Interview with Tyana Tavakol, LMFT

One of my favorite parts about being a therapist is connecting with like-minded professionals. Tyana Tavakol is a licensed therapist and a colleague whom I trust deeply. Below is an interview I conducted with her in hopes of sharing more of her expertise and wisdom with the world. 

Hi, Tyana! Tell us more about yourself. How did you get to where you are today? What made you interested in working with neurodivergence and trauma?

It’s been a journey! I’ve always loved psychology, but as a child of immigrants, it wasn’t something I knew could be a career since mental health wasn’t talked about as much when I was growing up. So, my career started in corporate doing advertising at Amazon. After a few years, the pull of psychology just kept getting stronger. After doing more of my own therapy, I became more connected to myself and realized I would really regret not giving a career in mental health a shot.

Fast forward years later, I now run a practice called Uncovering You where I specialize in providing neurodiversity-affirming therapy for self-identified or formally late-diagnosed autistic adults who struggle with past trauma, people-pleasing, and deceptively high-functioning anxiety.

I got into trauma work pretty much right off the bat because I realized clients with past childhood trauma who were looking for nervous system regulation were where I did some of my best work. I sought training in IFS, or inner child work and parts work, along with other trauma modalities like psychodynamic therapy and the Trauma Resiliency Model. These approaches taught me how to help clients process trauma both intellectually and somatically.

The more I continued down the path of my own personal work, the more I started connecting the dots so much of my own life made sense through a neurodivergence lens. After realizing I’m both autistic and ADHD, or AuDHD, I began training to become a neurodivergent affirming therapist for my own clients, many of whom I realized were also exploring or discovering their own neurodivergence.

Being able to help people understand themselves through this lens, often after years of feeling like something was “wrong” with them, has become one of the most meaningful parts of my work.

What are some signs of autism in adults that often go unnoticed or misinterpreted?

While everyone is different in how their autism presents, there are some that have shown up I’ve noticed more often than others. This doesn’t mean that if someone relates to these they can 100% conclude they are autistic, they are just some possible ways autism can show up:

• Stimming: Stimming (short for self-stimulatory behavior) refers to repetitive movements, sounds, or actions that help regulate the nervous system. While it's common in autistic and other neurodivergent people, everyone stims to some degree. Some subtle examples include playing with your hair, picking at your nails, rubbing your hands together, tapping your fingers, bouncing your leg, swaying, humming, or singing. These behaviors often happen automatically, especially during times of excitement, stress, concentration, or overwhelm, and can be subtle enough to go unnoticed. 

• Echolalia: If you often feel a strong urge to repeat words, sounds, or phrases you've just heard, or find yourself communicating through movie quotes, song lyrics, or familiar phrases that perfectly match a situation, you may be experiencing echolalia or a related form of repetitive language. Many people think these habits are simply "quirky," but they are common forms of communication and self-regulation in autistic people and some other neurodivergent individuals. 

• Special interests: A special interest is more than simply enjoying a hobby. It's an interest that brings intense joy, curiosity, and engagement, often making it easy to spend hours learning about or participating in it. People may know an incredible amount about the topic, seek it out regularly, and feel genuinely energized by it. While others might simply see it as a passion, the depth, intensity, and consistency can make it what many autistic people refer to as a special interest. 

• Sensory sensitivity: Being highly sensitive to lights, sounds, textures, tastes, smells, temperature, or other sensory experiences is common among autistic adults. What others may dismiss as being "picky" or "too sensitive" often reflects genuine differences in how the brain processes sensory information. These differences can make everyday environments feel much more intense, distracting, or even physically uncomfortable. 

How can someone tell the difference between autism, trauma responses, anxiety, and being a highly sensitive person? 

This is actually a super fascinating question, because honestly it’s so common for someone to have all of the above show up. 

One of the biggest differences is looking at the pattern, timeline, and root cause. Autism is a neurodevelopmental difference, meaning it’s been part of someone’s brain development from when they were born. It’s not something that develops because of an experience or goes away when someone feels safer like trauma. For many late diagnosed autistic adults, they may look back and notice patterns that have existed throughout their life, like sensory differences, feeling socially out of place, needing more predictability or having specialized or in depth interests.

