Ep 1: Understanding AuDHD - Lived Experience, Clinical Insight

When viewed through the lens of difference, rather than disorder, we often find that it's expectations that warrant changing, not humans.

🎙️ Episode 1: Understanding AuDHD — The Intersection of Autism and ADHD | The AuDHD Psych Podcast

Episode Summary

Welcome to the first episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast — hosted by Aaron Howearth, a clinical psychologist, queer, non-binary, and proudly neurodivergent (AuDHD) individual (the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD).

In this powerful introductory episode, Aaron explores what it means to live, work, and thrive as an AuDHD person — blending clinical psychology, lived experience, and the neurodiversity-affirming paradigm. Aaron dives into why understanding AuDHD is vital for both clinicians and the neurodivergent community.

Aaron shares their personal and professional journey — from 23 years in the Royal Navy to founding Howearth Psychology, a therapeutic space serving neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ communities. With honesty and humour, Aaron reflects on how their unique perspective helps bridge the gap between traditional clinical psychology and the affirming lens that celebrates difference rather than pathologising it.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• What is AuDHD? — Understanding how autism and ADHD can coexist, despite past diagnostic misconceptions.
• The “Unhelpful Expressions” Concept — Why neurodivergent traits aren’t inherently disordered, but can express in ways that either help or hinder our goals.
• Diagnosis Through a Neurodiversity-Affirming Lens — How psychological assessment can empower rather than label.
• Living Authentically — Aaron’s journey through gender identity, neurodivergence, and finding meaning in community service.
• Changing Clinical Perspectives — Encouraging fellow psychologists to view neurodivergence through strength-based, person-centred practice.
• Engaging With The Podcast — Listeners are invited to interact, question, and shape future discussions — from diagnostic frameworks to lived experiences of being AuDHD.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hi, welcome to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howard, clinical psychologist and neurodivergent human. What's the podcast about, you ask? Well, the podcast is about the co-occurrence of characteristics of autism and ADHD, which we are starting to see is happening much more often than we thought it did before. What else is the podcast about? Well, I'm bringing the perspective of clinical psychology, lived experience, my own and others, and also the neurodiversity affirming paradigm because we are different, not less. We are not inherently flawed by our characteristics. We just have some difficulties and some strengths related. Oh, who are you, you ask? Well, I am a 50-year-old Audi HD non-binary gay biological male. It took me a little while to think about that. There's lots of words. I'm an intersection of intersections. And I spent about 23 years in the Navy serving my community in that way and realized that I like people. Probably my special interest is people. So becoming a psychologist at midlife was a way for me to serve the communities that I sit in in a much more personal way. I became a psychologist and then moved into the neurodevelopmental space, partly because I was diagnosed with ADHD just before I qualified, partly because it is the community that I serve and the community that I'd sat within without realizing it for so many years. I found all of my networks, friends and professional, have turned out to be neurodivergent or have neurodivergent characteristics. And so that being the clinical space that I work in was just a natural affinity for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Maybe Aaron, you could share a little bit about how you decided to set up a practice for yourself and how this how its psychology came to be conceptualized.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Absolutely. And that lovely voice you can hear in the background is the delightful Uma who's helping me out every time I pause and go blank. Uma's going to be giving me prompting uh messages. So, about my practice, uh, again, my practice is primarily with neurodivergent people and queer people. So I work in the therapeutic and diagnostic space for usually autism and ADHD, but some of the broader areas of neurodivergence as well. And I also work in the queer space, uh, both with queer people, providing a safe space for them, and also conducting WPATH assessments to facilitate uh gender-affirming care.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah, and how has your own experience shaped this space that is how it's psychology?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

