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Hi, I’m Seren. I’m an Autism and ADHD coach who nearly quit coaching before I even started. While I believe a core strength I have as a coach is the compassionate recognition of my own struggles, I was struggling. How did I have any right to coach others when my own life was disintegrating?

I had finished my training as an ADHD coach but was in the process of going from feeling like I had finally gotten my life together to one of my most spectacular breakdowns (and as an undiagnosed autistic for 34 years, that is a high bar). 

I was experiencing significant reactivation of C-PTSD due to my interactions with my former employers. I had quit my job after having meltdowns over trying to navigate an incredibly hostile accommodations process. Leading up to that, I had been harassed for my communication differences and criticized for being open about my struggles. I lost my EI for not applying to enough jobs because I had debilitating panic attacks and had already used my medical EI. I was terrified I would never be able to coach. Even talking to others felt impossible without severe anxiety.

I was sitting in the wreckage of a thousand tools and strategies that didn’t save me from the implosion of my life. And none of them were working in the aftermath. No matter how much more I pushed myself or tried harder. I would simply end up in a meltdown or shutdown. What was I supposed to tell clients when I couldn’t even use what I learned on myself? 

I thought I had spent the previous year unmasking and discovering myself, but in the wake of all this loss, I realised I had simply discovered another path to trying to find ways others might value me. Did I even want to coach? 

I kept writing and throwing away content because even though I could rationally understand that I couldn’t write in a way that pleases everyone, my body had lost its voice in a sea of “what ifs.” There was no “just writing.” The impact of a year of intensified gaslighting about my communication had opened the floodgates to a recurrent theme in my life and stripped away my words. I was left with someone speaking in a register I didn’t recognize. 

But then I trained in the Unmasking with the Values Based Integration Process. I thought I was going in to expand my knowledge as a coach, but I also found myself. As part of the experiential training, I engaged with the process as both the coach and the client. And in the process, I reconnected to myself and my voice in a way that I hadn’t been able to in years of intellectualising my struggles. I had put so much work into frantically attempting to heal, but I didn’t know how to ask my body what it needed. My ultimate goal was to control a body I saw as unruly, and I judged every framework by other people’s responses. 

I had done values exercises before. I was taught to use values in my initial training, but I took one look at the list, and my first thought was, “How can I ever use this with clients if I can’t even use it myself?” I was so heavily masked that if you gave me a list of values, I would pick what others told me I should value. While I wasn’t totally wrong in my choices, I was still choosing based on other people’s words, definitions, and voices, ranking what society says has value over what I value. 

Creating my values from when I felt fully alive brought me something I’ve never had access to in other frameworks. I’m used to translating from how I naturally express myself so that others can understand. But documenting stories and building my values was also a process of building a shared language with my coach. These are my own words from my own stories. And I have created my own definitions of what they mean to me. And my own representation of how they work together and intersect. These values sing to me. There is no whispering doubt that “maybe I don’t really know myself.”  

Through self-discovery, I was able to ground and anchor my coaching practice. It’s still going slowly, and I’m still finding my way, but the work does align with who I am when I allow my values to guide me. And the experience of supporting others through this process makes me feel fully alive.