Why I Wrote Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Facilitation

The story behind this book did not begin with research or training. It started with feeling confused and misunderstood. A tug in my chest that I carried since childhood. A mix of awe, apprehension, and an ache to understand what helps other people feel safe in a world that often felt too loud, too fast, and too dangerous for me.

For decades, I followed that feeling without knowing its name. Only later would I come to understand how neurodivergence had shaped how I perceived the world, sensed danger, and sought meaning. Before that, I just knew I was searching for something that felt like coherence. Something that made room for the way my mind worked.

I want to share the story behind my book, Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Facilitation, and why I felt called to write it. Carried by curiosity, protection, and discovery, this project has been years in the making. It grows from three decades of fascination with psychedelics, a lifelong instinct to keep people safe, and the unfolding of my own neurodivergent identity in systems that rarely spoke my language. It is written for facilitators and therapists who want to make their work more inclusive, and for neurodivergent readers seeking language to advocate for their needs.

Rumors, Reverence, and the First Doorway

In my adolescence during the late 80s and early 90s, psychedelics lived in whispers. Adults spoke about them the way people talk about making big mistakes–with fear and certainty shaped more by rumor than understanding. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) assemblies at my elementary school spread hysteria. They cast all drugs as equally monstrous, with LSD presented as dangerous as cocaine, heroin, marijuana, or something called “angel’s dust.”

Books offered contradictory clues. I read works by Aldous Huxley and about Ken Kesey, and devoured all the photocopied zines, often written by slightly older kids who smelled like smoke and Xerox toner. I found pieces of information in books about the sixties and held them like artifacts. 

As a teenager, I sensed something beneath the fear of psychedelics emanating from adults. A shimmer. A possibility. Even when I semi-believed the myth that LSD could scramble my DNA, something in me stayed curious. I made solemn promises to myself that now feel almost sweet. I decided I would stop at six trips because, according to lore, taking LSD seven times would supposedly make me “legally insane.” That kind of rule made perfect sense to me then. Now it seems so neurodivergent of me, with black-and-white thinking and a rules-based cognitive style. Nonetheless, I wanted each experience to matter. I wanted them to count.

The world felt fragile and intense, yet also full of portals. Psychedelics were a secret door vibrating behind everything I read and heard.

Learning Through the People Around Me

During my late teens until into my thirties, that secret door blew wide open. As a zine writer and touring musician, I drifted through art houses, cramped basements, and sketchy warehouses where audio amplifiers were worshiped. Psychedelics were part of the creative process. Someone always had a story, a warning, a confession, a revelation. People spoke about their trips as if describing dreams that had stitched themselves into waking life.

I listened more than I spoke. I learned by watching their faces shift when they remembered certain moments. I noticed who sought depth, who sought escape, who stumbled into awe or chaos. Those stories became an inner library. They taught me how fragile the line between openness and overwhelm could be.

Most of my early direct experiences with psychedelics were nearly too much for my childhood traumatized nervous system to handle. My rigidity and hypervigilance made it hard to settle into the medicine, and the space felt too unpredictable to surrender to. I did not know I was neurodivergent then. I only knew that I felt exposed and overstimulated in a way that seemed different from the people around me. At the time, I told myself I was simply bad at tripping because “I’m too uptight.”

Still, there were moments when something profound emerged at the edge of my awareness, and curiosity always pulled me back. I wanted to understand why psychedelic states felt expansive for some people and disorienting for others like me. I tried to understand why certain moments felt like revelation and others like danger. I wanted to feel a connection to something bigger than myself and the punk scenes I dwelt in.

And then came MDMA. I was in my mid-twenties when it opened a feeling I did not know I was missing. A sense of belonging to humanity that dropped into me like warm light and dissolved me across the desert landscape of my surroundings. For a moment, I felt connected to everybody on Earth, and so I no longer felt like an alien. That moment never left me. It was the first time I felt soul-level healing.

Becoming a Therapist and Finding My Place

By the time I entered graduate school, I carried those moments with me. I knew psychedelics were part of my path, even if I could not yet articulate how. I gathered every study I could find and presented on psychedelic therapy in my classes long before it was popular. Along the way, I continued to meet people who had quietly worked with these medicines for years and found them profoundly helpful. The field seemed years behind what many people already knew in their bodies.

In my disability-focused counseling studies, where I began reading the work of disabled authors, something shifted again. Their writing framed difference as a matter of culture and identity. Not a defect. Not a deficiency. A way of being. That language felt like relief. It helped me understand parts of myself I had never named aloud.

Secretly identifying myself as neurodivergent during my undergrad landed like both a terrifying revelation and an unsteadying truth, soon unravelling so many moments of my life with new clarity. And still, I hesitated to integrate into my identity. When I told my then-therapist, he seemed to try to rescue me by dismissing and waving it away. I stayed quiet for years after that, sometimes quite anxious that someone would ask me if I’m “on the spectrum.”

I began to recognize my own rhythms and sensory world in descriptions of neurodivergence, although I had not yet spoken this aloud. My graduate school made space for many identities, yet neurodivergence hovered on the margins, barely mentioned in my courses. I was experiencing deep shame through internalized ableism even as I was learning how to advocate for disabled people. I promised myself I would someday use my work to protect people who had been shaped by environments that did not understand them.

