IFS + Brainspotting Intensives for AuDHD:
Finally, Support That Meets the Whole of You
AuDHD is a unique neurotype: more complex than the sum of its parts. IFS and Brainspotting Intensives are designed to meet exactly that beautiful complexity.
AuDHD is not ADHD plus autism.
It's something altogether more layered, and often more exhausting, than either neurotype on its own.
If you are both Autistic and ADHD, you will likely already know this. The way the two neurotypes interact creates a very particular inner landscape: one that is deeply intelligent, intensely feeling, creatively wired, and simultaneously dealing with paradoxes that can be genuinely bewildering.
You crave routine and struggle to maintain it.
You need deep focus and battle distractibility.
You long for connection and find it overwhelming.
You are simultaneously too sensitive and under-stimulated.
You mask exhaustively in one direction, only to find your nervous system protesting loudly in another.
And underneath all of it, for many AuDHD people, there are years of misattribution, self-blame, and unprocessed pain. Often a late, maybe first singular then dual diagnosis, that brought relief and challenge in equal measure.
What you need is not another hour of talking about it. What you need is a properly resourced, deeply informed container that can hold all of it — and help you actually move through it.
That's what IFS and Brainspotting Intensives are designed to do.
A Note From Your Therapist
I am a neurodiversity-affirming therapist, fully committed to the Neurodiversity Paradigm, and I work with a significant number of AuDHD clients, both in weekly individual therapy and in intensive formats.
I do not approach Autism or ADHD as problems to solve or deficits to correct. I approach them as fundamental aspects of a person's wiring that deserve to be understood, honoured, and supported with real depth and care. I am also proudly ADHD myself.
If you have spent years in therapy settings that felt like they were trying to make you more neurotypical, or that missed the complexity of your experience entirely — I want you to know that it is possible to work differently.
What Makes AuDHD Distinct
AuDHD is the term increasingly used to describe the experience of being both Autistic and ADHD — two neurotypes that were historically thought to be mutually exclusive (they are not, and the research now reflects this clearly).
What makes AuDHD particularly complex is that the two neurotypes can work against each other in ways that create real internal conflict:
The drive for predictability versus difficulty with consistency. Many Autistic people find comfort and regulation in routine and sameness. ADHD makes consistency genuinely hard to maintain. The result can be a painful cycle of building careful structure, failing to sustain it, and experiencing intense shame as a consequence. This is shame that can go deep, because it feels like yet more evidence of fundamental brokenness.
The need for deep focus versus distractibility. Autistic hyperfocus and ADHD hyperfocus are not the same thing. One tends to be interest-driven and highly sustained; the other may be impulsive and harder to direct. When both are present, one's relationship with one's own attention can feel genuinely unreliable, and that unreliability has often been weaponised against AuDHD people throughout their lives.
Sensory sensitivity and the masking burden. Many AuDHD people carry an enormous and largely invisible load of sensory management and social masking. They may perform neurotypicality in environments that are actively uncomfortable, often from a very young age. Over time, this takes a serious toll: on the nervous system, on identity, and on the ability to access one's own genuine feelings and needs.
Emotional intensity and RSD. Both neurotypes are associated with deep emotional experience — including rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), which is particularly painful and particularly common in AuDHD people.
The emotional response to perceived criticism, failure, or social exclusion can feel catastrophic, even when the rational mind knows it isn't. This is not a character flaw. It is a neurological reality, and it deserves proper therapeutic attention.
The late diagnosis experience. Many AuDHD adults, especially women, were not diagnosed until adulthood, sometimes well into their forties or beyond. The relief of finally understanding is real. So is the grief: the retrospective recognition of how differently things might have gone with the right support.
All of this is real. All of it matters. And all of it can be worked with.
Why Weekly Therapy Often Falls Short
Standard weekly therapy has real value, but it has structural limitations that are especially pronounced for AuDHD clients.
Fifty minutes is rarely enough for genuine depth. For many AuDHD clients, there is a significant cognitive and sensory settling-in process that has to happen before real access opens up. By the time that settling occurs, the session is almost over.
