Yet, nothing fully fits; this is a space to make sense of your experience without feeling ‘broken’.
If you experience any of these feelings, you are not alone.
Many adult AuDHD individuals live in the Autism ADHD overlap, where their traits can pull them in opposite directions.
Read this for more on what AuDHD is and how it presents
AuDHD support sits within our broader approach to neurodivergent therapy for adults in Ontario — you can see the full range of services and approach there.
I feel different depending on the setting. There is a work ‘me’ and a different ‘me’ at home.
I feel like a walking paradox every day.
I am successful on paper, but internally, I feel the struggle of just being myself.
I feel like I am living inside a bubble that keeps everyone around me at a distance.
I feel burned out from hiding my thoughts, interests, and way of processing from others.
AuDHD can be confusing because traits can compete, mask, or change depending on context. Here are some common struggles neurodivergent adults with both autism and ADHD may experience.
If you primarily resonate with attention regulation and executive dysfunction challenges, you may also want to explore ADHD therapy for adults in Ontario.
Maybe at work, you are seen as successful or even feel confident about your work. But in social settings, you struggle to connect and understand social cues. As a result, you may feel like you don’t know who you are.
Adults with AuDHD also often feel like they have to hide their overwhelm from friends, family, and work colleagues. High effort functioning is exhausting—both physically and emotionally.
Many AuDHD adults don’t realize they’re in burnout until capacity collapses. I’ve written more about this in Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy and Self-Compassion Practices for Neurodivergent Burnout.You feel fundamentally different, but you also want to feel understood for who you are. Trying to find someone who understands how you feel and why you feel that way often leads to intense loneliness.
AuDHD is autism and ADHD together. It is a unique neurotype that often feels like having one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.
Your ADHD brain may very well crave novelty, big-picture ideas, and bursts of high energy.
On the other hand, your autistic brain craves predictability, sensory safety, and deep, bottom-up processing.
This often leaves you feeling like you’re oscillating between two extremes. But what you’re experiencing is not a problem. It is your natural rhythm.
When intelligence is used to compensate for social or executive struggles, masking becomes costly.
Who am I, really?
Why does this keep happening in work and relationships?
How do I live authentically instead of reactively?
As therapists, we create a space where you are not a puzzle to be solved, but a person to be witnessed. All parts of you are welcome at our sessions. You can be fully yourself, not a version that is shaped by expectations, masking, or performance.
In our virtual online AuDHD therapy, we don’t pathologize your oscillations. We don’t view your paradoxes as something to fix.
Instead, we witness your entire experience.
Our goal as your AuDHD therapist is to help you understand the “both/and” nature of AuDHD. We look at how your traits interact, overlap, and shift across contexts.
One challenging thing to deal with is rejection sensitivity in AuDHD adults, learn more about it here.
We do not pathologize fluctuations; we recognize they are part of your natural rhythm. In our sessions, we focus on integration, not correction.
We work beyond labels and into identity, meaning, authenticity, and belonging.
Together, we look more closely at how to align your life with your values for true coherence that makes life enjoyable. We don’t use external expectations as a measuring stick for your experience.
Ultimately, this isn’t about fitting you into a box. Instead, your AuDHD therapist's goal is to help you understand why the box never fit you to begin with.
Traditional goal-oriented therapy often misses this complexity, which we explore in Why Traditional Therapy Fails Gifted Clients.
More self-understanding, less shame.
A clearer sense of identity.
Fewer burnout cycles.
More authentic choices and decision-making based on boundaries.
Feeling less alone with your experience.
Sessions are online, so you can access therapy from the comfort of your support space. No need to commute. We work virtually with adults throughout Toronto.
Whether you’re struggling with autism masking or AuDHD burnout, our sessions allow you to fully be yourself. Stimming is welcome, and since we meet virtually, you control your sensory environment. You’re welcome to take pauses, write things down, or adjust the format to what works for you.
Each session is about 50 minutes, and your privacy is always confidential.
If your experience also includes giftedness or twice-exceptionality, you can learn more about therapy for gifted and 2e adults.
AuDHD means being both autistic and ADHD. It's not simply two conditions side by side — the traits interact, sometimes amplifying each other and sometimes pulling in opposite directions, which is why AuDHD can look different from either autism or ADHD alone. An estimated large minority of autistic people also meet criteria for ADHD, and vice versa.
No — "AuDHD" is a community term, not a diagnosis in the DSM-5. What is official: since 2013, autism and ADHD can be diagnosed together in the same person (they previously couldn't, which is partly why so many AuDHD adults were missed). In practice, you'd receive two diagnoses; AuDHD is the word people use for the lived combination.
Because in some ways they do. Your ADHD side may crave novelty and spontaneity while your autistic side needs predictability and routine; one seeks stimulation while the other gets overwhelmed by it. That push-pull isn't you being inconsistent — it's the defining experience of AuDHD, and therapy works with the tension rather than trying to resolve it into one "correct" mode.
Many people begin therapy with only one diagnosis or without a formal diagnosis. Some were diagnosed with ADHD first and later began recognizing autistic traits, while others discovered ADHD after first identifying autism. Some people are still exploring both. You do not need a second diagnosis, or a first diagnosis, to begin therapy. We work with your actual experiences and can help you understand which descriptions and supports fit.
Single-condition approaches often backfire for AuDHD adults: pure ADHD strategies can ignore sensory limits and push you toward burnout, while autism-focused structure can feel suffocating to an ADHD brain. AuDHD therapy holds both — building routines flexible enough for novelty-seeking, energy plans that respect sensory capacity, and space to work out which needs are speaking at any given moment.
Not yet — sessions are currently individual. As the practice grows, we're exploring group offerings for AuDHD adults; if that interests you, mention it at your meet-and-greet and we'll let you know when something opens.
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