Psychotherapy for Neurodivergent Children, Adolescents and Adults | Pasadena, CA

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For neurodivergent children, adolescents and adults seeking thoughtful, clinically grounded support for mental health, sensory and emotional regulation, executive functioning, relationships, identity, trauma, and the demands of everyday life.

You may be looking for more than a therapist who knows the right terminology.

Perhaps you have spent therapy sessions explaining why a supposedly simple task is not simple, why sensory overload affects the rest of your day, why one interaction can take hours to recover from, or why understanding a problem has not made it easier to change.

You may have been described as avoidant, resistant, unmotivated, overly sensitive, rigid, dramatic, or unwilling to try—when the fuller picture involved overload, limited capacity, executive-functioning demands, trauma, communication differences, or an environment that did not fit.

At the same time, neurodivergence is not the only part of your experience. You may also be living with anxiety, depression, grief, loneliness, burnout, relationship pain, trauma, or questions about identity following a diagnosis or a new understanding of lifelong patterns.

At Samar, psychotherapy begins with neurodevelopmental context while taking the full complexity of your mental health and life seriously.

What Brings Neurodivergent Children, Adolescents and Adults to Therapy?

People come to Samar for many of the same reasons anyone seeks psychotherapy—anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, loneliness, shame, relationship pain, or major change—but neurodevelopmental context can alter how those concerns are experienced, expressed, and approached.

Anxiety, depression, chronic overwhelm, or emotional exhaustion
Autistic burnout, ADHD burnout, masking, or a significant loss of capacity
Trauma related to bullying, exclusion, restraint, coercion, repeated misunderstanding, or prior treatment experiences
Shame, perfectionism, self-criticism, or a longstanding sense of being defective or “too much”
Difficulty recognizing emotions, body signals, needs, or the point at which stress became overload
Executive-functioning strain involving initiation, organization, time, prioritization, transitions, decision-making, and follow-through
Relationship conflict, loneliness, rejection sensitivity, boundaries, intimacy, or communication differences
Questions about identity following diagnosis, self-identification, or recognition of lifelong patterns
The demands of work, school, parenting, caregiving, health changes, or major life transitions

What therapy may include

Therapy may be reflective, structured, practical, relational, or some combination of these. The work is adapted to the person and the clinical need rather than treating a standard therapy format as a test of whether you are participating correctly.

Together, we may identify a recurring pattern, clarify what is maintaining a problem, practice communication, develop a regulation or recovery plan, examine shame, build executive-functioning supports, process grief or trauma, identify an environmental mismatch, or involve a partner or family member with your consent.

You can ask for direct questions, greater specificity, more processing time, a pause, a written option, or a different way of approaching the work. Strategies are treated as collaborative experiments. When something does not help, we examine what made it ineffective rather than assuming you lacked motivation or effort.

Therapy Can Be Adapted Without Becoming Less Serious

Accessibility is not the same as lowering the clinical bar.

Communication and Processing

Questions can be more direct. You can ask for greater specificity, written options, more silence, more time, or the opportunity to revise an answer later. Therapy does not assume that rapid spoken processing is the most accurate form of participation.

Structure and executive functioning

When helpful, sessions can use agendas, clearer priorities, smaller next steps, written recaps, or practical examination of where a plan actually breaks down. Knowing what to do and having reliable access to doing it are not treated as the same thing.

Sensory experience and regulation

Sensory demands, transitions, fatigue, bodily awareness, and recovery needs can meaningfully affect emotional well-being and daily functioning. At Samar, these experiences are considered part of the clinical picture rather than treated as secondary concerns.

Relationships and context

Therapy can examine what happens between people as well as what happens inside one person: expectations, implicit versus explicit communication, boundaries, workload, environmental demands, culture, and repeated experiences of being misunderstood.

You will not be asked to perform neurotypicality

Meaningful participation in therapy is not measured by eye contact, stillness, conventional posture, rapid verbal responses, or a socially expected emotional display. You may move, fidget, doodle, hold a pillow, sit differently, use writing, pause before answering, or take additional time to process.

The goal is not to help you appear more typical. The goal is to make therapy accurate and accessible enough to work on the concerns that genuinely matter to you.

Insight Is Useful. Access Matters Too.

You may already understand yourself extremely well and still struggle to begin, sequence, remember, sustain, or recover when plans are disrupted. Therapy can explore the gap between understanding and implementation without turning that gap into a character judgment.

Diagnosis, Assessment & Care Coordination

A formal neurodevelopmental diagnosis is not required for psychotherapy. Samar does not currently provide formal autism, ADHD, or other neurodevelopmental assessments. When evaluation, medication care, or coordination with another clinician is important, those needs can be discussed and coordinated when appropriate and authorized.

Session options

In-person appointments are available in Pasadena, California. Secure telehealth appointments are available throughout California. When clinically appropriate, home visits may be considered.

Fees and Insurance

Individual psychotherapy sessions are $255. Couples, relationship, and family therapy sessions are $275.

Samar Neurodivergent Therapy Center is an out-of-network practice and does not participate directly with insurance plans. Upon request, we can provide a superbill that you may submit to your insurance company for possible out-of-network reimbursement. Coverage and reimbursement vary by plan. We recommend contacting your insurance provider directly to confirm your out-of-network mental health benefits.

Read about autism-informed psychotherapy
Read about ADHD & AuDHD-informed psychotherapy
Read about intellectual disability and mental health
Read "You Did Not Fail Therapy—Therapy Failed to Account for You" on our Blog
Review current therapy fees and insurance information

Questions About Neurodivergent Therapy

Is “neurodivergent therapy” a particular therapy modality?

Not necessarily. Neurodivergent therapy is not defined by one modality or set of techniques. The difference is that neurodevelopmental context is considered throughout the work—including how concerns are understood, how sessions are structured, how communication happens, what demands the environment creates, and how interventions are adapted to the person.

Will therapy only focus on neurodivergence?

No. Therapy can focus on anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, relationships, identity, burnout, life transitions, or other mental health concerns. Neurodivergence is part of the clinical context when it is relevant, but it is not assumed to explain every difficulty or become the focus of every session.

What if previous therapy felt affirming but still was not useful?

Feeling respected and understood matters, but affirmation alone does not make therapy effective. Treatment may still miss the mark when communication, pacing, structure, sensory demands, executive-functioning demands, or the underlying formulation do not fit the person. At Samar, those differences can be identified and addressed directly.

Does adapting therapy mean making it less challenging?

No. Adaptation is not about lowering expectations or avoiding difficult work. It is about making therapy more accessible and clinically appropriate so the person can engage with the work itself—without unnecessary barriers created by the way therapy is communicated, structured, or delivered.