Historically, psychology has operated on an unspoken, underlying assumption: when someone is struggling, the problem is located entirely inside. Our thoughts are distorted. Our behaviors are maladaptive. Our brains are unruly and need to be trained to fit into the world around us.
As neurodivergent people, we know firsthand how exhausting and damaging that medicalized, deficit-based approach feels.
We already spend all day translating ourselves for a world that wasn’t built for our sensory systems, our communication styles, or the ways we process information. The last thing any of us needs is to walk into a therapy office and be handed another set of compliance-based tools designed to make us look and act more neurotypical.
That is where liberation-oriented and anti-oppressive therapy comes in. Rooted in the foundational work of Liberation Psychology (developed by Latin American psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró), liberation-oriented therapy flips the clinical script entirely. Instead of asking, "What is wrong with this person, and how do we fix them?" it asks, "What systems are impacting us, how is power operating here, and how do we reclaim our autonomy and humanity?"
Understanding Oppression, Power, and Liberation in Therapy
Therapeutic jargon can often feel distant or overly academic, so let’s ground these ideas in what they actually mean for our lives and relationships.
Naming Systemic Oppression and Neuronormativity
Anti-Oppressive Therapy recognizes that mental health does not operate and is not contained to our minds. An individual’s anxiety, depression, trauma, or burnout cannot be separated from the real-world systems of power and oppression we live within, including capitalism, fascism, ableism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity.
For those of us who are Autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, dyslexic, or otherwise neurodivergent, we are constantly navigating neuronormativity and systemic ableism. Society holds a rigid standard for how a human brain and nervous system "should" function, and it penalizes anyone who diverges from that standard. When a therapist ignores those oppressive systems, therapy inadvertently becomes an enforcement tool for the status quo, gaslighting neurodivergent people into believing our natural responses to an inaccessible world are merely "cognitive distortions" or personal failings.
The Therapist’s Relationship to Power
One of the most vital parts of anti-oppressive work happens before a client even walks into the room: the therapist’s ongoing interrogation of their own power.
In traditional clinical models, the therapist sits on a pedestal as the objective "expert" who diagnoses, assesses, and prescribes solutions to a passive patient. Historically, the mental health industrial complex has wielded immense institutional power over neurodivergent people, deciding who is "functional," whose communication is valid, and whose bodily autonomy is respected. Even with the best intentions, a therapist holds structural power in the room.
Practicing anti-oppressive therapy means I cannot pretend that power dynamic doesn't exist. Even as a neurodivergent therapist myself, it is my responsibility to continually examine my own privileges, biases, and institutional role through deep self-reflection and supervision within community. It means actively dismantling the clinical hierarchy so I am not acting as an authority figure or a gatekeeper of "normality," but rather showing up as an accountable, transparent human collaborator. If a rupture or misunderstanding happens in the room, an anti-oppressive therapist works to welcome feedback, honor the client's boundaries, and do the necessary work of repair.
Maximizing Client Autonomy and Humanity
Liberation-Oriented Therapy takes anti-oppressive awareness and turns it toward freedom, agency, and self-determination. Many neurodivergent people carry heavy histories of compliance trauma: years of being coerced by schools, families, workplaces, or past therapies into overriding our own bodily signals and boundaries just to be accepted or left alone.
Because oppression strips people of choice and reduces human beings to their productivity or compliance, a liberation-oriented therapist takes on the intentional role of maximizing client autonomy and humanity. In practice, this means:
- Bodily and nervous system sovereignty: Supporting neurodivergent people in trusting our own internal signals, sensory boundaries, and pacing above external demands.
- Consent-driven collaboration: Every step of therapy is co-created. Clients hold the ultimate authority over what we explore, how we explore it, and what healing looks like for their life.
- Honoring wholeness over productivity: Recognizing that a person’s worth is inherent, not something earned by how well they perform under capitalism or how closely they mimic neurotypical behavior.
