What is therapy with me like?
Therapy with me is not about being handed a script or getting advice. I work in a slower, more relational, and more curious way. We pay attention to what’s happening beneath the story: survival patterns, nervous system protection, shame, agency, masking, and the parts of you that disappeared and are longing to have a voice.
Do you provide autism assessments?
No — I do not provide formal autism evaluations. I offer therapy that is informed by autistic experience, masking, relational trauma, nervous system differences, and the complexity of late identification. If you’re looking to be assessed, please email me at sarayu.meraki@merakicounseling.org, and I can provide a referral list.
I'm high-functioning-can I be autistic?
Many of my clients have careers, families, responsibilities, and competent outer lives while internally feeling anxious, exhausted, ashamed, disconnected, or chronically overwhelmed. Part of that may be autistic masking and burnout. Even if you aren’t autistic, a lot of what resonates here is also experienced with relational trauma. Therapy can help make room for the self that has been carrying the cost of appearing okay.
Will therapy make me feel more broken?
That fear is welcome here.
Therapy should not be another place where you feel analyzed, corrected, exposed, or turned into a problem to solve. And if you have spent much of your life feeling too much, not enough, confusing, sensitive, intense, or hard to understand, it makes sense that therapy could feel risky.
My approach is not about treating you like a collection of symptoms. It is about getting curious about how your patterns make sense, how they protected you, and what they may be costing you now.
The goal is not to prove that you are broken.
The goal is to build enough safety, honesty, and self-trust that more of you can exist without shame.
Am I autistic, is it trauma, or something else?
The intersection of these experiences often overlaps and gets tangled. Therapy does not have to start with perfect certainty. You can explore patterns, sensory needs, relational history, masking, shutdown, anxiety, executive functioning, and self-trust without needing to force everything into one category.
What if I’ve had therapy before?
Many of my clients come to therapy with a lot of insight already.
You may understand your patterns. You may know where they came from. You may have language for your trauma, attachment style, anxiety, masking, or nervous system. And still, something may not be shifting in the way you hoped.
In our work, we are not only looking for more understanding. We are paying attention to what happens inside you in real time: the places you leave yourself, the survival strategies that come online, the shame that organizes the pattern, and the parts of you that are still trying to protect you.
Sometimes feeling stuck does not mean you need to try harder. It means we need to listen differently.
Do I have to have an autism diagnosis?
No — formal diagnosis is not required. Many autistic and AuDHD women arrive with questions, hunches, self-recognition, or a complicated relationship with labels. Therapy can support exploration without making diagnosis the center of the work.
How do you help with relationships + masking?
If you feel like you lose yourself in relationships, over-adapt, people-please, manage others’ emotions, suppress sensory needs, or struggle to know what you actually want, therapy helps tease apart where masking might be getting in the way of what you want for yourself. The work is not about becoming better at filling another role (this could look like trying to do therapy “right” or be a “good client”). It’s about building more honest connections with yourself and in your relationships.
How is my approach neurodivergent-affirming?
I don’t treat autistic traits as impairments to correct. We get curious about what is protective, what is masking, what is trauma, what is sensory or nervous system need, and what supports more agency and self-trust.
Will therapy with you include homework?
Yes, sometimes, when useful — but therapy with me is not mainly about developing coping skills. The deeper work is supporting your relationship to yourself, what you’ve experienced, what you need, and what you want for yourself now. Tools can support the work, but they are not the whole work.
Religious trauma + eating disorders
These issues often overlap.
For late-identified autistic and AuDHD women, complex trauma may be tangled with years of being misunderstood, corrected, dismissed, overstimulated, or expected to override your own nervous system in order to belong.
Religious trauma can add another layer if you were taught to distrust your body, suppress your anger, obey authority, perform goodness, or confuse self-abandonment with love.
Eating disorders and disordered eating can also be connected to sensory overwhelm, control, shame, body disconnection, masking, trauma, and the need for predictability.
In therapy, we can hold the whole picture with care. We do not have to reduce your experience to one label or one explanation.
Ready to start your journey?
Contact me today for your free connection call.