“Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Lived experience is well-documented in qualitative and interpretative psychological research and recognised as a therapeutic modality for various neurotypes. While diagnostic criteria describe neurodivergence from the “outside looking in”, lived experience moves conversations away from clinical gatekeeping and deficits to a nuanced reality of what it feels like from the “inside out”.

At Dawn Counselling, we believe in a social model of mental health where clients, through their lived experience, get to delineate their neuro-identities, health and environmental struggles, and identify the support they need apart from medical and diagnostic scaffolding.

We help you gain clarity, direction and control when facing barriers and functional challenges. We personalise your therapeutic journey with a unique combination of evidence-based, lived experience-informed approaches in affective empathy, humanistic, cognitive and somatic modalities.  You have full agency to discover and create meaning, and to articulate experiences, thoughts and emotions in a non-judgmental, safe space.

Our areas of counselling support: