AuDHD Flourishing
The monotropic neurotype of Autism + ADHD holds strengths and challenges. Typical advice often doesn't work for us! Your AuDHD host, Mattia Maurée (they/them), shares research, lived experience, and practical advice from coaching over 400 neurodivergent folks. They focus on feeling better first, before tackling the big life design questions. You're doing great, you belong here, and it's possible to feel a lot better. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
Decluttering, organizing, and cleaning my home in a more routine way is having some interesting effects on my perfectionist tendencies! (Plus, perfectionism comes up in the decision-making process; more on that in my interview on A Slob Comes Clean, which I'll link here when it's out.)
Specifically, a cleaner space = less decision fatigue = lower cognitive load = more executive function resources for ME!
If you want support with ...
Dana K White, like me, couldn't find advice that worked for her. So she made it up! And it turns out, it was helpful for many other people too.
After writing an anonymous blog about cleaning her overwhelmingly cluttered home, Dana "came out" and started helping others too. Also, many of those people let her know she seems to have ADHD ;)
Her explanations have already helped me a lot, and given me hope about a clean home for the first...
Transitions are one of THE things that support the way that productivity shows up for AuDHDers! Transitions don't have to be all about work: play and rest can be transitions too. And sometimes we need transition time into and out of work, play, AND rest!
Today I talk in more detail about how long transitions can take for me (routinely 30-60 minutes). If that's true for you, a 20-minute chunk of work (or getting interrupted) isn'...
PDA is the Persistent Drive for Autonomy (community term), or pathological demand avoidance (clinical & pathologizing term). What happens when PDA, ADHD, and autism all overlap? Well... stress and relationship challenges!
Thankfully, everything that helped me feel more safe has also made my PDA more manageable. There are many approaches to build that safety.
This episode is a follow-up to the interview on PDA last week
Men...
It's been a running joke (that wasn't initially a joke) that I'm totally going to do a PDA episode very soon... since the very first episode of AuDHD Flourishing.
Now we have one, thanks to Chris Wells and Marni Kammersell for interviewing me on PDA: Resistance and Resilience, and letting me cross-post the episode here!
Mentioned in episode:
- Full show notes
- AuDHD Flourishing Episode 87: Giftedness & the Sparkly Mind with Sh...
About two years ago, I started ADHD stimulant medication as a regular (most days) thing. I've mentioned it here and there on the podcast.
This is my most concentrated "review" of the main things I've noticed over the past two years.
To be clear, when I mention a factor that might make stimulant meds more of a burnout risk, I'm not saying those folks shouldn't try it! Just to be very careful not to push through the body's capacity.
...One reason most advice doesn't work for us is that it's backwards. It's telling us to do/have the end result, rather than showing us how to get there.
In the case of safety or shame, it's pretty clear that we can't just leap to the end of the process (if there even is one with a traumatized body).
Mentioned in episode:
- Toxic Shame: What it is and How to Heal From it (YouTube, Heidi Priebe. Her take is overall better/more acce...
TQ (they/them) is a queer, trans, physically disabled, AuDHD Chinese-Singaporean artist, author/host of the upcoming book/podcast Queer! AuDHD! BIPOC!, and community facilitator for other queer neurodivergent BIPOC.
In true ND fashion, we range over many topics, including the importance of community and hearing your own stories as a person with multiple intersecting identities.
You can pre-order a copy of their upcoming book...
Also on YouTube for some visuals
My urge for minimalism is partly to provide myself with the visual cues I desperately need, without overwhelming myself with visual clutter. And, there has been a specifically classist push for minimalism that sometimes causes me to get rid of too much.
Here's an excellent thread about minimalism, class, and why you're probably not a hoarder
I especially loved the idea that you may just nee...
Thanks to Hyperfocus with Rae Jacobson for letting me cross-post this important discussion about one of the first longitudinal studies of ADHD in women and girls!
Full show notes, timestamps, and Transcript available on Hyperfocus' site
(Ep 5, The “devastating” findings of a decades-long ADHD study, Dec 5, 2024 has the full version; it was reposted Aug 28 2025 with more brief notes)
Show notes:
Dr. Stephen Hins...
Chronic shame makes us feel all kinds of terrible things that often are the triggers that send people to therapy.
It's caused in part by relational rupture without repair, especially as an infant and child.
While there's no quick fix, recognizing the signs and beginning to gently work with it does help over time.
This is episode 10 of a series of 10 that started with 102 AuDHD Therapy That Works with Joe Sosta
I'm working on some ...
Darren Glencross was diagnosed near the beginning of 2025, and since then has written multiple books and come up with a new framework for people to explore outside of the medical model.
It includes: Pattern Language, Inner Orbit with 12 satellites (and Their Orbit), and the Carry Kit
It's exciting to explore community-led models!
Connect with Darren:
- Message on Instagram @beaconwithin
- Darren Glencross on LinkedIn
M...
AuDHD brains face many challenges when it comes to projects. It's something I've put a great deal of time and learning into, both personally and professionally. This episode covers many ideas and approaches that tend to work for us.
Key Takeaways:
- We usually learn to use what I call the Adrenaline-Anxiety Approach. While effective short-term, it can lead to burnout and other issues.
- A monotropic approach is more sustainable an...
This ep also available on YouTube
"use more lube:" do what you need to do to make life easier, more comfortable, and more pleasurable for you in the moment.
This goes beyond sensory needs, though that's often where we start.
You may not be sure what you want on the grand scale (or it feels impossible to get there). But being kind to yourself, and meeting your needs moment-to-moment, helps create a communication feedback loop with ...
Intuition has been a way to interface with my body, even when the relationship with my body was contentious.
While I won't share the trauma stories that led to the subtitle (Intuition Saved My Life), I have a variety of examples of how unconscious information can surface in a useful way.
ep. 7 in an interconnected 10-episode series
Mentioned in episode:
It often feels easiest to do what's right in front of us. And that's lovely, a lot of the time, and uses our strengths!
And... it starts to feel bad if we're in whack-a-mole mode almost all of the time, and don't have spacious time to comprehend the whole of our experience.
This ties into our sensory needs and leans more into the psychological side of these needs.
Mentioned in episode:
Maria Bowler recently published the book Making Time: A New Vision for Crafting a Life beyond Productivity. It's a relaxing take on doing what you want to do, and feeling okay while doing it.
One of the main themes is being present, and being true to yourself even if you're doing boring stuff you don't want to do. Finding those moments of resonance that turn the entire activity into building self-trust.
If you already read the book a...
The Autistic community has taken many approaches to reframing what the diagnostic criteria calls "Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts." There's the double-empathy problem, for example, in which Autistic people have an easier time understanding each other where allistics struggle and vice versa.
Childhood Emotional Neglect, while a relatively new idea from 2012, aligns rema...
This episode is also on YouTube
If our sensory needs are not met, even an otherwise okay day will still feel... off somehow. And then that gap between how we feel and how we think we "should" feel can make it even worse (that one's not a topic in this episode, just a thing that happens).
If our sensory needs ARE met, sometimes even tough circumstances can feel not that bad.
To be clear, this is not about avoiding bad days, which a...
Lessons learned from ~17 years of therapy over the last 20 years. How I'd approach therapy now based on that.
What to look for in therapists, goal-setting in therapy, and reasons to quit your current therapist.
Also connects back to last week's interview with Joe about AuDHD therapy.
Links mentioned:
- Book Decolonizing Therapy (also mentioned last week, affiliate link)
- Blog post on finding a neurodivergent-affirming therapist (w...
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