Understanding Neurodiversity Through a Relational Lens
- May 20
- 7 min read
Written by Julie Wan, Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
Julie Wan is a UK-based Psychotherapist and Counsellor specialising in anxiety, life transitions, and attachment work with teenagers and adults. She integrates humanistic-existential psychotherapy with developmental psychology to help clients gain clarity and freedom.
As conversations around ADHD and autism continue to grow, many people are reexamining long-held feelings of shame, difference, and self-understanding. This article explores neurodiversity through a relational and phenomenological lens, reflecting on diagnosis, societal structures, and the importance of understanding human experience with curiosity rather than reduction.
Why neurodiversity conversations matter right now
Conversations around ADHD and autism have become increasingly visible in recent years. For some people, diagnosis brings an enormous sense of relief and understanding. For others, it can feel uncomfortable or limiting, as though their identity risks becoming reduced to a label.
The longer I sit with clients, and reflect on my own experiences too, the more I find myself questioning these kinds of either or positions.
As someone with lived experience of neurodiversity alongside my professional work as a therapist, I have become deeply curious about the ways people make sense of diagnosis, difference, and identity.
Part of what drew me to writing this article was a tension I have increasingly noticed, both personally and professionally, yet rarely seen spoken about explicitly. Within existential and phenomenological traditions, there is often understandable caution around reducing people to labels, whilst at the same time many people experience diagnosis as profoundly meaningful, relieving, and validating. I have found myself increasingly reflecting on how we might hold both of these realities together without rushing too quickly towards a conclusion. Perhaps this unresolved tension is part of the paradox itself.
As a therapist working from a phenomenological and existential perspective, I am often less interested in asking what a person objectively is, and more interested in understanding how someone experiences themselves and the meaning they make of that experience. Thinkers such as Ernesto Spinelli have deeply influenced my thinking in this respect, particularly around remaining open to experience rather than reducing people too quickly to fixed assumptions or categories.
At the same time, I have also found compassionate psychiatric voices such as Edward Hallowell incredibly valuable. What I appreciate in his writing on neurodiversity is that he acknowledges both the reality of struggle and the humanity of the person experiencing it, without collapsing them entirely into pathology.
I think that balance feels important to me.
When diagnosis brings relief
I have sat with clients who, after years of believing there was simply something wrong with them, experienced diagnosis as profoundly relieving. Suddenly, experiences that once felt confusing begin to make sense within a different framework. The narrative can shift from “I am failing” to “perhaps my brain works differently within a world that expects certain ways of functioning.”
The shame softens. Self blame loosens. There is often more room for self compassion. Yet, diagnosis is not always experienced positively. Some people feel boxed in by labels, fearful of being reduced to a category or seen only through a diagnostic lens. Others worry that diagnosis somehow defines the boundaries of what they can become.
Both of these realities matter to me. Public understanding of neurodiversity is still shaped by stereotypes. ADHD, for example, is often imagined through the image of the hyperactive, disruptive, misbehaving boy unable to sit still in a classroom, yet many women and girls are only diagnosed later in life, after years of masking or quietly struggling in ways that went unseen.
Many adults receiving diagnoses later in life describe not only relief, but grief too. Grief for the years spent believing they were lazy, difficult, disorganised, too sensitive, or fundamentally flawed.
This is one reason why I would describe myself as neurodiversity affirming in my therapeutic work. Not because I believe diagnosis should define a person completely, nor because I think every human struggle should be explained diagnostically, but because I have repeatedly seen how understanding oneself differently can create compassion where previously there was only shame.
The systems we live within
At the same time, I also find myself increasingly reflecting on the social structures we live within and the ways they shape what becomes visible as difference in the first place.
Modern life rewards certain ways of functioning. We tend to value sustained attention, organisation, productivity, emotional regulation, and the ability to function consistently within highly structured environments. This is especially visible within education and workplace cultures shaped around standardisation, efficiency, and conformity. This does not mean neurodiversity is unreal.
Attentional, sensory, emotional, and social differences are very real lived experiences. But I do wonder whether the impact of those differences, and the extent to which they become disabling, shameful, or pathologised, is shaped in relationship with the environments people are trying to navigate.
Even the language we use reflects this at times. Terms such as disorder can subtly imply malfunction or defect, shaping how people come to understand themselves long before compassion or context enter the conversation.