The weekly rhythm makes sustained momentum genuinely difficult. Processing something significant, then returning to ordinary life without adequate integration, then having to re-enter the therapeutic space a week later: this cycle can leave AuDHD clients feeling chronically activated, picking at the same wounds rather than actually healing them.
And the relational demands of weekly therapy such as the attunement with the therapist, the performance of being a "good client," the pressure to present one's inner world in an organised, time-limited way, can be quietly exhausting for people who are already spending enormous energy navigating everything else.
Intensives remove most of these constraints. They offer what weekly therapy structurally cannot: sustained time, genuine depth, and the spaciousness for real integration to happen.
Brainspotting: Working Where Words Don't Reach
Brainspotting is a powerful, body-based therapeutic method that works by identifying specific eye positions, ‘brainspots’, that correspond to stored trauma, unprocessed pain, and emotional blockages held in the brain and nervous system.
For AuDHD clients, this is often genuinely transformative in a way that talk-based approaches are not - and this is for a specific reason.
Brainspotting does not depend on verbal fluency or narrative construction. It does not require you to find the right words at the right moment, or to present your inner world in a linear, accessible way. If words aren't available (this is common for many AuDHD clients, particularly during emotional activation or in moments of overwhelm) that is completely fine. The work proceeds through the body and the nervous system, accessing what is stored beneath the level of conscious articulation.
In an intensive format, Brainspotting becomes even more powerful. We are not limited to a single processing window. We can follow a thread until it is genuinely complete, rather than cutting off mid-process and asking your system to hold it for another week. The nervous system gets to discharge, integrate, and settle — within the same container, on the same day.
This is where lasting change actually happens.
IFS: A Framework That Makes Sense of the Internal Contradictions
If Brainspotting works at the level of the body and nervous system, Internal Family Systems (IFS) works at the level of meaning, identity, and the inner landscape.
IFS is a therapeutic model developed by Dr Richard Schwartz that understands us as containing multiple "parts", each with their own history, beliefs, roles, and protective strategies, alongside a core Self that is fundamentally whole and capable of leading.
Rather than seeing difficult emotions or internal conflicts as symptoms to eliminate, IFS approaches them with genuine curiosity: what is this part carrying? What is it protecting? What did it learn, and when?
For AuDHD clients, this framework is often immediately resonant. The experience of internal contradiction: the part that desperately wants connection and the part that finds it overwhelming; the part that sets ambitious intentions and the part that cannot follow through; the inner critic who has absorbed decades of "you're too much / not enough".
Let me repeat, these are not signs of dysfunction. They are parts doing what parts do: trying to protect a system that has often been under serious pressure.
In intensive work, IFS gives us a map. We get to understand not just what is happening, but why — and to meet the parts that have been working hardest with genuine compassion rather than frustration or shame.
The combination of Brainspotting and IFS in an intensive format is particularly potent: IFS helps us identify what needs to be worked on and build a relationship with the parts involved, and Brainspotting provides the neurological mechanism to actually process and release what those parts have been holding.
Together, they create change that is both felt in the body and integrated at the level of meaning and identity.
What an AuDHD Intensive Actually Looks Like
Every intensive is bespoke and designed around your specific history, needs, and goals. That said, there is a shape to how we work together that tends to suit AuDHD clients particularly well.
Before we meet, you'll complete an - entirely optional - detailed pre-work process in a format genuinely designed with neurodivergent brains in mind: flexible, available in audio or written form, with structured prompts that help you arrive feeling oriented rather than overwhelmed.
From this work and your initial consult, we begin with shared understanding, not from scratch.
Within each intensive day, we move through focused therapeutic blocks: significantly longer and more immersive than anything possible in a standard session. We do this using Brainspotting, IFS, or a fluid combination of both depending on what your system is calling for in that moment.
There is no rush to a conclusion. No sense that we need to tidy things up before time runs out. We follow the thread.
Between sessions, integration pauses are built in deliberately. Time to rest, to move, to journal, to simply be without agenda.
For AuDHD clients, these pauses are not wasted time: they are where a great deal of neurological processing and consolidation happens. The nervous system needs space to integrate what has shifted.
The structure itself is consistent and predictable throughout: the same relational container, the same clear rhythm each day.
