you label it resistance, ask: resistance to what, exactly?

Sometimes it's the modality. Sometimes it's the power dynamic. Sometimes it's the fact that the system asking them to change is the same one that harmed them.

Save this for the next time a client gets labeled "resistant."

Follow me for more clinical content.

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Seattle, WA

Website

http://connectbetter.learnworlds.com/

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