It is perhaps no coincidence that many people celebrated for creativity, innovation, or challenging convention are also people whose minds work differently. Traits that may be pathologised within rigid environments can, in different contexts, become sources of originality, creativity, and vision.
It leaves me wondering whether, at times, the problem lies less within the person themselves and more within environments that struggle to accommodate different ways of thinking and being.
If our societal structures were different, would we even use terms such as neurodivergent in the same way? Human neurological variation has likely always existed, yet the meanings we attach to certain traits are inevitably shaped by the cultures and expectations we live within.
Someone who struggles within highly standardised environments may experience themselves very differently in spaces that are more flexible, creative, or adaptive.
Some evolutionary and anthropological perspectives have also suggested that traits now associated with neurodiversity may once have been experienced very differently within earlier human communities. Human beings lived for much of history within smaller relational groups where survival depended on a range of different strengths and ways of responding to the environment.
Within those contexts, traits we might now associate with ADHD, such as novelty seeking, scanning the environment, creativity, spontaneity, or responding quickly to change, may not necessarily have been understood through the lens of disorder in the way they often are today. Different people within a group may naturally have gravitated towards different roles based on their particular strengths.
Of course, this does not mean neurodiversity would never have brought struggle or challenge. Nor does it mean earlier societies were somehow ideal. But it does invite reflection on the possibility that some forms of distress emerge not only from difference itself, but from the relationship between that difference and the structures people are expected to function within.
Beyond reductionism
From a phenomenological perspective, human beings do not exist separately from relationships, culture, expectations, and the social worlds they move through. Diagnosis itself does not emerge in a vacuum either. It exists within particular ideas about what is considered normal, productive, functional, or acceptable.
This does not make neurodiversity unreal. Rather, it invites us to reflect more deeply on the relationship between individuals and the worlds they are trying to navigate.
I am also drawn to aspects of R. D. Laing’s thinking, particularly his concern that diagnosis can sometimes become reductionist when human suffering is separated from the wider context within which it emerges. At the same time, I do not entirely reject diagnosis in the way some perspectives critical of psychiatry have done. Within the systems we currently live in, diagnosis can provide language, support, understanding, access to help, and relief from shame for people who may otherwise feel deeply alone in their struggles.
I think this tension matters.
A relational way of understanding people
As a relational therapist, I am far less interested in fixing people than in helping them understand themselves more compassionately and honestly. Much of my work involves creating a space where people can begin making sense of themselves outside rigid narratives of defectiveness or failure.
Very often, the people I work with do not seem broken to me, although they can feel that way. More often, they seem overwhelmed, ashamed, exhausted from masking, or worn down from trying to fit themselves into environments that do not naturally accommodate who they are.
This is why I often find myself interested not in rejecting diagnosis, but in remaining curious about how it is being held and experienced.
In my work, I sometimes find myself gently challenging the idea that struggles belong entirely within the individual at all. As a relational therapist, I see human beings as inseparable from the relationships, systems, environments, and social expectations that shape their lives.
Sometimes this opens up a different kind of conversation. If the structures surrounding someone were different, would those struggles feel the same? Would they even be understood in the same way?
Perhaps diagnosis can be understood not as a fixed identity, but as one possible lens through which people make sense of themselves. A lens that can offer validation, language, understanding, support, and self-compassion within the at times limiting societal structures that we live in, whilst still leaving space for complexity, individuality, and humanity.
Closing reflection
As a neurodiversity affirming therapist working relationally with both adults and teenagers, I continue to find myself deeply interested in the ways people make sense of themselves, their struggles, and the worlds they are trying to navigate. Both personally and professionally, I believe there is something profoundly healing about moving away from shame and towards greater understanding, self-compassion, and curiosity about what it means to be human.
Read more from Julie Wan
Julie Wan, Psychotherapeutic Counsellor
Julie Wan is a Psychotherapist and Counsellor working on the South Coast of the UK and the founder of Rockshore Therapy. Registered with the BACP, she works from a humanistic-existential framework, integrating phenomenology, attachment theory, and developmental psychology. Julie specialises in anxiety, transitions, and relational difficulties with teenagers and adults. Her work is known for its depth, clarity, and ability to reduce self-blame while supporting clients to see their situations more clearly. She has previously worked with organisations including the YMCA and brings a rich background in education and teaching to her therapeutic practice.
