Key To Achieving Therapy Service Ltd

11/11/2025

The Right Fit Feels Like Partnership

(A quiet thank you to the families who make this work what it is.)

Yesterday, I spoke about the challenges that can come when expectations and communication styles don’t align. That reflection wasn’t about blame. It was about clarity. Because clarity creates space for connection.

Today, I want to focus on the other side of that coin.
The moments that work. The people who make this work possible.

The families and young people I connect with deeply are the ones who remind me what partnership really means. They show up with openness, honesty, and a willingness to learn together. They ask questions, share insights, and trust that I’m human too.

They understand that therapy isn’t a transaction, it’s a relationship.
That growth happens when we hold curiosity, patience, and kindness in equal measure.
And that respect flows both ways: from practitioner to family, and back again.

I see you. I see the effort it takes to stay hopeful in systems that can feel impossible. I see the bravery it takes to try again when you’ve been let down before. And I see the love behind every question, every story, every attempt to make life a little easier for your child.

So, this is a quiet thank you.
To those who meet the work with grace, humour, reflection, and trust.
You are the reason this work still feels meaningful, even on the hard days.

We all know the feeling when something just fits. When you’re understood, respected, and supported in a way that feels safe and true. That’s my experience from this side of the work.
I’d love to hear from you. What does the “right fit” look or feel like for you, in your world?

Here’s to the partnerships that feel grounded, kind, and human.

10/11/2025

Why Being Liked Is Overrated: Lessons from a Neurodivergent Business Owner

Learning to balance authenticity, autonomy, and compassion even when it means not being everyone’s cup of tea
Many neurodivergent people end up carving their own path in business. Often not out of ambition alone, but necessity. Running a small business offers what most traditional workplaces don’t: autonomy, flexibility, creative control, and the chance to build an environment that actually works for our nervous systems.

But with that freedom comes a unique set of challenges. The same traits that make us visionary, intuitive, and relentless can also make business ownership exhausting. We juggle capacity, sensory limits, executive function hurdles, and the emotional weight of wanting to do good work without burning out.

That same need for autonomy also creates tension in a world that still runs on the idea that “the customer is always right.”
For many neurodivergent people, including me, that phrase can feel like a threat to autonomy and safety. It pushes directly against our need for mutual respect, collaboration, and psychological equality. I’ve learned that I don’t fare well in dynamics where payment is mistaken for permission to control, to dictate, or to treat a professional as an employee rather than a collaborator.

And yet, I understand how it happens. People are stressed. Systems are failing them. They reach out, desperate for help and clarity. But being trauma-informed means recognising that stress doesn’t excuse disrespect. Autonomy and empathy can coexist; they have to, for this work to remain safe for everyone involved.

I live with AuDHD, hEDS and FND. That combination brings creativity, empathy, and drive, but also physical limits and executive-function challenges.

This past year, I’ve faced capacity strain, long waiting lists, and frustration from families who wanted instant answers or total availability. I care deeply, but I’m learning that caring doesn’t mean self-erasure.

For years, I was a therapist first and a business owner by accident. Lately, I’ve been diving into the business world properly through training, learning, and stretching myself in uncomfortable ways.

Because when you run a neurodivergent-led service, you don’t just manage operations; you hold people’s stories, your own health, and your values all at once.

A lesson from Stephen Bartlett stuck with me: if everyone likes you, you’re probably not standing for anything. That’s a tough pill for a lifelong people-pleaser who’s masked through conflict avoidance and rejection sensitivity. But leadership means tolerating discomfort.

I’m not a miracle worker. I’m a neurodivergent, trauma-informed parent and clinician balancing ethics, capacity, and humanity. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay. The people who align with my work value transparency, collaboration, and honesty over control.

And the truth is, we only know what we know.

The more I learn, especially stepping into the business world, the more I realise how much there still is to understand about human behaviour, power dynamics, and the messy middle between compassion and autonomy.

So, I’d really love to hear from you.

What conversations would you like to see more of here? What do you want to understand better about neurodivergent practice, business, or the human side of this work?

(And please, spare me the RSD by commenting so I know someone’s actually reading this.)

Let’s keep learning out loud together.

30/10/2025

Many of the families I work with have spent years fighting for their children to be seen, understood, and educated safely.

Years of meetings, emails, complaints, and sleepless nights.
Years of being told to wait.
Years of holding their nerve because walking away would mean their child got nothing.

And now, finally, the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman has released a report "Out of school, out of sight?” that recognises exactly what these families have been shouting into the void all along.

It confirms that when a child can’t attend school because it isn’t suitable, the Local Authority has a legal duty to provide alternative, full-time, suitable education.
It confirms that being on roll isn’t enough.
It confirms that ignoring professional advice, or leaving children out of education for months or years, is not acceptable practice. It's maladministration.

This document exists because families didn’t let it drop.
Because they took it all the way complaints, appeals, tribunals, and the LGO itself.
Because they kept going when every system told them to give up.

So yes, this report matters. But what matters even more is why it exists at all.
It’s the result of relentless advocacy by parents who had no choice but to become experts, case managers, and campaigners for their own children.

To those families: you’re the reason awareness is shifting.
You’re the reason professionals like me have something stronger to stand on.
And you’re the reason future children might not have to go through the same fight.

Thank you for holding the line.
You shouldn’t have had to but because you did, change is starting to happen.

https://www.lgo.org.uk/assets/attach/6865/Children-out-of-school-F.pdf?fbclid=IwdGRjcANwtXpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHn8bB2Pov7fr_lymYrCy1FAhhSoKuKYkrYuru78nZV95a4zmIhHQcvK24yif_aem_zgFQ5XyBiQo6DaH6zxFs6A

06/10/2025

I wasn’t expecting Kellie Bright’s documentary to hit me so hard.
I watch families go through these struggles every day. The endless fight for understanding, the exhaustion, the heartbreak of being unseen. It’s my work, it’s what I hold space for.

But watching it on screen, told through the eyes of a parent and a public figure, caught me completely off guard.
Because it’s not just what I see in others. It's what I live too.

As a neurodivergent person, I felt every bit of that tension between love and overwhelm, advocacy and burnout, visibility and invisibility. Seeing it reflected on national television felt both validating and devastating. Finally, the reality so many of us know was there in plain sight, messy, emotional, human.

I wish there were more of this.
More honesty, more depth, more space for neurodivergent voices. Not just as subjects of documentaries, but as the storytellers too.

Kellie Bright meets parents fighting for the right education for their autistic children.

08/09/2025

I appreciate Dr Amir Khan bringing attention to Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), because it’s a condition that desperately needs more public understanding. But some of the wording falls short and can be harmful for people living with it.

Saying FND is triggered by mental health trauma’ risks reinforcing stigma. The idea that symptoms are imagined, or ‘all in the mind.’ Trauma is trauma. It is not ‘mental health.’ Trauma is an event or a series of events. This could include illness, injury, abuse, loss, systemic harm, sensory overload, or stress. Trauma affects the whole body and nervous system, not just the mind.

FND is a condition where the brain and body stop communicating in expected ways, leading to very real physical symptoms. For some people, trauma plays a role. For others, illness, injury, or other stressors are more central. Often it’s a mix of factors. To reduce it down to ‘mental health trauma’ is not only inaccurate but dismissive of the lived reality of many people.

This matters because language shapes how FND is understood, believed, and treated. Too many people with FND have been dismissed, gaslit, or funnelled into services that don’t meet their needs because of misconceptions like this.

If we want to raise awareness, we need accurate, affirming language that reflects the complexity of FND and honours the experiences of those living with it.