Neurodiversity is already in our consulting rooms, training groups, coaching practices and organizations. We are working with it, whether or not we name it. As transactional analysis practitioners across every field, we have inherited a predominantly trauma-informed lens for understanding why people struggle. That lens has given us genuine insight, genuine compassion and a coherent framework for relational practice. Yet I have begun to wonder whether it is always sufficient.

This article is an invitation. Over the past several years, I have been working alongside colleagues in the U.S., India, New Zealand, Europe and the U.K., as we explore how TA theory and practice need to extend when our clients, supervisees or trainees are neurodivergent. What I am proposing is a new school of thought within the field: Neuro-informed Transactional Analysis, or NiTA. I am not offering it as a finished theory, but as a beginning — a frame I would like us to develop together. I am particularly curious to hear from those of you who are already working in this space.

A different kind of difficulty

As TA practitioners, we have been well-trained to ask: Which driver? Which injunction? What feels unsafe here? These questions have served us well. But there are moments in practice when they take us in the wrong direction.

A coaching client agrees enthusiastically to every action point and returns the following week having done none of them. A person in therapy, asked to reflect on a feeling, goes blank — not defended, not resistant, simply unavailable. A trainee becomes overwhelmed in a group process, cannot stop talking or freezes when it is time to write the essay. We recognize these moments. We may immediately begin to formulate around script, injunctions or early relational experience. Sometimes that formulation will be exactly right.

But sometimes it will not. In neurodivergent individuals, what resembles a driver behavior or a racket feeling may have nothing to do with script and everything to do with a nervous system that has simply run out of capacity. If we only have a trauma-informed frame, we risk interpreting capacity depletion as resistance, procrastination as fear of success and shutdown as defense. The intervention that follows will miss the mark entirely and, at its most significant, cause harm.

The distinction I am drawing is not between two opposing theories but between two different questions: one asking where the threat is and how the person is protecting themselves, the other asking where capacity breaks down and what would help them function again. Both can be valid for the same client. But when only one is asked, we risk a category error.

Principles of neuro-informed TA: The three Cs

NiTA is proposed as a school within TA, offering an additional conceptual frame, one that places neurodevelopmental capacity, executive functioning and sensory regulation at the center of how we understand human behavior across all TA fields. The three principles that follow are not steps or stages. They are the underlying orientation of neuro-informed practice held continuously in mind, present in every encounter, shaping how we see, interpret and respond whenever we are working with a neurodivergent client.

Curiosity

Before any formulation is offered, one question is worth sitting with: Does this person currently have the executive and sensory capacity to engage with what I am about to offer? In simpler terms, are they present? Can they actually listen right now? Can they articulate clearly what they want to say, or is their head foggy?

Curiosity as a foundational stance means staying genuinely open to the possibility that what we are seeing is not script, drivers or injunctions but a lack of capacity in this moment.

For example, a supervisee arrives at supervision tipped into overwhelm by something that happened beforehand. What they present can easily read as burnout, a pattern of overextension or an ethical concern about self-care and sustainability. If the supervision moves in that direction, it becomes about workload, boundaries and fitness to practice and can cause a real rupture, taking the supervisee further into overwhelm rather than helping them to settle. Applying the principle of neuro-informed curiosity first asks: Is this dysregulation? And if so, what does this person need in order to regulate before we go anywhere near the matter they came to discuss?

In practice, curiosity holds the following questions in mind:

• Am I dealing with overwhelm, dysregulation or a moment of low energy? What does this person need in order to feel regulated enough to be present?
• Is executive function fully available in this moment, or is this person overwhelmed, frozen or somewhere between? Depending on the person’s neurotype, the same underlying state can look very different.
• Were energy levels already depleted before they arrived? Fluctuating energy is very common in neurodivergent people, and what might be happening neurochemically — dopamine, noradrenaline or serotonin levels — is always worth holding in mind, as these directly shape energy, focus and emotional regulation.

Curiosity does not answer these questions definitively. It holds them open and, in doing so, keeps us from reaching too quickly for a formulation that fits the trauma-informed theory but misses the person.

Context

Context asks us to look at what is actually surrounding this person before we reach for formulation.

Returning to our earlier example, had a neuro-informed lens been applied, the first move would have been curiosity about the context: What is actually surrounding this person right now? The supervisee had just received a letter from a foreign tax office requiring them to file in two countries simultaneously. This was new, unexpected and genuinely overwhelming on top of an already full life. That conversation could have been simple and brief.

Or consider a client who spent years believing he was fundamentally avoidant. He and his previous therapist had linked this to early experiences of unpredictability, and there was truth in that. But when we began to look at how much energy his days were actually consuming — the sensory load, the decision-making demands and the number of transitions from task to task — a different picture emerged. He was not avoiding engaging with life, but he was depleted before the day had properly begun. Without that lens, we would have kept reading the trauma-informed map instead of the neuro-informed territory.

Context in neuro-informed TA shifts the organizing question away from what is wrong with this person or what happened in their past. Instead, it asks:

• How is this environment affecting their sensory system right now?
• What is overwhelming this person’s capacity right now: the weight of their circumstances, too many simultaneous thoughts or looping thinking they cannot escape?

This does not replace script analysis. It asks the extra questions before we go there.

Coping

Insight is not enough. This may be the most decisive of the three principles. Understanding what is happening is not the same as being able to manage it. A person can have genuine insight into their neurodiversity and still find daily life completely unmanageable.

I have watched clients make genuine breakthroughs in understanding their own patterns, then return a month later with nothing changed — not resistance, not defense, but executive function too depleted to bridge insight and action.

This is where coping comes in. Psychoeducation, practical strategies, sensory adjustments, pacing, routines, energy management and reducing unnecessary masking are not add-ons to the real work. They are the work. Our role is to support the client, trainee or organization to break insight down into concrete, achievable changes that make neurodiversity manageable.

For example, a supervisee arrives in tears, completely stuck with their essay writing. There are two directions available. The trauma-informed route would explore what the experience around exams brings up: authority figures, past failures, the fear and the freeze. That is legitimate work.

But the neuro-informed coping approach asks something different entirely: How can we help them initiate their thinking? How can they record their thoughts as they read, before those thoughts disappear? How can they structure what they already know and bring genuine clarity to what they need to say? We look at chunks of time, looping thoughts and the specific techniques that support a neurodivergent person to actually get the work onto the page. This is the neuro-informed way to meet a supervisee in that moment — not instead of depth, but as the practical foundation that makes everything else possible.

The same principle applies at every level in organizations, in educational settings and wherever neurodivergent people are being supported to learn, work and function.

We are not here to change the person or their neurodiversity. The aim is to help them understand who they are, build a real relationship with their neurodivergent self and create a life, a pace and habits that genuinely suit them.

Regulation comes first. Without it, deeper therapeutic work cannot take root. But once that foundation begins to build, the two can run together, and the neuro-informed lens never drops, even when we move into trauma-informed or script-based work. A neurodivergent response can surface at any point in the process. The neuro-informed approach does not end when the deeper work begins. It stays present throughout.

NiTA is not a destination. It is a direction. Curiosity, context and coping. Three principles, always present, never finished. This is not a framework to complete; it is a different starting point, one I hope we can develop together, across fields, across contexts and across the full breadth of what TA has to offer. Let’s form it together.