Ashley Holland-Denis, LMFT

I started as a Parent Partner at Family Health Centers of San Diego, sitting next to parents in IEP meetings and clinical appointments before I was ever the one running the session. From there I moved into school-based therapy with San Diego Unified students, then into wraparound and trauma work with families navigating housing instability and domestic violence recovery. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I noticed a pattern: an enormous number of the families I was working with were neurodivergent, and almost none of the support built around them was designed with that in mind. Some of that recognition was personal. I have two neurodivergent kids of my own, and watching them grow up made me look back at my own childhood differently, with a lot of things that felt harder than they were supposed to, that I never had words for at the time. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, well into my career, and there's a lot about autism that resonates with me too, even without a formal diagnosis. I know what it's like to be up at 1am reading everything you can find about your kid, and I know what it's like to be the kid who couldn't explain why things felt different. I work from a neurodiversity-affirming stance, which in practice means: I don't treat ADHD or autism as something to be minimized, masked, or trained out of. Most of the day-to-day struggle of neurodivergent people isn't a flaw, it's a mismatch between how their brain works and what school, home, work, or their own inner critic is asking of them. My work is about making that easier to live with. With teens, that's direct: real executive-function strategies, and undoing years of hearing "lazy," "too sensitive," or "too much." With adults, it's often about making sense of a diagnosis - new or newly understood - that reframes a lot of what came before it. With couples, it's about understanding how two different (or differently-diagnosed) brains navigate a relationship together, without either partner being cast as the problem. Clinically, I draw on family systems and couples-focused approaches, CBT adapted for neurodivergent thinkers, and a strong emphasis on nervous-system regulation. I also work closely with parents and caregivers, because the change that lasts happens at home, not just in a session once a week.