Responding to questions and learning preferences:

Please note, each lesson has a choice of video content or written content - if you prefer to read the informaiton rather than watch a video, just scroll down to the written section.

You can answer the self-reflective questions online, if you wish. If you do so, in terms of privacy, I would potentially be able to see them (although I would not check your answers). Alternatively, you can download the booklet which accompanies the course or write your answers in your own notebook as you work through the course.

If you choose to leave a comment at the end of a lesson, this is automatically shared with other students. Any comments that are deemed offensive by the admins will be deleted.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to Navigating Feelings: Emotional Regulation for Neurodivergent Minds. My name is Claire, and I’m thrilled to be guiding you through this journey of emotional understanding and growth. I am a late-diagnosed autistic woman, author and Psychology Today expert blogger on autism, and I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of clients across the globe. My work has centred on helping individuals like you develop practical strategies for understanding and regulating emotions, and I am excited to share these same approaches in this course.

I'm going to be sharing my own experiences of emotional regulation with you throughout this course, in a hope to shift some of the stigma associated with mood and emotional regulation issues. From a very young age, my emotional responses have been considered very extreme. I was one of those extremely well behaved children, I always followed the rules, quitely played and was terrified of upsetting my mum, but when I felt scared, threatened or overwhelmed, I could become violent and completely hysterical, on one occasion leaving mum scarred for life. I know now that I experienced autistic meltdowns, and I still do, despite years of being a therapist and learning every emotional regulation tool in the book.

Like so many of my clients, my emotional experience is intense, it can sometimes be uncontrollable and it's different to many people's. When I was in my twenties, I thought I must have bipolar disorder because of the intensity of my mood swings. It wasn't until I discovered that I was autistic, and that my brain processed emotions differently, that I could make some sense of my experience.

Making sense of what was happening helped me develop strategies to deal with it, which I've also shared with my clients over the years.

Throughout the course, I'll share why our brains respond differently and you'll be encouraged to reflect on your own experience at the end of each lesson. You'll have a choice of watching videos or reading the content and you'll also find resources and tools which really can make a difference to how you experience your emotions.

I can't say there's a quick fix, or a total cure to emotional regulation, but when we understand what's happening, and we have tools in place that can really make a difference, it can help us feel more in control than we might have felt at any other point in our lives.