Sarayu Meraki, MS, LPC
IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL THERAPY
FOR LATE IDENTIFIED
AUTISTIC and AuDHD WOMEN
I work with clients throughout Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona. My home office is located within 10 miles of Cedarburg, Mequon, Grafton, Jackson, Port Washington, and West Bend.
Hi, I’m Sarayu
I’m autistic, I’m a therapist, and a deeply curious human. I’ve spent a lot of my life paying attention to what happens beneath the surface and tuning into my environments and the people in them to know how I should act and be – while at the same time sensing something felt wrong.
I’m interested in the places where story, nervous system, autistic traits, shame, longing, humor, survival, and self-trust all meet. The places where people are not simply “struggling,” but stuck in a cycle of always trying harder and not seeming to land anywhere.
In the therapy room, I tend to be slow, spacious, relational, and believe that self-inquiry itself is healing and exists for its own sake. Sometimes tender. Sometimes quiet. Sometimes a little silly, because being human is weird, and we do not need to make healing more serious than it already is.
Why I do this work
I came to this work through my own long relationship with rock-bottoms, recovery, and self-return.
My clinical lens has been shaped by a trauma model of treatment called NARM, years of being a client myself, treatment and recovery spaces, Jungian analysis, the Medicine Wheel, and countless kind and loving humans – on the spectrum and off – who showed up for me in ways that helped me believe there were other options.
For many, autism recognition brings both relief and grief: a clearer understanding of the nervous system they’ve been living inside, and a painful awareness of how much energy has gone into translating, camouflaging, enduring, and trying not to be “too much” and always feeling like not enough.
So when people find their way to me in that strange in-between place of before I knew and after — where things feel confusing and clearer, overwhelming and settling, painful and hopeful all at once — I have a lot of respect, empathy, and compassion for the courage and tenacity it takes to be there.
Often, that in-between place is where something important is beginning to emerge. You may be recognizing how much you’ve been misunderstood, erased, used, or abandoned by people and systems around you. And now a harder, more tender question is rising:
“How did I learn to do that to myself?”
Embedded in that question is a deeper self-betrayal that you internalized when your environment betrayed you. Healing from that wound isn’t just about feeling that pain. It’s about reclaiming self-trust.
I don’t believe you are something to fix
I don’t see symptoms as the whole story. I see them as signals.
Anxiety, shutdown, self-criticism, perfectionism, relational fear, masking, over-responsibility, and emotional intensity often point toward something deeper: a pain, need, longing, or survival pattern that has not yet had enough room to be witnessed.
The patterns that frustrate you now often began as intelligent ways to survive. Performance, pressure, caretaking, masking, and self-blame helped you preserve connection, avoid rejection, or get through heartbreaking circumstances.
I am not interested in managing those patterns into submission. I am interested in helping you understand how you are relating to yourself when those patterns show up.
The space between here and there is not something we have to rush through.
It is the story you get to tell, understand, and begin to rewrite.
What therapy with me is like
It’s not just about what to do or change. It’s about how you are relating to what is.
Therapy with me is not about being handed a script for how to become something or someone. It is slower and more complex than that. More relational than that. And, I hope, more honest than that.
In our work, we pay attention to what is happening beneath the story: the dilemma inside the pattern, the emotions that had to go underground, the parts of you that learned to disappear, the ways your nervous system protects you, and the places where your agency is more alive.
And part of that aliveness is the autistic human you are.
I draw from various holistic therapeutic approaches, frameworks, and my own lived experience of healing. But theory is not the center of the room. You are.
The models help me listen. The relationship helps us discover.
Professional grounding
My work is rooted in depth-oriented relational therapy and informed by NARM, Polyvagal Theory, psychodynamic therapy, trauma-informed care, attachment theory, Jungian and archetypal perspectives, and ongoing study and my own healing of complex relational trauma and masking.
Closing invitation
Therapy with me is not about becoming someone else. It is slowly rebuilding the trust to inhabit yourself.
It is about understanding the ways you had to leave yourself, honoring the brilliance of how you survived, and slowly building the trust to return.
The space between here and there is not something we have to rush through. I am here to listen with you for what is already trying to emerge.
Shortly after graduating from my master’s program, I asked one of my mentors how they stopped hating themselves.
They said, “I realized there were other options.”
If this feels like the kind of work you are looking for, reach out to me at the link below.
Ready to start your journey?
Contact me today for your free connection call.