So, my own experience, I guess, uh, and this is the autism coming through. I guess for many years I didn't realize that my experience wasn't the same as everybody else's, both my gender experience, but also my experience of being a weirdo. And I use that word as something that I've always loved about myself. I've been very different for a very long time as a young person. I felt some shame around that. And then in my teens, I started to realize that it was actually a really positive quality that I had to think differently and to be different to other people. It came with its own stresses, but I think it's those stresses that really inform my clinical practice. I am very happy to share generally a lot of my own history to provide a framework for other people to see that wherever they are now isn't necessarily where they're going to end up later in life. As an early life sailor, uh, I didn't know I was neurodivergent. I had no strategies to manage the unhelpful expression of my characteristics, and so I made some choices. They weren't the most helpful choices, but they didn't define me, and they haven't defined me, and they haven't stopped me from unlearning a lot of the things that I learned in my youth and relearning who I truly am and what I can be. And I want to share that with other people.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, that's really brilliant. And just to kind of circle back on something that you just talked about, um, this idea of unhelpful expressions. I just know that later on when we're editing this, you're gonna want to be like, oh, that's not necessarily something that I'm trying to get at. And do you want to just elaborate a little bit more?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Yeah, so well, I actually really deliberately use the language unhelpful expressions of neurodivergence because neurodivergence itself, ADHD, autism, and those core characteristics of both, aren't inherently disordered. It is my hyperfixation and on different topics within neurodivergence and my special interest in humans. That means that I can consume huge amounts of research knowledge in a small period of time that might take an average person, you know, months will take me weeks, sometimes days if I really get into the zone. However, sometimes I do get into the zone and I just won't see time. I'll think, oh, I'll finish work at six o'clock, and it'll be two o'clock in the morning, and I'll still be reading something really interesting. Same characteristic, one outcome is really positive. One outcome is not so helpful in other areas of my life. So I think when I refer to the unhelpful expression, I'm talking about those things that stop us from meeting our goals, not the characteristics themselves.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction going forward for our viewers. And why this podcast, and why now?

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Um now because uh as discussed before, I've been diagnosed formally with ADHD, and through my own diagnostic services that I provide, I started to recognize a lot of the experience of the people that I was working with, was also my experience. So I self-identify as autistic. Um recognizing those characteristics and how they've influenced my life and identity, both in sometimes negative ways, but broadly in really positive ways. Again, it's about wanting to share my experience with other people, but not just my experience. I also want to bring a perspective of clinical psych, um, which to a lot of people will seem very counterintuitive under the context of the neurodiversity affirming paradigm. But I actually think they can coexist because my clinical psych practice is not treating autism or ADHD. My clinical practice is treating the expression of those things when they're stopping someone from meeting their goals. The person, the characteristics are valid and worthwhile, just every characteristic is good in some contexts and not so good in others.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Brilliant. Um, so what sort of gaps, or let's say, um I don't know, for lack of a better word, I'd say what are some things in the space of AUDHD do you see, you know, not sort of surfacing in current conversations that you probably want to address throughout this podcast?

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Well, I think just the fact that Audi HD is a thing. Uh, up until the DSM 5, 2013, that was released, uh, basically autism trumps all others. So you couldn't diagnose autism and ADHD. So essentially what we were seeing there is, I wasn't, I wasn't a psychologist at that stage, but what the world saw at that point was if you had ADHD characteristics, which can be really helpful in some settings and really unhelpful in other settings, that was kind of pushed to the side because it was all explained by autism in the diagnostic schema. However, the characteristics of autism and ADHD are very different. And if you have the unhelpful expression of characteristics of both, but you only have a diagnosis of autism, it means that half of your difficulties are kind of being missed. So now we recognize for the last sort of 12 years that they do co-occur, they are separate, and one does not trump the other or supersede the other. And that's really important. There are still people out there who believe that ADHD and autism can't exist in the same person, and that's such a fallacy, and it's a harmful fallacy.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Yeah, I think that you touched a little bit about what is Aud and how they are a common co-occurring sort of um thing. Um maybe you'd want to frame it under the realm of why it's underdiagnosed so much.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

I think with Aud, it's fascinating to me working in the space because I have the privilege of being able to reflect on my own experience. And I think to answer your question, it's that in a lot of situations, ADHD characteristics can make it look like autistic characteristics are not there, and vice versa. And the the simple example that I'll use is the impulsivity that's a core characteristic of ADHD, intuitively is the opposite of the rigidity that we consider to be a core cognitive characteristic of autism. However, they can coexist. And again, lived experience, um, my impulsivity has made me make a lot of choices in my life and made me drop a lot of choices in my life and move on to the next thing. When I've had power and control and agency over those choices. However, if I don't have agency in choices, if you turn up to my home at eight o'clock at night when I'm not expecting you and I have a big workload, internally I melt down. I'm an internalizer. You probably won't see it, but I'll experience it. So you would look at my life and go, oh, you went from the Navy to dog walking to psychologist. You'd see the ADHD in that to some degree. And then you'd go, Oh, so you're not really that rigid because you could travel all over Southeast Asia with the Navy. But I had control and choice in that. Take that control and choice away from me, as with so many people who sit in both the ADHD and the autism spaces, and that's where we see this real rigidity. The rigidity, the routines, they help keep us safe, like our stims and other repetitive thoughts and behaviors. And I think that's probably the biggest blind spot is that lots of people don't realize that the characteristics can co-occur. And so they see one and they assume that the other one doesn't actually exist in that person as well. And again, we look at either miss or missed diagnosis, and that means that we're not providing the resources and the supports for people who may need them.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

