# A different child each time

Blog 

Children, young people & families 

By Guest Blog

9th July 2026

**Trauma, neurodivergence, and the story we reach for first.**

***With thanks to our member, Marion Wadowski, for this blog.***

When I worked at Place2Be, I’d get one referral for a child — and then, from the adults around them, I would hear about almost a different child each time. The teacher saw one thing, the foster carer another, the safeguarding lead another again.

And almost always, the word that came up was trauma. Rarely neurodivergence. Hardly ever both.

Sometimes that was right. But sometimes a child would be described as controlling — rigid, demanding, kicking off when plans changed — looking less like a power struggle and more like a child clinging to the only predictability they had. Or a child called withdrawn, shut down, hard to reach, read as attachment damage, when it might equally have been an autistic child quietly overwhelmed. The need for sameness gets heard as defiance. The flat face gets heard as avoidance. And the neurodivergent reading rarely gets a look in.

Trauma is perhaps easier to name. Counsellors are trained in it; far fewer of us are trained in neurodivergence. And, put bluntly, it’s the more forgivable story — “he’s been through so much” asks for sympathy in a way that still, too often, neurodivergence simply doesn’t. It goes unrecognised.

There’s a harder reason too, and it’s systemic. Naming neurodivergence properly takes time, training and assessment routes that the people around these children simply aren’t given. A teacher with thirty children and almost no neurodiversity training at all, a social worker with an impossible caseload, a head juggling budgets — they’re set up to fail at this, and then so is the child. The more available explanation wins by default.

At one school I worked in, there was a cupboard in the staff room marked SEND, with a lopsided sticker underneath: *in progress*. It stayed that way the whole time I was there. I did have to laugh — what a metaphor.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: for these children, it’s so often not an either/or. A child can be carrying real trauma and be neurodivergent at the same time. The two get so tangled that no referral form has a box for it. And the features overlap more than people realise (1) — autism, attachment difficulties, complex trauma, they can look remarkably alike, even to clinicians who’ve seen a lot. Take a child who won’t be soothed, who watches the room, who falls apart when something changes. Is that a nervous system braced for the next bad thing? A brain that needs sameness and tips easily into overwhelm? Quite often, it’s both, at the same time.

So the question I try to sit with isn’t *which label is it*. It’s *which lens did I reach for without thinking, and would the other one fit just as well?*

Because the cost of only naming the trauma falls on the child. If we read an autistic child’s need for routine purely as control to be loosened, or their stimming and withdrawal as symptoms to be settled, we end up trying to take away the very things keeping them regulated. We treat the coping as the problem. For a child who has already been failed by the adults and systems meant to keep them safe, that’s a second injury laid over the first — being misunderstood all over again, this time by the people trying to help.

There’s something else I try to stay alert to, especially with children who’ve been hurt by adults: how much weight is put on my “counselling” authority. A traumatised child is often watching closely for power and control — who’s got it, what they might do with it. And a neurodivergent child can be doing the same, especially if being asked to do things has always felt like too much.

In that school setting the approach was child-led: you follow where the child takes you. But I came to see that for a foster child all that freedom can feel just as unsafe — there’s nothing holding it. What helped wasn’t stepping back. It was staying clearly in charge of safety — being the steady frame — while leaving the child a real say in everything inside it. Contained and collaborative at the same time.

So I try to hold “trauma” and “neurodivergence” side by side. The thing that helps me most is looking at pattern. Trauma tends to come and go — it flares when something reminds the child, and settles when they feel safe. Neurodivergence is steadier; it’s there across the board, day in, day out.

But which of the two it actually is — that’s not mine to call. Naming it, autism or ADHD or a trauma disorder, is a diagnosis, and that’s not in a counsellor skillset. I think that’s worth saying plainly. My job is to understand what a child *needs*. And those needs don’t wait for a diagnosis but requires awareness.

This doesn’t stop at childhood, either. I work with adults now, and I keep meeting the grown-up version of the same mix-up — people whose autism or ADHD spent decades filed under “a difficult start,” and people whose real trauma got tidied away under a diagnosis. The lens flips; the confusion doesn’t.

Holding both at once is harder work, and a lot less tidy. But it’s the only way I’ve found to actually see the child in front of me — and the adult they’ll become — instead of the easier story.

*1) Sarr, R., et al. (2025). Differential diagnosis of autism, attachment disorders, complex post-traumatic stress disorder and emotionally unstable personality disorder: A Delphi study. British Journal of Psychology, 116(1), 1–33.* [*https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12731*](https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12731)

**You can find out more about Marion Wadowski here:**

[Neurodivergent Counselling & Coaching Online UK | Equalition](https://www.equalition.com/)  
[Marion Wadowski | LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marion-wadowski/)