The Best Trauma-Informed Self-Care for Neurodivergent Trauma Survivors

If you're a neurodivergent survivor you have to change the way you self-care.

Photo by Hiki App on Unsplash

I was a long-time devotee to therapy for my childhood and adoption trauma. For years, I sat in chairs across from therapists and had encounters both good and bad. From a therapist calling me a nihilist for not wanting children, to another who told me I was too “self-aware,” I saw it all and I tried it all. After years, however, I realized I wasn’t getting the desired effects. Why?

I did the work. I showed up. I changed myself. I learned, learned, and re-learned who I was and what it meant to be the person I wanted to become. Yet I still felt panicked all the time. I felt hopeless and overwhelmed.

The reality, I later discovered, was that I was a neurodivergent person.

I won’t bore you with a vellum scroll of titles that, frankly, aren’t really your concern. Suffice it to say this — there was a reason all that therapy didn’t feel (physically) like it had worked. That reason was that my *nervous system* was wired differently, which had changed the way it sustained damage from over a decade of childhood trauma.

That’s right. There’s a big difference between a neurotypical trauma survivor and a neurodivergent trauma survivor. Those differences are down to core physical levels, and that shapes the way both are able to repair their nervous systems and regulate their emotional responses to the stressors of life.

Once I understood those differences, my healing fast-tracked, and I was soon able to navigate anxiety, *my* depression, and some of the worst symptoms that came with CPTSD and my extremely dysregulated, damaged, and dysfunctional nervous system.

Are you a neurodivergent person too? Then your struggle to “heal” may come down to adopting the approach that actually accommodates your needs.

The neurodivergent nervous system is wired differently.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Unlike the neurotypical nervous system, the nervous systems of neurodivergent people (specifically, for this article, those with ADHD, ASD, and AuDHD) are incredibly sensitive. That means that it processes a lot more information than your average neurotypical brain. For the neurodivergent person, being alive can be (at times) a sensory nightmare.

But that’s not the crux of the true differences, or why trauma recovery is so much harder for those who sit at certain points in the neurodivergent spectrum.