The AuDHD Psych Podcast

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1. Ep34: AuDHD Experience — Self-Concept and it's Influence on Autistic, AuDHD & ADHD Experience

   13 oktober 2026 · 18 min

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   🎙️ Episode 34: AuDHD (& Human) Experience — Self-Concept & It's Influence on Autistic, AuDHD & ADHD Experience

   "Am I actually broken? Or do I just have these lessons that I've learnt that have informed my understanding of myself?"

   Summary:
   This week Aaron unpacks self-concept: what it is, how we develop it as neurodivergent people, and how we can deliberately change it to improve our emotional experience. Building on the working model of emotions from the previous episode, he frames self-concept as our integrated understanding of who and what we are, woven together from core beliefs and spanning every domain that matters to us: relationships, learning, work, family, and social life.

   Aaron explains that every single experience teaches us something about ourselves, and shares personal examples of how failure experiences shaped his own self-concept: failing year twelve twice, mixed performance in the Navy, and believing he was "academically stupid" until nearly 40, when a colleague encouraged him to study psychology. He contrasts this with the success experiences since, which have reshaped his understanding of himself as a learner once he found the right environment and the right anchors for his attention.

   He then turns to the neurodivergent experience under a deficit-based model, where "normal" is implicitly assumed to be "right" and difference is repeatedly fed back to us as vague, impulsive, too much, or not enough. These implicit lessons create a self-fulfilling loop: expecting social situations to go badly, becoming anxious, performing worse, and reinforcing the belief. Aaron closes with two practical pathways for change: deliberately collecting new success experiences through scaffolded, CBT-style exposure, and finding community, where comparing ourselves against a realistic norm teaches us that we are not wrong, deficient, or broken. He cautions against the "superpower" framing just as much as the deficit framing, landing on a balanced vie…

2. Ep33: AuDHD Experience — Disclosure and Self-Advocacy for AuDHDers, ADHDers and Autistic Folk.

   6 oktober 2026 · 26 min

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   🎙️ Episode 33: AuDHD Experience — Disclosure and Self-Advocacy

   "Disclose where it serves you, and only where you feel safe doing so. People are not entitled to our information."

   Summary:
   Should I tell people I'm neurodivergent, and how do I advocate for what I need? This week Aaron reframes disclosure as something almost everyone gets wrong: it isn't a one-off announcement but a repeated, context-specific process that happens across settings and across a lifetime. Borrowing the queer community's language of "inviting people in," he explains why partial disclosure is the norm, not a failure, and why the decision always comes down to a personal cost-benefit analysis grounded in safety.

   Aaron walks through what the research tells us. In a UK study of 238 autistic adults, around 55% disclosed to some people, about a third disclosed to everyone, and roughly 10% told no one, with close to half of employees only disclosing after starting a job and outcomes split between positive and negative experiences. He contrasts this with the only experience-sampling study of disclosure as it happens, where about two-thirds of opportunities led to some disclosure and three-quarters of those were experienced positively, and he lingers on one participant's line: "I don't have the spoons to disclose and self-advocate in this context right now."

   From there, Aaron turns to accommodations. In Australia you don't have to name a diagnosis to a workplace; you can describe your difficulties and ask for reasonable adjustments, and employers have both a legal and a moral obligation to provide them where they don't cause undue hardship. Speaking as both a clinician and a small-practice owner, he explains what an employer needs to know to act, acknowledges that accommodations are often only partially met or not met at all, and closes with a practical self-reflection framework: identify the environment, the differences that matter in it, their impact, the accommodation that wo…

3. Ep 32: AuDHD Experience - Understanding Emotions - A Conceptual Working Model

   2 september 2026 · 24 min

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   🎙️ Episode 31: AuDHD Experience — A Working Model of Emotions

   "Emotions are our integrated experience of our body's response to our understanding of ourselves in our context."

   Summary:
   This week Aaron shares a working model for understanding emotions, developed with alexithymia and interoceptive differences in the neurodivergent community in mind. He defines emotion as combining cognitive appraisal (our understanding of self and context) with the body's physiological response, drawing on Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest framework extended to a "survive then thrive" lens.

   Aaron distinguishes challenge from threat, then walks through the activated spectrum of emotions using a real-world example from his own neighbourhood, St Kilda: fight (anger), flight (fear/anxiety), freeze, and fawn, explaining the physiological and attentional shifts behind each — heart rate, digestion, muscle tension, and narrowing focus. He extends the model into flop (depression, underpinned by hopelessness) and touches on disgust as a slower-threat, memory-enhancing response distinct from the acute threat responses.

