Meeting The Elephant: Why Hire a Human Therapist?

When the grade two teacher suggested having my kiddo assessed for autism, I thought she was crazy.

At this point, I had three kids in school, and he was definitely struggling more than his brothers, but not a lot more. I thought, “okay, maybe ADHD.” The family history is there. Sure, it could be neurodiversity, but he wasn’t struggling enough for it to be autism.

Fast forward many many months, and my spouse and I are sitting in a virtual meeting with a psychologist going over his results. She carefully outlined each assessment, the developmentally appropriate benchmark response, and why our kiddo’s (often wildly different) response supported an autism and ADHD diagnosis.

It took me three years to really untangle all the things that I had to face in my own head and heart after those labels entered the chat.

Most of the tangled threads were things that I didn’t even know were there until we were talking about MY kid. What I thought autism was. What I thought was a “normal” level of struggle. What I thought everyone found easy, and what I thought everyone found hard.

Our biggest barrier to diagnosis was that ADHD and autism are both “highly heritable”. They have a tendency to run in families. So when our kid started to struggle in the ways that we had always struggled, we mostly shrugged it off because that had been our experience when we were younger, and it had been a common experience throughout our families for generations. It was “normal”. And it still is “normal” in our world, that’s never going to change.

It took an outsider’s set of eyes to recognize the nature of our “normal” struggle.

We chose to go the diagnosis route. That’s not for everyone. In our case, it gave us better access to support that is useful to us while our kiddo is navigating school. But even if diagnosis isn’t for you, there’s a lot of power in identifying the features of the elephant in the room.

The elephant that you thought everyone else was living with too.

The elephant that isn’t going anywhere, no matter how much you “optimize” your space.

The elephant that already has so many names it's hard to see anymore: your family calls it one thing, your workplace calls it another, your partner calls it something else. Quirky, rigid, unreliable, lazy, blunt, distractible, quiet. Everyone else already has a name for the elephant in the room.

Sometimes it’s important to get to know the elephant well enough that you can give it your own name. That’s where a human therapist can help.

Maybe you already have someone in your life who can accompany you through this process without imposing their own elephant’s name. But sometimes the best person to help you find the elephant’s edges is a trustworthy, non-judgemental outsider. Someone who can help you peel back all the labels everyone else has already applied, so you can see the elephant for yourself.

A human therapist can help you make space for the elephant, and maybe even make friends with it. Learn to take care of it. Learn to notice when it is hungry, and when it is tired. Learn its needs and feelings. Learn where it came from, how it has shaped you, and where it could take you next.

Are you ready to meet the elephant in the room?

I’d love to meet them too.