Eventually, a formal diagnosis helped me find my feet. Opening my private practice helped me claim space. When I finally spoke publicly about being neurodivergent, clients arrived who had been searching for someone who understood their world. That recognition felt like settling in my own nervous system, and I love my work as a therapist for neurodivergent people.

I also had the privilege and pleasure of attending the first training of the Autistic Psychedelic community, and then I became a member of their short-lived professionals group. Meeting minds with dozens of other neurodivergent people working in many different careers and contexts was profoundly meaningful to me. Here was the first time I was in a “room” (albeit on Zoom) of a large group of self-aware Autistic people and the first time I openly identified myself as Autistic. I felt really safe because we all had the same special interest.

Somatic and Psychedelic Paths Converge

Training in body-based (“somatic”) approaches to therapy Hakomi and Somatic Experiencing changed everything again. These approaches taught me how to listen with my whole nervous system. They taught me that healing is not only about insight but also about sensation, breath, movement, and relationship.

Some practice sessions in my training felt as vast and vivid as psychedelic journeys. My body trembled and shook while I learned to track subtle shifts in others, the way fear coils and then loosens, the way safety blooms when someone is truly seen. I began to understand that psychedelics and somatics were two paths leading to the same door. Both move toward release and integration, toward becoming more whole.

When Oregon legalized psilocybin, I trained at InnerTrek and gained experience in the Westernized approach to psychedelic facilitation from both sides, alternating as facilitator and journeyer in our practicum. The training was powerful, although yet again, neurodivergence was barely mentioned in the curriculum. It echoed what I had witnessed in therapy education. Inclusion stretched far, yet somehow stopped just before reaching neurodivergent support. Meanwhile, nearly everything written about psychedelics does not consider neurotype differences. 

Across all my trainings, the pattern was unmistakable. People with divergent nervous systems like mine were expected to adapt to environments that do not recognize our needs. Meanwhile, neurodivergent people are navigating psychedelic spaces without adequate support, without recognition of our sensory profiles, our overwhelm, our pacing, or the ways our nervous systems process meaning.

I had spent years gathering insights, observations, and stories that lived between the margins of formal training. I realized it was time to bring them together. I wanted to create a bridge where none had existed. That bridge became Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing.

It offers what I needed years earlier. A language for what happens when neurodivergence meets psychedelics. A set of tools that supports difference. A way for facilitators to listen more deeply to the bodies and minds sitting before them.

Writing as Continuation of Care

Writing arrived in my life long before therapy or psychedelics. It was the first place where I felt steady, the first place where the world made sense. When I was six, I promised myself I would write books my mother could read someday because reading brought her joy. That promise stayed with me even after she died, though, to be honest, she probably would have preferred that I write a novel.

By my teens, I was stapling together small-press zines on cheap paper, filling them with whatever I found interesting, beautiful, or confusing. Music reviews, lists of things that made me feel alive, jokes, poems that barely made sense, and occasional gossip that I should have kept private. In the late 90s and 2000s, I was pretty shy, and those zines became my way of participating in a world that often overwhelmed me. They let me speak freely, which I was afraid to do in person.

Later, after therapy to overcome social anxiety, I joined experimental bands where sound and emotion blurred together. I wrote lyrics that felt like short stories, liner notes that read like tiny essays, and pieces that tried to capture the feeling of standing in a room where amplifier feedback and emotional vulnerability vibrated at the same frequency. Those years taught me how to translate sensations into words.

When I eventually entered college in early middle age, I discovered I loved writing in all different styles: essays, reflections, technical and research papers, and creative writing assignments. I spent nine years immersed in school and never grew tired of shaping ideas into language, enjoying the thrill of explaining something to satisfaction. Writing became a shelter for me. A way to process the world, organize my thoughts, and speak clearly without forcing myself into environments that drained me.

As an introvert who prefers quiet spaces and deep focus, writing is my way of contributing. Loud gatherings and group events feel overwhelming, so I learned to offer what I could through self-publishing, where no one could control or misconstrue my writing. When I began researching neurodivergence and realized how deeply it explained my life, writing became a place to integrate everything I had been carrying.

My special interests naturally braided themselves together: neurodivergence, psychedelics, trauma healing, and music. Writing let me explore them at my own pace and in depth. It gave me a path toward advocacy that aligned with my nervous system.

What I Hope This Book Holds

I wrote this book for facilitators, therapists, and guides who want to meet their clients with a deeper understanding. I wrote it for neurodivergent readers who deserve to see their experiences accurately and with respect.

For clients, I hope it brings safety, agency, and deep healing.
For facilitators, I hope it expands attunement to clients.
For me, it fulfills a promise I made long ago: to help people who navigate the world in uncommon ways, often quietly, often alone.

This is the story behind Neurodivergent Psychedelic Healing.
A story built from curiosity, connection, and the long search for a place where my mind could breathe.
An attempt to turn lived experience into something that feels like music.
A melody carried forward by every kind of mind.

Please consider buying my book: https://neuro-inclusive.com/neurodivergenthealing