About Giancarlo

For years, I moved through the world feeling like I was on the wrong frequency. Too sensitive, too intense, too restless on the inside, or somehow never enough. As a child, the autism was far more visible than the ADHD: I was the serious, withdrawn kid with his own subjects, who never understood the unwritten rules of the playground. The ADHD was there, but I carried it inwardly, without the visible restlessness everyone looks for. In relationships I felt everything intensely and had no words for it. At work I could carry difficult projects and then freeze at a three-minute phone call. Nothing added up, so I drew the only conclusion that made sense at the time: the problem is me.

I learned to mask early, and well. I studied people like a foreign language: when to laugh, how to look relaxed while my nervous system was on alert. The mask worked. People liked me. And I came home emptied out, with a tiredness sleep never touched. I paid the cost for years: burnout, anxiety, stretches when I could not speak to anyone, followed by the guilt of not managing things other people find simple.

"I spent years believing something was wrong with me. Diagnosis didn't fix me, it freed me. And now I help others find that same freedom."

My autism and ADHD diagnoses came after the age of 30. They were not a verdict, they were a map. Thirty years of scattered episodes suddenly took shape: the sensitivity to light and noise, the routines that kept me whole, the enthusiasm that carried me through days on a single subject and the crash that followed. Nothing about me changed. What changed was the story I told about myself, and that changed everything else.

I also learned, at the same time, that I am not an exception. A great many people are diagnosed with autism or ADHD at 30, at 40, at 50, after decades of being told they were anxious, lazy, too sensitive, or simply hard to please. I hear the same story, almost word for word, every week I work. That is exactly why I have written at length about late diagnosis on this site's blog: so that the person living it can find it written down somewhere, before they find the courage to walk into a therapy room.

That was when I began to build my life differently: not to fix myself, but to stop working against myself, with quieter environments and with people around whom I do not have to explain and translate in order to be understood. Something essential shifted: I stopped paying, day after day, the rent on a mask.

The most concrete change was to my pace. Many neurodivergent minds run in cycles of boom and bust: you give everything you have until you are empty, then spend weeks recovering and blaming yourself for every lost day. I learned, first the hard way and then working alongside others, that a pace that holds is not one hundred per cent on the good day, but sixty or seventy per cent, held steadily. It sounds like less. In practice it produces far more, because you are no longer paying, four times a year, for the months of recovery.

The way I do therapy changed too. I had trained in serious, well-evidenced models, except that almost all of them start from an assumption they never say out loud: that the mind in front of the therapist is a neurotypical one. That emotion can be recognised and named on request. That motivation arrives if you decide it should. That silence in the room is calming for everyone. That what you agreed together gets done between sessions, if the person really wants it. I knew from the inside where those assumptions break, because they had broken on me first. And I knew something harder to say: when therapy does not fit, it is not the method that goes home carrying the doubt. It is the person, with one more piece of evidence that they have failed again, just like at school, at work, in relationships.

What I do now grew out of that, built on neuro-affirming principles. I integrate what has been shown to help, from IFS and DBT to somatic work and trauma-informed approaches, but I put every technique through a single question: how does the mind in front of me actually work, not how a manual says it ought to. I do not ask you to fit the method, I fit the method to you. I know all too well what it is like to sit in a therapy room and feel unseen, to have your traits called symptoms. My practice exists precisely so that you never have to go through that again.