Sam Peters, LPC, LSC – Therapist
I work with neurodivergent people from about eight to ninety-nine, and with the people who love and care for them. Many of my clients arrive having spent years being told, kindly or otherwise, that they’d be fine if they just tried a little harder, cared a little more, or sat a little stiller. My starting assumption is a different one. I assume you already have a nervous system that makes sense, real reasons for the things you do, and a great deal of hard-won skill at getting through days that were not built with you in mind. My work is to get curious about all of that alongside you, not to sand it down.
A large part of my practice is with neurodivergent kids and teens: K-12 students who are worn out by school, anxious in ways that get read as defiance, shut down in ways that get read as laziness, or gifted in ways nobody is grading. I meet with them directly, and I work closely with their parents. That’s partly because a kid’s week holds far more hours than our fifty minutes, and partly because most parents I meet are doing their absolute best with a map that doesn’t match the terrain they’re standing on. Family sessions in my office tend to be less about correcting the child and more about helping everyone in the room understand what is actually happening, and what each person needs in order to be able to do it differently.
Equally central to my work is late diagnosis, meaning the young adults and adults who learn at nineteen, or thirty-four, or sixty-two that there was a name for it the whole time. That discovery is rarely a tidy relief. It usually arrives tangled up with grief for the years spent white-knuckling, some justified anger about what could have gone differently, and the strange, disorienting task of sorting out which parts of your personality were you and which parts were armor. I think that deserves real time and real company, and we take it at whatever pace it wants to go.
My style is warm, direct, and not especially clinical. We will laugh in session. I’ll ask a lot of questions, and I’ll tell you plainly what I’m noticing. I’m not in the business of teaching anyone to pass as neurotypical. I am very interested in helping people get better at reading their own signals, asking for what they need out loud, recovering from a hard day a little faster than they used to, and building a life that is sized for the brain and body they actually have. Accommodations are not cheating. Rest is not a character flaw. Joy counts as a clinical goal.
I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor and have spent almost 20 years doing this work, though I’d rather be judged on the fit than on the letters. I won’t promise that therapy will make anything easy, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who did. Some of what neurodivergent people are up against is environmental rather than personal, and it doesn’t belong to you to fix alone. What I can offer is a room where you don’t have to explain the basics, someone who will keep showing up curious about you specifically, and steady work on the things that are genuinely within reach. If that sounds like the kind of company you’re looking for, I’d be glad to meet you.
