Finding Words

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There's a quiet assumption built into most wellbeing spaces: that understanding yourself means being able to explain yourself.

That progress looks like putting language around your experience. That if you can name it, you can work with it.

And if you've spent most of your life trying to make sense of yourself through frameworks that weren't built for you, that assumption can do real harm. It's not that you're bad at reflection. It's that the tools you were given were designed for a different kind of system than yours.

For many neurodivergent adults, this assumption doesn't just feel unhelpful — it can feel like another demand, or worse, an expectation that some people simply cannot meet because their world is understood and expressed through other means.

If you've ever sat in a room where someone asked "how does that make you feel?" and your honest answer was "I don't know," this might resonate. Not because you don't feel things, but because the route between feeling something, knowing what it means for you and describing it in words isn't always a straight line. Sometimes it's not a line at all.

The pressure to translate

A lot of conventional therapeutic and coaching approaches rely heavily on verbal processing. Talk about what happened. Reflect on how you feel. Describe what you need. These are reasonable invitations — but they assume a particular kind of access to your inner world that not everyone has in the same way.

Many neurodivergent people experience alexithymia — a difficulty identifying or describing emotions. This isn't about not having emotions. It's about not having an easy, reliable route to them through language. You might notice that your body feels tight, or heavy, or buzzing, without being able to attach a word like "anxious" or "sad" to it. You might know something is wrong but not be able to say what.

There are also interoceptive differences — differences in how clearly you pick up signals from inside your own body. You might not notice hunger until you're shaky. You might not realise you're overwhelmed until you're already shutting down. When the signals are quiet, patchy, or arrive all at once, being asked to "check in with yourself" can feel like being asked to read a book in a language you're still learning.

None of this is a failing. It's simply a different way of processing — one that’s worth respecting, not overriding.

What creative expression offers

This is where creative arts come in. Not as a replacement for words, and not as a route towards them either — but as a way of knowing that doesn't need words at all.

These aren't workarounds. They're valid, complete forms of self-expression in their own right.

What makes creative approaches particularly powerful for neurodivergent adults is that they bypass the demand to perform understanding verbally. You don't have to know what you feel before you begin. You don't have to arrive with it all worked out. The invitation is to notice what happens when your hands are busy and the pressure to explain is off.

Curiosity, not correction

It matters, though, how this is held. Creative expression in a neurodiversity-affirming space isn't about decoding your artwork or being guided towards a particular interpretation or outcome. It's not art therapy in the traditional sense, and it's not about producing something "good."

It's about curiosity but a specific kind. We follow what's already there rather than introducing something new.

For example, if you describe your experience as "heavy," we might ask "What kind of heavy?", not to interpret, but to let your attention stay there a moment longer.

Your experience leads and we stay very close to that.

This is one of the reasons that working with Clean Language feels so natural alongside creative practice. Clean Language honours the words, metaphors and gestures you already use rather than replacing them with someone else's framework. If you describe your experience as "a knot" or "a fog" or "something red," those words are taken seriously. They're not translated, corrected, or reinterpreted. They're yours.

The understanding doesn't always need to be verbal. Sometimes you leave a session having created something, and it shifted something inside you and you couldn't tell anyone what changed — but you know that it did. That counts. That's real.

Why this matters for neurodivergent adults specifically

Neurodivergent adults — particularly those who are late-diagnosed, self-identified, or still figuring things out — have often spent years in environments that weren't designed for them. Environments where the expected mode of reflection was verbal, linear and fast. Where "I don't know" was treated as avoidance rather than honesty. Where masking your way through an emotional check-in was easier than admitting you didn’t understand the question.

Creative practice offers a way to step outside that pattern. It gives your body something to do while your mind settles. It lets you explore identity, communication and inner experience at your own pace, in your own way without the performance of having to narrate it as you go.

And when you do this alongside other neurodivergent adults — in a small group where masking isn't necessary and your way of being is welcomed — something else opens up too. Not just self-awareness, but connection and belonging. The kind of connection that comes from creating alongside someone that doesn't need you to be anything other than who you are.

It doesn't have to be more complicated than that

You don't need to be an artist. You don't need to know what you're looking for. You don't even need to talk about what you make.

You just need a space that's designed around how you actually process — not how you've been told you should with materials that give you and your inner world somewhere to land that isn't a sentence.

A space like this exists

This is what we're building with Finding Words — a gentle, therapeutic arts group for neurodivergent adults at Salisbury Arts Centre, co-facilitated by me and Francesca Myles, an Integrative Arts Counsellor. If you're curious, you can join the waitlist or book a free pre-call with Francesca.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do isn't finding the right words. It's letting yourself explore without them.