That's amazing. Um, so now that we've touched a bit about what is ADHD, I think it's great for our viewers if you could just touch a little bit about what to expect going forward, what are the topics that are coming up, um, what makes this podcast different from sort of the more clinical and medical ones? Yep.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

So I guess um what to expect. Well, we'll start off talking about how do we diagnose autism and ADHD, and then we'll have a little bit of a look into what I've just spoken about, how they can look very opposite to one another, but they can coexist. How are we going to be different in this podcast to other podcasts? I think it's the combination of my clinical perspective uh merged with my lived experience in the neurodiver, beg your pardon, the neurodiversity affirming paradigm, because I think kind of like uh autism and ADHD were perceived not to be able to coexist. I think in a lot of spaces, we think that clinical psychology and a diagnostic world can't coexist with neurodiversity affirming paradigms. But I'd argue actually that they're both intimately linked because people like myself, we're not giving you a diagnosis to try and say there's something wrong with you. We're giving you a diagnosis because the unhelpful expression of some of your characteristics means that you're not able to meet your goals. And so we're inherently affirming you as a person by making the diagnosis and showing you how we could make some changes to try and facilitate you meeting your goals. But also, diagnosis doesn't have to just be pointing out everything that's wrong with somebody. The process also highlights all the things that are right with people as well. You know, I talked about my impulsivity before. Some of my impulsivity saw me probably getting much less sleep as a young person than I should because I enjoyed going out a lot. But that impulsivity also saw me join the Navy and buy a property that I bought and sold that facilitated me changing careers. So the characteristics are not inherently deficit or disordered. It's the way they express in our worlds, that is, and that's what we try and manage.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

So, how can listeners engage or sort of reflect on some of the things that we share? How would you see that sort of going forward?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Um, how can listeners engage with it? Uh in whatever way suits you best. You know, we are all so different, and the way we learn, the way we process, the way we think more broadly is different for every single person. Neurodivergent people, we're more different than everybody else. So, yep, our characteristics absolutely are on a spectrum and everybody has them to some degree. We have them significantly more or less than other people. How do we engage with the content? Um, engage with it as works best for you and your mind. Uh, if you want to engage through social media, we're more than happy with that. If you want to engage by reaching out to us, we're more than happy with that. If you want to engage by looking up the facts around uh, you know, anything that I say and challenging it, I'm very open to that too, because challenge is how we grow. So, whatever suits you best, I think is the best way to engage uh with our content.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yeah, absolutely. And I think just to add on, like if there's any sort of areas that people would, you know, really like to sort of get your input on and for us to be able to delve into, I think that would be a great way for us to tangent the podcast and see as it grows.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

And so, okay, just sort of wrap things up. What do you what did you sort of feel from today's episode that was sort of new or validating and do you know in terms of the information presented? Yeah, I'll probably just even from your day, like a little tidbit would be great.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Uh, something from today, something from the podcast, new and validating. I think me in front of a camera is pretty new and pretty validating. I think uh I I mean I've created this platform by myself, or for myself rather, um, to try and facilitate change in perspectives. Change in perspectives, both in how we view ourselves as not inherently deficient or disordered, but also hopefully changing the perspectives of other clinicians who might stumble across this podcast and think to themselves, I don't agree with that, and then process a little more and go, oh, actually, that makes sense. That's kind of the thing that I really uh hope to achieve here, and that's the little joy for me today, is this is our first step. Thanks to Uma, who's really facilitated this for me. Um, ADHD overcommitted. Uh Uma is me outsourcing time uh and doing a wonderful job of it. So that's my pleasure to that today. That's my little piece of joy.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah, and I think for me as well, like getting so I like when um big ideas are sort of like they finally come into fruition. And I think we've been chatting about this for a good few months. Yeah, it's been even longer for you. Um so I think just seeing this come to light has just been so rewarding and exciting, and yeah. So do you want to just sign us off for a bit?

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Well, I appreciate that, Uma, and thank you. So you guys can't see Uma, but I can. So I'm thanking her on your behalf. Um, well, that's it for us today, and we will be back again in episode two, and we'll be talking about a little bit about diagnosis. So thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.