The Compassion Collective Provider Toolkit
What to Look for in Neurodivergent-Affirming Therapy, Assessments, and Providers
A Relational Toolkit for ND-Affirming Support and Transformative Care
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” – Audre Lorde
This toolkit emerges not from credentialed halls but from two years of mutual aid among autistic adults, held in community, trauma, resilience, and a shared longing for liberation.
I write from lived experience, as an autistic, multiply neurodivergent human; as a community builder; and as someone steeped in both academic psychology and a master’s program in Transformative Social Change. But I did not find the deepest truths in textbooks. I found them in circles of Mad wisdom, in ruptures and repairs, in relationships that refused to flatten us for the sake of being seen.
This toolkit is not professional. It is relational, liberatory, and participatory. It centers people who have been pathologized, silenced, or extracted from—and it insists that care must be co-created, not imposed. It is an offering—please hold it with tenderness, pass it with consent, and use it to nourish the spaces where care still dares to grow in the margins.
🧬 Core Principles of ND-Affirming Care
ND-affirming care is not a method. It's a way of being. These are the principles that hold this approach:
🧠 Power Analysis: Who Holds the Frame?
To understand care systems, we must map power. These are sites of disempowerment often unspoken in clinical or assessment spaces:
Provider > Client: The assumption of neutrality, expertise, and authority often obscures power differentials.
Systems > Individuals: DSM categories, insurance protocols, and state-sanctioned diagnoses often define “truth.”
Institutions > Communities: Grassroots, relational, or Mad knowledge is often dismissed as anecdotal or unstable.
Whiteness > Intersectional Identity: Race, class, gender, and queerness shape how divergence is framed, feared, or erased.
Unaddressed power is always active. Ethical care names it, disrupts it, and redistributes it.
🚩 Red Flags in Therapy or Assessment
If your support feels more like erasure than expansion, pay attention. These are signs of neuronormative or coercive care:
Uses functioning labels or “support levels” as fixed traits
Frames neurodivergence as a pathology to be corrected
Over-relies on DSM or insurance structures to define reality
Frames masking as necessary for success
Measures progress through compliance
Dismisses your lived reality as “bias”
Pathologizes dissent, emotionality, or burnout
Ignores or erases intersectionality
Refuses to name power or rupture in the provider-client dynamic
💚 Green Flags: What Affirming Support Looks Like
Centers your goals, pace, identity, and processing style
Views divergence as valuable and interdependence as strength
Collaborates with you, not on you
Acknowledges systemic harm, medical trauma, and diagnostic injustice
Encourages self-trust and intuitive knowing
Is open to rupture, feedback, and repair
Uses inclusive, co-created, or identity-first language
Makes space for metaphor, art, ritual, silence, movement
Recognizes burnout, PDA/autonomy needs, and sensory regulation as real
🔍 Assessment Considerations: Asking Better Questions
Before agreeing to an evaluation, consider:
💠 Integration Pathways: What Comes After Diagnosis?
Alternatives and Supplements to Clinical Care:
Peer support collectives
Somatic or art-based trauma healing
Liberatory therapy spaces (BIPOC-led, queer-affirming, Mad-positive)
Community-based assessment models (narrative, relational, intersubjective)
Worker-owned therapy co-ops or solidarity clinics
Radical rest, land connection, and sensory sovereignty spaces
📚 Companion Theories
These can be cited in academic or policy contexts to support the validity of this framework:
📖 Glossary for Liberatory Practice
🧸 Final Words: A Reclamation
You are not too much. You are not broken. You are not imagining it.
Therapy should never feel like erasure. You deserve support that sees you, that holds you, and that walks with you, not over you.
Your sanity is not defined by systems that have failed to include you.
You get to define safety. You get to choose resonance.
📣 For Providers & Allies:
Thank you for unlearning.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for remembering that care is not a credential—it is a commitment to humanity.
✅ Toolkit Author: Sher Griffin (The Compassion Collective)
Please cite and share with care.
This document is part of an ongoing praxis of co-creation, community accountability, and radical love.