This matters for AuDHD clients in ways that are both practical and deeply settling.
And because this is a 1:1 intensive, there are no group dynamics to manage, no communal spaces you didn't choose, no social energy being spent on anything other than the work itself.
What We Work On Together
In intensive work with AuDHD clients, the terrain we often explore includes:
The deep exhaustion of masking, and the parts that learned early that the authentic self was too much, too different, not safe to show.
The grief of late diagnosis, and the complicated feelings about who you might have been with earlier support. Rejection sensitivity and its neurological and emotional roots.
The inner critic who has spent years speaking in the voices of everyone who ever misunderstood or underestimated you.
The somatic residue of years of sensory and social overload, held in the body long after the experiences themselves have passed.
And, often, slowly and surely, the parts of you that are genuinely extraordinary, that have been so focused on surviving that they haven't had much room to simply be.
Intensive Retreats in SE Asia
So far, the intensives I have described take place mainly online, which works brilliantly. I also offer suggestions for how to make this experience as ‘retreat-like’ as possible.
For AuDHD clients who want to do this work face-to-face and in a setting completely removed from ordinary life, my bespoke 1:1 IFS and Brainspotting Retreat Intensives in SE Asia offer something quite particular.
These are fully private, fully customised retreats — designed around your sensory preferences, your energy rhythms, your communication style, and your goals. There are no group programmes, no communal spaces you didn't choose, no social obligations of any kind. Just you, the work, and a genuinely beautiful environment selected with your nervous system in mind.
Many AuDHD clients find that the physical and psychological distance from their ordinary context, away from every environment that usually requires something of them, creates a quality of access to their own inner world that simply isn't available at home.
When the nervous system is not managing its usual background load, the depth of work that becomes possible is remarkable.
You can read the full detail about how these retreats work, including locations across Thailand, Bali, Vietnam, and Malaysia, in my dedicated post: Intentional, Private and Bespoke 1:1 Trauma Healing Retreats in SE Asia.
What Clients Walk Away With
After IFS and Brainspotting Intensive work, my AuDHD clients often describe:
A quieter, less embattled relationship with their own mind — and with the parts of themselves that have been in conflict
Significant relief from the shame and self-blame accumulated over years of feeling like they were failing at something that should be easy
A calmer, more regulated nervous system, and genuine trust in their capacity to return to regulation when things are hard
Greater clarity about who they actually are beneath the masking and the management
More compassion for themselves — including for the parts that have been working the hardest
One client, diagnosed AuDHD in her late thirties, described it as "the first time I've ever felt like a therapist actually understood the whole picture, not just one part of it, because we had TIME to go there."
Also ADHD Without the Autism?
If you are ADHD but not Autistic, I have a dedicated post on how Brainspotting and IFS Intensives work specifically for ADHD brains: Why Brainspotting Intensives Are Game-Changing for ADHD Brains.
Fees and Format
IFS and Brainspotting Intensives start at £4,500 GBP and include:
Flexible pre-work preparation genuinely designed to suit your neurotype
Several hours of focused, unhurried IFS and Brainspotting therapy across one or more days
Integration support built into the rhythm of each day
Optional tailored reporting to help you reflect on and anchor your transformation
For ongoing individual work, I offer limited availability weekly 1:1 sessions at £250 GBP per hour (on a 40-week-per-year commitment basis).
For bespoke 1:1 retreat intensives in SE Asia, investment starts at £5,500 GBP for the therapeutic element. Full details — including structure, locations, and FAQs — are in the retreat post here.
Ready to Talk?
If this speaks to something you've been looking for — real, informed, deeply supportive work that meets the full complexity of your AuDHD experience — I'd love to hear from you.
The first step is a free, no-pressure conversation: to talk through where you are, what you're carrying, and whether an intensive might be the right container for you.
Book your free consult call here.
You have been working so hard to manage, to mask, to make it all work. You deserve support that genuinely meets you where you are — and that has the depth and the time to actually help you move.
I'm here when you're ready.
Lucy
Brainspotting Therapist | IFS Therapist | Registered Counsellor | Certified Sex Therapist | Intensives Specialist
