About Christine Harris

MS, LPCC, AuDHD

I’m Christine Harris, a licensed clinical therapist, founder of Neurodiversity Affirming Therapy and Wellness Center, and a late-diagnosed AuDHD (Autistic & ADHD) adult.

Like many of the people I work with, I spent years trying to understand why life felt so much harder than it seemed to be for everyone else. I learned to mask, overachieve, self-monitor, and push through exhaustion in order to function within expectations that never fully fit how my nervous system actually worked.

From the outside, much of that effort looked successful.

Internally, it often felt exhausting, confusing, and unsustainable.

When I eventually discovered I was autistic and ADHD, the most significant shift was not simply realizing I was neurodivergent. It was realizing that many of the struggles I had spent years interpreting as personal failures were actually understandable responses to living against my natural neurology.

That movement from chronic self-criticism toward more accurate self-understanding fundamentally changed the way I understood myself, my history, my needs, and the world around me.

It also changed the way I practice therapy.

Why I Created This Practice

I created this practice to offer the kind of space I wish had existed earlier in my own life — a space where neurodivergent adults do not have to translate themselves into neurotypical language, defend the legitimacy of their experiences, or constantly perform versions of themselves designed for other people’s comfort.

Too many neurodivergent adults spend years in systems that misunderstand them.

Their exhaustion becomes depression.
Their overwhelm becomes anxiety.
Their shutdown becomes avoidance.
Their masking becomes “high functioning.”
Their suffering becomes invisible because they learned how to keep performing while carrying enormous internal strain.

Over time, many people begin viewing themselves through frameworks built around deficiency, failure, or pathology without ever receiving an explanation that fully accounts for the deeper patterns underneath what they are experiencing.

My work is grounded in the belief that accurate understanding changes people’s relationship to themselves.

Not because understanding magically removes struggle, but because it can replace years of shame, confusion, and self-blame with context, clarity, self-trust, and a more sustainable way of relating to yourself.

My Path to This Work

My perspective as a therapist has been shaped by both professional training and lived experience.

I hold a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and am a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC). My clinical work has increasingly focused on autistic and ADHD adults, particularly those navigating late identification, masking, burnout, trauma, perfectionism, chronic overwhelm, and the process of understanding themselves differently after years of feeling that something simply did not add up.

My own ADHD diagnosis came while I was completing my master’s degree. I was later diagnosed as autistic as an adult.

Those experiences did not replace my clinical training. They changed the lens through which I understood it.

Concepts I had learned professionally began connecting with experiences I understood from the inside. I became increasingly interested in the places where conventional explanations of distress can miss important context — especially when a neurodivergent person has spent years compensating, masking, over-functioning, or trying to make themselves succeed within environments that do not fit them.

Today, I provide telehealth therapy to adults in Minnesota, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee, with a practice centered specifically around neurodivergent adults and the complexity of their lived experience.

How My Experience Shapes My Work

Being a neurodivergent therapist does not mean I assume your experience is the same as mine.

It does mean that many of the realities neurodivergent clients describe are not abstract concepts to me.

I understand from the inside what it can mean to appear capable while expending enormous energy to maintain that appearance. I understand masking, perfectionism, overthinking, pushing beyond capacity, and the disorientation that can come from discovering later in life that the framework you were using to understand yourself was incomplete.

That lived experience exists alongside my clinical training.

I bring knowledge of therapeutic theory, trauma, neurodivergence, emotional and relational patterns, and clinical practice. You bring knowledge of your own internal experience, history, relationships, needs, and life.

We put those forms of knowledge together.

That combination is central to the way I work: curious rather than prescriptive, collaborative rather than hierarchical, and interested in understanding what is happening before deciding what needs to change.

Understanding comes before action.

What Matters to Me as a Therapist

My work is neurodiversity-affirming, trauma-informed, evidence-based, depth-oriented, and collaborative.

To me, neurodiversity-affirming practice means understanding neurodivergence within context rather than automatically framing difference as dysfunction.

Trauma-informed care means recognizing not only discrete traumatic experiences, but also the cumulative impact of years spent masking, adapting, over-functioning, misunderstanding yourself, or suppressing important parts of yourself in order to belong.

Evidence-based practice means drawing from established clinical knowledge while thinking carefully about whether a particular framework or intervention actually fits the person in front of me.

And collaboration means respecting your knowledge of yourself. Therapy is not a process in which I define who you are or hand you a formula for becoming someone different. We work together to understand your experiences more accurately and determine what might help you live more sustainably and authentically.

I also believe deeply that distress should not be minimized simply because someone appears functional from the outside.

Many neurodivergent people have survived by becoming extraordinarily skilled at hiding how much something costs them.

That does not make the cost less real.

A Space Where You Can Be a Whole Person

Therapy requires vulnerability, and I believe people deserve clarity about the kind of space they are entering.

My work is grounded in honesty, transparency, compassion, curiosity, collaboration, and respect for human complexity.

I welcome clients across identities, backgrounds, genders, sexualities, relationship structures, and abilities, and I remain attentive to the ways social systems, environments, expectations, and experiences of marginalization can shape mental health and a person’s relationship with themselves.

You do not have to make yourself easier to understand, more conventional, less complicated, or more comfortable for someone else in order to deserve thoughtful care.

You get to arrive as a whole person.

Beyond Therapy

Outside of clinical work, I’m an animal lover, a science nerd, a lifelong learner, and an endlessly curious person.

I love learning simply because something is interesting. I can happily disappear into a subject, follow connections in unexpected directions, and spend far more time than I intended learning everything I can about something that caught my attention.

Science has long been one of those interests, but so have the larger questions underneath it — how people work, how the world works, how we make meaning, and how different ways of understanding something can completely change what we see.

I also love nature and animals and have always felt deeply connected to them.

And I genuinely value the intensity, curiosity, enthusiasm, creativity, and joy that can come with neurodivergent interests. I do not think the things that fascinate us are trivial simply because other people may not understand why they matter so much.

Those parts of who I am inevitably come into the way I practice therapy: curiosity, depth, openness to complexity, and a willingness to keep looking when the first explanation does not quite fit.

Still Have Questions?

If something here resonates with you and you would like to get a sense of what working together might be like, I offer free 15-minute consultations.

You can tell me a little about what has been bringing you to therapy, ask questions about my approach, and get a sense of whether this feels like the kind of support you have been looking for.

There is no pressure to move forward.

The goal is simply for both of us to have enough information to decide whether working together feels like a good fit.