   He then turns to positive and deactivated states — calm, contentment, boredom, and the activated positives of excitement, interest, curiosity, and play — showing how these emerge once safety is established and how they support learning and thriving rather than mere survival. Aaron closes with practical questions listeners can use to identify their own emotions when interoception is limited, such as noticing expectations, direction of movement (towards or away), activation level, and sense of agency.

   Key Themes & Takeaways:

   Emotion as appraisal plus body response – emotions reflect both our understanding of self-in-context and our body's activation (or non-activation) in response

   Challenge vs threat – the same event can trigger different emotions depending on our perceived resources relative to the demand

   The activated spectrum – fight, flight, freeze, and…

4. Ep 31: Neurodivergent Experience - Male/Female Vs Internalising/Externalising Presentations & Late Diagnosis

   23 augustus 2026 · 16 min

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   🎙️ Episode 31: Neurodivergent Experience - Male/Female Vs Internalising/Externalising Presentations & Late Diagnosis

   "When we talk about male and female presentations, we're really talking about internalising and externalising presentations."

   Summary:

   In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist and AuDHDer Aaron Howearth asks why more boys and men are diagnosed with autism and ADHD than girls and women. He argues that what we call male and female presentations is better described as internalising and externalising. An internalising presentation suppresses the impulse and works hard to fit the social rules, while an externalising presentation acts on it and is visible to everyone in the room. He links that split to how we still raise sons and daughters differently, and to how diagnostic criteria are built from what clinicians and researchers could observe. Because externalising presentations are the observable ones, they are the ones encoded in slow-moving manuals like the DSM and ICD, while quieter internalising presentations are less likely to be noticed or referred on.

   He then traces the cost of being missed. Internalising presentations more commonly come with anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidality, difficulties with self-esteem and self-concept, and a greater likelihood of a personality disorder diagnosis. Externalising presentations more often attract conduct diagnoses, defiance and aggression, but they also tend to bring earlier recognition and the relief of seeing yourself reflected in peers with the same label. Without that recognition, "I'm different" quietly becomes "I'm not enough". He closes on late diagnosis: masking eventually meets a threshold it cannot hold, and for many neurodivergent women that arrives at perimenopause, when falling oestrogen affects GABA, serotonin and dopamine and brain fog, inattention and sensory gating become harder to hide.

   Key Themes & Takeaways

   Internalising vs Externali…

5. Ep 30: AuDHD Experience - Autistic Burnout & Recovery

   15 augustus 2026 · 27 min

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   🎙️ Episode 30: AuDHD Experience - Autistic Burnout & Recovery

   "Downtime is a necessity, not a nice to have."

   Summary:

   In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist and AuDHDer Aaron Howearth takes on two questions: what is autistic or neurodivergent burnout, and what can we actually do to protect ourselves from it? He begins by being clear about where the evidence sits. Autistic burnout has been described within community since around 2008 but only reached academic publication in 2020, when Raymaker and colleagues offered a description, followed by Higgins and colleagues the year after. There is no specific research on ADHD burnout — that literature is about occupational burnout in ADHDers — and no research at all on combined AuDHD burnout, so this episode draws on the autistic burnout literature and says so plainly.

   Aaron works through the characteristics the two descriptions broadly agree on: debilitating exhaustion that leaves people drained and depleted, a loss of existing skills that increases disability, and, in Higgins' description, withdrawal. He makes the skill loss concrete — heightened sensory sensitivity, more emotional difficulty, reduced cognition, memory, speech and executive function, and increased difficulty with the activities of daily living like showering, cooking, cleaning and getting to work. He also complicates the three-month timeframe commonly quoted from Raymaker and colleagues, noting that the lived experience research mostly doesn't specify a duration at all: for some people it is days, for others months or years, and some don't fully recover.

   Drawing on a recent systematic review synthesising the lived experience literature, Aaron maps the consequences across three domains: adverse health and wellbeing impacts, our place within the community, and our capacity to stay hopeful about the future and about ourselves. That includes longer-lasting disability and continued fatigue, difficulty expressin…

6. Ep 29: AuDHD Experience - Work, Burnout and Ableism in Autism & ADHD

   26 juli 2026 · 26 min

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   🎙️ Episode 29 — Work, Burnout & Ableism: Why So Many of Us Aren't Employed

   Episode Summary

   If we are different and not defective, why are so many of us unemployed, underemployed, or exhausted at work? In this episode, Aaron Howearth (Clinical Psychologist) works through the employment gap for neurodivergent people — and makes the case that it is structural, not a matter of effort or willingness.