Why This Matters So Deeply for Neurodivergent People
When we bring an anti-oppressive, liberation-oriented lens into neurodivergent therapy, the entire focus of our work shifts in four fundamental ways:
1. Unmasking and Healing from Compliance Trauma
As social psychologist Dr. Devon Price writes in Unmasking Autism, so many neurodivergent people survive by building elaborate masks: forcing eye contact, suppressing stims, hiding sensory pain, and over-functioning to keep others comfortable. While masking is often a brilliant, necessary survival strategy in an unsafe world, chronic masking leads to profound exhaustion, dissociation, and AuDHD or Autistic burnout.
Liberation-oriented therapy never asks neurodivergent people to build a better mask. Instead, it creates a relational sanctuary where we can explore who we are beneath the fawn responses and survival strategies, grieving what it cost us to hide and reclaiming our authentic ways of being.
2. Trading Shame for Critical Consciousness
Most neurodivergent people carry decades of relational wounds from being called "lazy," "too much," "too sensitive," or "inconsistent." For AuDHD folks in particular, the internal tug-of-war between craving novelty and needing routine can be deeply misunderstood by the outside world, leading to intense internalized ableism.
In liberation psychology, healing involves developing what educator Paulo Freire called conscientização (critical consciousness): learning to see how our personal shame is actually the weight of systemic oppression. Together, we audit that harsh inner critic. Who taught us that rest has to be earned? Who decided that needing low-sensory spaces, body doubling, or parallel play makes someone defective? We trace that shame back to neuronormativity and hand it right back to the systems that created it!
3. Centering Epistemic Justice (Lived Experience as Authority)
Neurodivergent people are routinely subjected to epistemic injustice: having our own knowledge, perceptions, and interpretations of our experiences dismissed or spoken over by non-neurodivergent "experts." In an anti-oppressive therapy room, neurodivergent lived experience is honored as the primary authority.
4. Expanding How We Process, Play, and Connect
Even traditional talk therapy is built on neuronormative assumptions: that sitting still in a chair, making eye contact, and using linear verbal language for fifty minutes is the "right" way to heal.
Maximizing a client's humanity and autonomy means freeing therapy from those rigid rules. Sometimes spoken words feel inaccessible, or language simply cannot capture what our bodies and nervous systems are holding. Therapy can involve pacing the room, sitting on the floor, laying in bed, dimming the lights, stimming freely, or engaging with expressive arts, and play to explore our inner worlds intuitively without the pressure to perform verbally.
We Don’t Need to Be Fixed. We Need Room to Be Whole!
At its heart, liberation-oriented and anti-oppressive therapy is grounded in a radical truth: neurodivergent brains and bodies are not pathologies to be cured. Our differences exist. We are whole as we are.
Living with a different nervous system in an unaccommodating, overwhelming world is genuinely hard. Executive dysfunction, sensory overload, and systemic barriers are very real, and in therapy, we still work together on practical, compassionate ways to support our nervous systems and navigate daily life.
The difference is why and how we do that work. We don't do it to make ourselves palatable, compliant, or small. We do it to reclaim our autonomy, honor our boundaries, reconnect with our creativity and joy, and build lives that actually fit the way we are wired.
Because therapy should never be another place where neurodivergent people have to give up our power or perform. It should be the place where we are met in our full humanity, and where we finally get to come home to ourselves.
Therapy with Laury
Hi, I’m Laury, (she/her), a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT #158568) offering online neurodivergent-affirming and neurodivergent-informed therapy across California. (Supervised by Lori Crowley, LMFT #121471, LPCC #10892 at The Center for Mindful Psychotherapy).
As a neurodivergent therapist and abstract expressive artist, I know how deeply transformative it is to step into a space where we don't have to translate, shrink, or explain ourselves. We get to be different, we don’t have to be different. In my work with teens, and adults, I weave together psychodynamic-relational therapy, mindfulness, expressive arts, and play therapy through an anti-oppressive, neurodiversity-affirming, and liberation-oriented lens. My commitment is to hold a warm, non-hierarchical, and intuitive space that honors your autonomy, respects your nervous system, and celebrates your whole humanity.
Ready to explore what therapy can feel like when you don't have to mask?
I invite you to reach out to schedule a free consultation. You can contact me here to connect, ask any questions you might have, and see if working together feels like the right fit for you.
