Festive Families, Neurodivergent Hearts: When Harmony is Hard Workshop with Nea Clark

Overview

As the festive season approaches, many of us long for harmony, understanding, and closeness with our families. Yet for neurodivergent families, the holidays can highlight differences in communication, energy, and emotional regulation, often deepening misunderstanding rather than easing it.

This two-hour experiential workshop explores the emotional complexity of family disappointment through a neurodivergent lens. Using Transactional Analysis, we will unpack the “fantasy family” narrative, examine the grief of unmet expectations, and trace intergenerational patterns that shape our relational scripts. Blending psychotherapeutic insight with practical coaching tools, participants will learn how to balance closeness and distance, recognise signs of overwhelm, and co-regulate across neurotypes. The session concludes with a reflective grief ritual and a reclaiming of the Adult ego state, restoring choice, permission, and peace in family connections.

Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event

• By taking part in this workshop you will learn to recognise and map how family beliefs, repeating relational patterns and role dynamics contribute to cycles of disappointment, misattunement and shame in neurodivergent families, we’ll use short case vignettes and group conversation to explore real-life examples so you can see these patterns in action, and you will write a one-paragraph reflection that links at least two psychological concepts to observed family behaviours, this combination of discussion and reflective writing will help you turn abstract ideas into practical insights you can use with clients or in your own family work.
• Through the practical exercises in this session you will develop simple, embodied self-regulation tools and practise a co-regulation technique with another participant, examples include grounding and a brief orienting exercise, and a timing or pacing method for empathy attunement, you will put these into practice in a 2–3 minute role-play where you lead a co-regulation interaction and then briefly describe which bodily cues or timing choices you used and why, this hands-on approach is designed to deepen bodily awareness and give you usable cues to bring back to clinical or family settings.
• By the end of the workshop you will be ready to create a concise, client-centred plan for emotionally charged family moments that includes a short grief or acceptance ritual, a one-line communication script for difficult conversations and at least two boundary or pacing measures such as agreed time slots or coded signals, you will present this plan in a 2–3 minute summary to the group and receive focused peer feedback on clarity and feasibility, the aim is to leave with a practical, tested toolkit that can be adapted quickly for different family contexts.

Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?

• The workshop is aimed at psychotherapists, counsellors ADHD Coaches and trainees, and mental health practitioners who are working with ADHD clients who have been diagnosed or present ADHD traits.

How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?

• This course deepens practitioners’ understanding of how neurodivergent differences in communication, regulation and processing shape family relationships. That means clinicians will be better able to recognise patterns of misattunement, distinguish depleted capacity from resistance, and interpret family narratives without pathologising normal adaptations. Greater conceptual clarity leads to more accurate case formulations and more compassionate, targeted interventions.
• You will leave with practical, demonstrable skills to use in sessions: simple somatic regulation exercises, co-regulation techniques (timing, pacing, empathy-attunement), sensory plans and short communication scripts. These tools can be taught directly to clients, practised in role-plays, and incorporated into brief intervention plans for holiday or other high-stress family moments. The experiential elements make these skills easy to recall and apply under pressure.
• The course strengthens therapeutic stance and clinical decision-making: you will be more confident working with grief, shame and responsibility fatigue, better equipped to help clients set realistic boundaries, and able to design concise, client-centred plans that balance closeness and autonomy. Integrating psychotherapeutic and coaching approaches helps you offer flexible, brief interventions that suit both therapy and coaching contexts.
• Finally, the workshop builds professional capacity and service value. Participants will be able to offer clearer, evidence-informed support to neurodivergent clients and families, design sensory-aware interventions, and present these outcomes to supervisors, commissioners or referrers. Overall the training promotes inclusion, resilience and self-advocacy — leading to steadier therapeutic alliances and more sustainable client outcomes.