   We start with the numbers. Around three in ten autistic adults are employed in UK research, roughly half in Australia, and in the Netherlands the most common employment trajectory across thousands of autistic people was long-term unemployment. ADHD sits differently in the data, with productivity loss, injury, and time off carrying much of the cost. What ties it together is a person-environment mismatch — and the uncomfortable finding that most interventions still try to change the person rather than the workplace, even though environmental change is what actually shifts employment outcomes.

   From there we get into burnout as a mechanism. We work through what autistic burnout actually is — chronic exhaustion, skills loss, reduced tolerance for sensory and cognitive demands, nonlinear and often long-term — how it must be differentiated from depression, anxiety, trauma responses and personality differences without excluding them, and why the withdrawal looks different (recovery, not amotivation). We are careful with masking: it is associated with burnout and likely a leading mechanism, but the causal evidence isn't there yet. We also name the thin ground honestly — ADHD burnout is a clinical and community idea without a defining study, and AuDHD burnout has almost no academic literature at all.

   Then we turn upstream to ableism: the assumption that able-bodied and typical means right, normal, and appropriate, and that anything else is deficient. That shows up bluntly (employers who say they would not hire an autistic person under any circumstances) and sub…

7. Ep 28: Understanding Neurodivergence - Relationships, Friendships and Intimacy in AuDHD, ADHD and Autism

   16 juli 2026 · 20 min

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   🎙️ Ep 28 — Relationships: Friendship, Loneliness & Intimacy Across Neurotypes

   "It's not meeting my needs. It's not meeting your needs. It's meeting our needs in the best balance for us"

   ⚠️ Content note: this episode includes brief discussion of trauma, including sexual trauma.

   If we're different and not defective, why do so many of us find relationships hard? In this episode, Aaron Howearth (Clinical Psychologist) sits with that question and works through friendship, loneliness, and intimacy across neurotypes — not as evidence of a deficit inside us, but as something that lives in the space between us and the people we're trying to connect with.

   We start with what the research bears out: on average, autistic people report being lonelier and having fewer, lower-quality friendships — though this varies enormously from person to person, and many of us genuinely prefer smaller, higher-quality networks. From there we get into the double empathy problem: the idea that communication difficulties aren't a one-sided skills deficit, but a two-way mismatch, like speaking the same language in a slightly different dialect. When neurotype-matched pairs communicate, that difficulty largely disappears — which tells us it's a language barrier, not a broken person. We look at why community is protective, why masking costs us, and why the evidence is stronger for autism than ADHD, with only grey-literature hints that double empathy extends to ADHD too.

   We then turn to intimacy across neurotypes — comparable desire for connection, but real barriers around sensory sensitivity, communication style, and a statistically higher likelihood of trauma. Finally, we bring in Gottman's work on partner responsiveness (turning towards vs turning away) and a warm-hug framing of attachment styles, landing on the most practical lever of all: understanding how you and your partner work, and meeting needs in the balance that's right for your context.

   In This Episode (Chapters)

   …

8. Ep 27: AuDHD Experience - Therapy Adaptations for Neurodivergent Folk (AuDHD, ADHD & Autism) — What's the Point?

   12 juli 2026 · 27 min

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   🎙️ Ep 27: AuDHD Experience - Therapy Adaptations for Neurodivergent Folk (AuDHD, ADHD & Autism) — What's the Point?

   "Barriers aren't a 'you' problem — they're an 'us' problem to manage together."

   Hi friends. If neurodivergent people are already showing up to therapy, why do affirming adaptations even matter? In this solo episode I work through that question from my own clinical experience and lived experience as an AuDHD psychologist. We map the barriers that keep neurodivergent people out of the therapy room — physical, psychological, emotional, sensory, and cognitive — and then walk back through the same five to look at small, practical, often low-cost changes that make care genuinely accessible. From externalising working memory and body doubling, to trauma-informed safety, non-fluorescent lighting, situational mutism, and a cushion instead of new chairs, this one is for neurodivergent listeners deciding what to ask for, and for clinicians wanting to do better.

   A note on the evidence: I'm speaking mostly from clinical and lived experience here, not a deep RCT base. Where I mention that neurodivergent people "endorse" adapted approaches as helpful, that's about acceptability and client-rated helpfulness — how much people value these adaptations — not proven treatment efficacy or effect sizes. The main study behind that point is Paynter, Sommer & Cook (2025), who asked autistic adults to rate the helpfulness of specific therapy adaptations. The passage on perimenopause and sensory gating is an emerging, still-contested area, not settled science — hold it lightly.

   Takeaways:
   • There's no single "neurodivergent barrier" — physical, psychological, emotional, sensory, and cognitive access all matter, and they stack.
   • Affirming therapy is trauma-informed by default; many of us carry complex stress and iatrogenic harm from past care.
   • Speech is never a choice — situational mutism is overwhelm, not defiance.
   • Meltdowns are overwhelm, and what loo…

9. Ep 26: Understanding Neurodivergence (AuDHD, Autism & ADHD) - More Than Diagnosis

   2 juli 2026 · 20 min

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   🎙️ Episode 26: Understanding Neurodivergence - More Than Diagnosis

   "I can be autistic without autism spectrum disorder, in the same way that I can have legs without being broken."

   Summary:

   In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, clinical psychologist and AuDHDer Aaron Howearth takes on a question sparked by a challenge on social media: can you identify as autistic without holding a formal diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder? The answer is yes — and in this episode, Aaron unpacks exactly why, drawing on clinical definitions, diagnostic criteria, the neurodiversity-affirming paradigm, and his own lived experience as an autistic ADHDer and former Navy serviceperson.

   Aaron begins by untangling three terms that are often conflated: neurodiversity, neurodivergent, and diagnosis. He explains that neurodiversity — like biodiversity — simply refers to the natural range of cognitive styles that exist across humans, while neurodivergent describes a brain that functions differently from the neurotypical majority. Autism, he argues, is a cluster of cognitive characteristics — not a disorder by default. Autism Spectrum Disorder, on the other hand, is the diagnostic label that applies only when those characteristics cause functional difficulties in the person's life.

   Drawing on Damian Milton's Double Empathy Problem, Aaron explores how social and communicative differences in autism are not inherent deficits, but mismatches between communication styles — a dialect problem, not a language problem. He walks through how the same characteristic (say, cognitive rigidity or impulsivity) can function as both a strength and a barrier depending on the environment, using vivid examples from his own clinical work and time in the Navy.

   Aaron also addresses the claim that autism diagnosis is "not a social construct," offering a clinical and philosophical unpacking of what a social construct actually is — and why diagnosis, by its very nature, fits that definition.…

10. Ep 25: AuDHD Experience - Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

    25 juni 2026 · 28 min

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    🎙️ Episode 25: AuDHD Experience - Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice

    "Neurodiversity-affirming practice" is now on almost every clinician's website here in Australia and around the world — but what does it actually mean, and what should it look like in the room? In this episode, Aaron Howearth (Clinical Psychologist) unpacks affirming practice not as a marketing label, but as a genuine reorientation of how we understand, formulate, and work alongside neurodivergent people.

    We start with the conceptual foundations: relocating difficulty away from the individual and into the mismatch between a person and an environment that demands they be someone they're not. From there we walk through the domains where affirming practice actually shows up — formulation, language, collaborative goal-setting, therapeutic-style fit, and environmental adaptation — using the five Ps formulation and plenty of lived-experience examples along the way. We then name clearly what affirming practice is not: relabelling old deficit-focused work, abandoning clinical reasoning, avoiding difficulty, or imposing an affirming frame on someone who hasn't asked for it.

    Finally, we offer six practical markers you can use to tell whether the care you're giving or receiving is genuinely affirming — and an honest note on where the evidence base currently sits. As always, this is general educational information, not individualised therapy or advice.

    In This Episode (Chapters)

    (00:00) Welcome and why affirming practice matters

    (01:30) What the research tells us — and where the evidence base is thin

    (03:00) Affirming practice as a reorientation, not a new treatment model

    (04:30) Relocating disability: the environmental mismatch

    (06:00) What we're actually trying to do in therapy (and what we're not)

    (08:00) The domains of affirming practice: formulation, language, goals, adaptation

    (09:30) Identity-first vs person-first language

    (10:30) The five Ps formulation, worked through as …

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