I have spent far too many years trying to be mysterious to no avail. Why? Because when you identify as an "open book," you learn through trial and error that people want to hear from people they don't usually hear from. Craving connection, not just nodding and smiling, means wanting people to want to know you. When sharing is regulating, though, you're positioned in an impossible double bind: suppress the urge to talk at the expense of your peace, or embrace your verbosity wi

The autistic trait I resonated with the least before better understanding its dimensions was monotropism. Sure, I've always had deep interests often labeled as "obsessive," and inertia has always impaired my ability to switch from task to task to some degree. Because I never do just one thing at a time, though, I assumed my ADHD's "distractibility" trait just overrode my monotropism. At the same time though, I never really identified with "multitasking" because I thought it i

Has your nervous system experienced enough agency today? Autonomy may be something you lose when someone tells you what to do, but that's really only half the story. An individual's felt sense of autonomy slowly drains away over the course of an ordinary day. This happens even in the absence of demands poking holes in the bottom of our cups; when we face more demands, we're drained more quickly. But we're never without demands: almost everything we do is in response to necess

I often hear from clients something along the lines of, "If someone overheard this, they'd probably think I was being irresponsible." Early in my career, I was quick to label this as a cognitive distortion and guess that it was stemming from an insecurity or fear. But there's another way to understand this pattern that gives us more choice in how we use it: I call this the "invisible audience" strategy. What's the invisible audience? When you mentally step outside yourself an

I am what some might call "an open book," by which I mean that in most contexts, disclosing information about myself doesn't bring up much emotion. Once upon a time in group therapy, I was known to roll my eyes at every "Thank you for sharing that." I have since come to learn that neither I nor my fellow group members were right or wrong about this. Instead, the group consisted of a diverse sampling of vulnerability languages, or things that each of us experience as vulnerabl

Given that every individual has a sensory profile as unique as our fingerprints, and that every sense is involved in our experience of embodiment, it only makes sense that the way we approach healing our relationships with our bodies should be adapted to fit our very specific sensory needs. It’s exciting to hear more and more eating disorder providers remark that treatment can no longer be “one-size-fits-all.” But when individualizing a plan for healing, how are they taking