What Is ND Consent?
You’ve heard the term neurodivergent consent, and wondered: what does it mean? How is it different to consent in general? And what does it mean for me as a professional working with ND clients?
We’ll explore what you need to know and how this article can be part of what saves you hundreds of hours of research and reflection.
The Assumption
As a professional you may have had this experience, although you may not have understood the significance. I know I certainly have in the past, in my practice, before I realised what else might be going on.
A client has gone quiet. You've just asked them something fairly ordinary like: "Does that feel okay?" Or "Are you alright to try that?" and there's a pause.
Longer than you expected. So you fill it. You soften the question, you offer reassurance, maybe you just move on, because the silence felt like it needed something in it.
You may have assumed, without meaning to, that their silence meant uncertainty, or even resistance.
You may have thought that a "yes" would arrive promptly, cleanly, in words and in the same few seconds it would for many people.
However, for neurodivergent clients, that may not be uncertainty or resistance. There could be several other things going on under the surface relating to their neurology, that create the pause.
Perhaps they are:
- struggling to identify their emotions (alexithymia)
- feeling confused from internal bodily feelings (interoception)
- finding it difficult to switch between one topic and another (monotropic)
- or they have a difference in their processing time (complex processing).
At the heart of that moment is something we as professionals have probably never trained in: it’s called ND consent.
Here we’re not talking about consent in terms of sexual relationships. We’re talking about the small every day decisions where we decide ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
It’s not that ordinary consent training is wrong. It was built around an assumption of how consent usually gets communicated: quickly, verbally and with consistency. However, it has been found quite recently by research with the ND community in 2025 (Beck et al) and 2026 (Dunleavy et al) that standard consent and decision-making doesn't work in the same way for every nervous system.
Curiosity Beats Assumption
So let's get curious about what could going on in that pause.
ND consent isn't just "did they say yes." It's whether that yes is genuinely congruent with how this particular person processes, senses, and communicates, and whether it's still true five minutes later, not just in the moment it was given.
Through a number of years of exploring neurodivergent consent, both personally through my own lived experience of neurodivergence and professionally with neurodivergent clients, I have come to understand it as:
"A free and informed agreement to an activity that is deeply congruent with an individual's unique neurological processing, sensory profile, and communication style."
ND experiences aren’t fixed. They are impacted by our sensory state, interpretation of our inner world and our ability to express that to the outer world. A "yes" given at the start of a session can be worn thin by the middle of it, and yet these fluctuations are rarely discussed.
There's also a distinction worth acknowledging: the difference between consent and compliance. Consent is a free, considered agreement. Compliance is going along with something to avoid conflict, or disappointing someone, or just because saying "no" didn't feel like an option in that moment. For clients who mask, who fawn, who people-please as a survival skill, those two can look identical from the outside. They are not the same thing.
In the community research behind this work, we asked neurodivergent adults to rate how well their therapists understood ND consent, on a scale of one to five. The average came out at roughly 2.1. This is not low because practitioners don't care. It’s low because as practitioners we weren’t ever taught to look for this.
This understanding has taken me years of reflecting on my own lived experiences as a neurodivergent person, with hundreds of hours of therapy under my belt over the past decade. It has also taken much reflection on the clients I have been working with, on my own and through my supervision.
This is exactly why I’m here sharing this with you today: to save you the hundreds of hours of reflection and research it would take to unpick it by yourself!
The Attunement
So here's the attunement. One small thing you can do differently. This one is for you. Not for you with your client. Not yet.
Next time you notice yourself agreeing to something quickly: a meeting time that doesn't quite work, a plan a friend suggests, even something small like what kind of tea you would like, pause for one extra second before you answer.
Just notice: is this a genuine yes? Or is it the fastest route past an awkward moment?
This is taking the time to confirm your internal consent is fully congruent before you give your external consent.
It gives you the opportunity to be certain you know what you actually want, instead of what you're in the habit of saying quickly out loud.
Most of us have at least one place in our life where those two aspects of consent, the inner and the outer, have drifted apart.
Finding yours, even briefly, is the fastest way to recognise it in the room with a client, because you'll know what it feels like from the inside first and you’ll know what to watch for.
That's essential to my whole method, really. Attune with yourself before you ask the same of anyone else.
Understanding how to help neurodivergent people attune with themselves before they make a decision or give their consent is life changing.
If this is the first time you've heard "ND consent" named, you're not behind. You're exactly where most professionals are standing right now. The difference is simply you are choosing to look. Thank you for making that choice.
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