Neurodivergent Conversations | Autism, ADHD, AuDHD, PDA, Emotional Regulation, SEND parent, Meltdowns, Special Needs Parent

Her sister was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school. So was her dad. And JoAnn spent years insisting it definitely wasn't her.

Her sister presented the way we all expect ADHD to look. Couldn't sit still, all over the place, pushing back against authority. JoAnn didn't look like that at all, so she assumed she was in the clear, and quietly carried a lot of shame instead. The klutziness. Running into walls. Going into class determined that today would be the day she paid attention, and catching herself 10 minutes later having heard none of it.

It took her husband, who is autistic and was diagnosed only about 18 months ago, pointing out the things that made her different from the norm before it all clicked into place.

I loved how she describes their marriage. They are jazz. He's the bass and the drum keeping everything on time. She's the saxophone doing riffs all around it to keep it interesting.

Then we get into what she actually does, which is helping mamas put down the guilt. And she says something I hadn't heard before: guilt isn't the villain. Used correctly, it is a pro-social emotion. It is the thing that nudges you to reply to the message you ignored, to repair the relationship, to reach back out. Guilt only turns dangerous when it stops describing what you did and starts describing who you are.

She walks through the guilt equation, which is expectations minus reality, and the gap versus gain shift, which is one of those tiny changes that quietly rearranges your whole day.

And then there is a coffee shop story involving the wrong woman, a free coffee and a genuinely spectacular misunderstanding, which she tells to make a point about what to do with the moments you would normally replay for weeks.

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She teaches families how to sleep for a living. And then her own bedtimes fell apart.

Michelle is a paediatric sleep specialist, so she knew every rule in the book. Bath, teeth, pyjamas, story, bed. It had worked. And then, seemingly overnight, it stopped. Bedtime battles climbing, teeth brushing refused, baths refused. She sat in it feeling baffled, convinced she must be doing something wrong, and quietly not telling anyone because how do you admit you are struggling with bedtime when bedtime is your job?

What shifted it wasn't a new technique. It was letting go of the shoulds and starting to ask a different question: what is my child's nervous system carrying right now, and how many demands am I stacking on top of it in the last 30 minutes of the day?

So she spread it out. Teeth after dinner. The nightly bath quietly retired, because honestly, how dirty are they? Instead of a routine her children had to get through, an evening they could float through.

We also get properly into the 4am wake-ups, because so many of us are living there. Michelle explains what is actually going on in the body at that hour, and it turns out to be several things at once rather than one thing you are failing to fix.

And her one small thing to try tonight is not what you would expect from a sleep specialist. It isn't dimmer lights or a calmer voice. It's jumping, tug of war with a dressing gown cord and pushing into the bathroom scales, because pressure through the body boosts melatonin naturally and laughing together does more for a nervous system than a quiet room ever will.

If bedtime in your house has stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like recovery, this one is for you.

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She married young, with an anxiety diagnosis, and assumed the wedding would fix it. It did not.

Jackie is back, which makes her my very first repeat guest, and this conversation went exactly where you would expect two ADHD brains to go, which is everywhere. We didn't prepare questions. We just hit record.

She talks first about showing up authentically online versus in real life, and why the internet has always felt safer than a room with two people in it.

Then we get into marriage, and this is the bit I keep thinking about. Jackie married two weeks out of college with what she was told was anxiety and what turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD and a stack of sensory differences she wouldn't understand until she was 31. Her husband's brain works nothing like hers. For years, that difference felt like a choice he was making, and when something feels like a choice, it feels like an attack, and then you're both defensive and nobody is actually talking.

What changed was understanding that every brain is just trying to feel safe, and different brains find safety in different places.

She is also clear about the line, which I appreciated. Neurodivergence isn't an excuse for bad behaviour. You do not get to say I can't. But you absolutely get to say I do it differently.

We talk about the "manual car" idea, which is possibly the kindest reframe I've heard for the fantasy that a partner should just know. We talk about touch, and the moment Jackie realised it wasn't her husband she was recoiling from, it was a specific type of touch. And we talk about the middle chunk of life, the survival years, where the laughter quietly disappears and you look up one day and realise you're partner roommates.

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She was 21 years old before she found out that most people do not love their job.

Angela grew up in a family where her dad fell in love with cars at 12, shined shoes outside a church for a quarter a go, bought and fixed up his first car at 16, and built a life inside the thing he loved. Nobody sat her down and explained any of this. She just absorbed it. Find the thing at 12. Charge for it at 16. Build the career.

So she did. First book of poetry at 7. First novel at 12. Writing other people's papers for money at 16. And then a 30-year career as a ghostwriter with more than 2,000 books behind her.

It wasn't until a friend's dad's retirement party, when Angela earnestly asked him when he first knew he loved insurance, that she found out the rest of the world was not operating this way at all.

What she describes, of course, is monotropic focus. And here is why I wanted to talk to her about it: going all the way down the rabbit hole builds a kind of confidence you cannot get anywhere else. Angela says she has imposter syndrome about plenty of things, but never about writing.

Which is why she is so firm that a special interest is not a reward and should never be used as one. Her advice for the 10-year-old in an Oxford pub with a stack of books about German tanks was simple: fill the house with German tanks.

We also talk about the harder side, which nobody warns you about. Special interests move on. Sometimes right after you have learned everything about skateboarding, or bought the expensive Yu-Gi-Oh card, or rearranged the bedroom. There is real grief in that, and Angela names it honestly.

Then she takes us somewhere I found genuinely brilliant, which is autistic culture. We talk about autism almost entirely in medical language, and yet for most of human history it was simply the way certain people were. Angela has boiled it down to 10 pillars of autistic culture, and she tells a story about her grandmother, cut glass and an encyclopaedic knowledge that came from absolutely nowhere except pure, deep interest.

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If you started out with a clear picture of the kind of parent you'd be, and then real life quietly dismantled the whole thing, this episode is going to feel like someone finally gets it.

This week I'm joined by Carrie Grant, mom of four (one of whom joined their family through adoption), an autistic mama herself, and someone who has run a support group for more than 300 SEND families for nearly 15 years. Carrie talks about the moment she “jumped ship” from the parenting she'd planned to a completely new way of doing things, and how that shift was less a few tweaks and more a total worldview change.

We get into what it means to become a “professional parent” overnight, learning the acronyms, writing the endless emails, holding two worlds together, and how she and her husband David landed on different pages for a while before finding their way back to the same one. Carrie shares the reframe that stuck with me most: our kids don't rise up into our world, we grow up through theirs. She has zero interest in making her children look more neurotypical, and so much interest in who they actually are.

We're also honest about the hard parts. The mornings that swallow whole hours, the days you barely recognize yourself, the loneliness of feeling like no one around you understands. Carrie's answer to all of it is community, the kind of people you can sit with and just say “this morning was hard” without explaining a single thing. She talks about holding space, being held in mind, and why other SEND parents are, in her words, the most amazing parents she's ever met.

And if you're running on empty right now, her take on self-care alone is worth the listen. Spoiler: she gives you full permission to ignore the advice that doesn't fit your life.

Come sit with us. It does get easier, and you are so far from alone in this.

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