Trauma responses, on the other hand, are adaptations that develop after experiences where someone’s nervous system learned they needed to protect themselves. This can show up as people pleasing, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting others, emotional overwhelm, shutting down, or feeling like they are constantly scanning for danger. Trauma responses are the nervous system trying to keep someone safe based on what they have experienced rather than something that is just a part of who someone was born as.

Anxiety can overlap with both autism and trauma because all three can involve things like overthinking, needing certainty, avoiding uncomfortable situations, or feeling overwhelmed. However, anxiety is often a protective mechanism where the brain tries to predict and prevent a potential threat or uncomfortable outcome. It’s not an event like trauma, and it’s not a neurodevelopmental difference like autism. Instead, anxiety is more about how your brain responds to uncertainty or perceived threats, often showing up through things like overthinking, worrying, preparing for the worst, or feeling tense. 

Being a highly sensitive person (HSP) is another area where there can be overlap. However, HSP is considered a temperament trait rather than a neurodevelopmental difference. Someone who is highly sensitive may experience emotions, sensory input, or environments more intensely, with that being the defining feature. Autism however usually involves a broader pattern of differences that have been present throughout someone’s life, including things like social communication differences, sensory processing differences, or a need for predictability, rather than just sensitivity. 

What is autism masking, and how can it impact someone’s mental health and sense of identity?

Masking is when, whether consciously or subconsciously, someone learns to hide parts of their true self in order to feel more accepted or understood by others. It can feel like walking into an environment and becoming a different version of yourself, changing the way you talk, move, dress, or express yourself based on what you think will be the most likeable or acceptable to others. 

Over time, masking can lead to an unstable sense of identity because the focus shifts from “Who am I?” to “Who do I need to be for others?” and your sense of self can start to change depending on who you’re around. 

After years of doing this, masking can become incredibly exhausting and take a toll on mental health. When so much energy is spent trying to be someone you think others will accept, rejection can feel especially painful because it can feel like all that effort still wasn’t enough. What makes masking even more complicated is that many people don’t realize they’re doing it because they learned these behaviors so early in life that they feel natural. They may not recognize how much of themselves they’ve pushed aside in order to be accepted. 

In your work, do you find that many autistic adults struggle with feeling “too sensitive,” overwhelmed, or like they don’t fit in?

This is extremely common. Being neurodivergent is often tied to growing up being told you’re “too much” or “too different”. Stories of being bullied, being an outsider, or just realizing pretty quickly that you don’t fit in show up in the therapy room all the time. And as an AuDHD adult myself, I completely understand what it’s like to have this messaging ingrained for so much of one’s life. 

How can therapy help autistic adults heal from shame or feeling like they have to hide who they are?

Neurodiversity affirming therapy can help autistic adults by first providing a space where they don’t have to mask. Stimming, sharing their passions, talking as much or as little as they want, and showing up as their full selves are all welcome in the therapeutic space, which for some people may be the first time they’ve ever felt truly allowed to just be.

And in that space is where the process of discovering who they are underneath the mask can begin. This can include exploring the parts of themselves they may have viewed as flaws, understanding which behaviors developed as ways to survive or adapt, and learning how to replace exhausting, masking related coping strategies with ways of showing up that feel more authentic and aligned.

A big part of the work is also unlearning years of internalized ableist messages that there is something wrong with them. There was never anything wrong with them. They may have just spent years in environments that didn’t understand, support, or appreciate the way their brain works. This can involve both processing the impact of this messaging in therapy and also learning how to build a neurodivergent community of their own that will love them for exactly who they are.

How can people reach out to Tyana for therapy? 

If any of this resonated and people would like to work with me as a neurodivergent affirming therapist, they are more than welcome to reach out through my website www.uncovering-you.com. 

I also have an Instagram where I post mental health content to support autistic adults who suspect or just found out their awkwardness might be autism at @uncoveringyoutherapy.