Meraki Counseling

You’ve probably spent years being the capable one. The thoughtful one. The self-aware one. The one who stubbornly keeps going, reads the room, adapts quickly, and tries very hard not to be too much or get caught off guard. You may have thought of yourself as introverted, highly sensitive, intensely empathetic—or simply assumed that if everyone else didn’t have to work this hard, there must be something wrong with you.

You may have already spent years in therapy for anxiety or OCD, eating or body image issues, painful relationship or sexual intimacy patterns, or were diagnosed with a personality disorder—and still had the nagging sense that some part of the puzzle was missing.

And now, someone or some life circumstance has introduced the idea that you might be autistic.

You may be realizing you had no idea you were masking—or even what masking was—or how much effort it takes for your brain and nervous system to function in a world that hasn’t evolved to accommodate your pace. Maybe you thought this was everyone’s experience.

As an adult-identified, high-masking autistic myself, I can tell you it isn’t.

You may find yourself:

• Realizing there may be actual reasons things felt harder than they seemed to for everyone else
• Noticing how much energy goes into reading the room, anticipating expectations, rehearsing for interactions, and trying to get things “right”
• Functioning remarkably well when things are clear, predictable, or within your control—and feeling embarrassingly overwhelmed or frustrated when they aren’t
• Needing much more recovery than you think you “should” after work, parenting, social interaction, intense sensory experiences, or simply being available to other people
• Realizing that the version of you who appears capable, likeable, or successful is becoming harder to access—or maybe deep down you resent it

Decades of pressure, overfunctioning, and self-doubt take a toll.

Part of you may feel relieved to finally have language for your experience. Other parts may feel overwhelmed, destabilized, angry, or deeply sad about how long you’ve been trying to adapt around needs you didn’t know how to name.

And the pressure isn’t just coming from your life right now. It comes from years of self-monitoring, overriding confusion and discomfort, trying to get relationships right, and learning to push through sensory strain or exhaustion so you could keep functioning and “adult.”

No wonder you’re exhausted.

Autism and trauma can look remarkably similar, but they aren’t the same thing—and they don’t always need the same kind of support. But for many late-identified autistic women, the two have become deeply intertwined. 

Your neurotype shaped how you experienced the world and relationships, while years of misunderstanding, misattunement, pressure, and adaptation shaped how you learned to relate to yourself.

Part of healing is being curious about what belongs to your autistic nervous system and what developed as protection around years of feeling misunderstood, overwhelmed, rejected, or responsible for keeping everything together.

For most of your life, adapting was likely an incredibly intelligent way to survive in a world that sometimes felt like someone else’s home planet. Therapy gives us somewhere to stop adapting long enough to discover what actually fits and is you.

Insight can be powerful, but knowing something is often different than shifting something inside you.

You may intellectually know that you’re allowed to have needs. You may already recognize that your body is telling you something is too much. But finding and honoring your own truth can still feel impossible, overwhelming, or even dangerous.

And your autistic nervous system may genuinely need something different from what you see the people around you needing. Skills, structure, and executive functioning support can be incredibly important for autistic brains and nervous systems. But our work also makes space for the deeper patterns beneath the pressure, performing, self-doubt, hypervigilance, and self-abandonment.

We aren’t trying to make you better at tolerating a life that doesn’t fit.

We’re trying to understand what becomes possible when you can relate to yourself with more clarity, compassion, and trust.

You don’t need to have everything figured out before coming to therapy.
And you don’t need to be in complete collapse to deserve support.

You just need a place to begin.

My approach is relational, trauma-informed, and curiosity-oriented. We work with your autistic experience without reducing you to it, while exploring the patterns that shape how you relate to yourself, your needs, and other people. Our work generally moves through three interconnected areas:

Understanding your system

Making sense of your sensory needs, energy, executive functioning, processing style, nervous system, and the practical supports that help you function more sustainably.

Untangling survival patterns

Exploring masking, relational trauma, pressure, self-doubt, hypervigilance, and the painful bind between belonging and abandoning yourself.

Reclaiming your inner authority and self-trust

Building the kind of self-trust that makes room for clearer choices, boundaries, relationships, and a life that feels increasingly like your own.

What I want for you is not just more ways to cope.

I want you to have a life with more room in it.

More truth.
More choice.
More permission to be real.
More trust in your inner experience.
More energy for a life that is actually yours.