Alchemind Psychology & Counselling

26/06/2026

Next episode is out 🙂 Most of us are used to thinking of AI as a shortcut — but what if it’s actually highlighting the very gaps in our critical thinking skills? In this episode, Dr. Catherine Crofts, a neurodivergent thinker, pharmacist, and public health researcher, challenges the common narrative. She reveals how decades of overprotective environments have stunted our ability to learn through failure, exploration, and independent problem-solving — and how AI can serve as a powerful tool to rebuild critical thinking if we use it wisely.

You’ll discover:

Why modern childhood has shifted from hands-on risk-taking to sterile safety measures, and what that means for developing problem-solving skills.

How AI can act as a “brain trainer” — guiding, scaffolding, and even diagnosing our cognitive gaps when used intentionally.
The four archetypes of AI tools that support learning: the executive assistant, tutor, stranger on the bus, and interpreter — and how to leverage each to maximize growth.

The importance of embracing mistakes, play, and curiosity in fostering deep, resilient thinking processes, especially in neurodivergent and neurotypical learners alike.

Why critical thinking isn’t an innate talent but a skill that needs practice, starting from early childhood and continuing throughout adulthood.

In a world obsessed with speed and efficiency, this conversation emphasizes the power of human curiosity and intellectual safety, the dangers of overprotection, and the role of technology in bridging cognitive gaps without replacing the critical human element. If you’re a parent, educator, or anyone passionate about cultivating authentic thinking skills in a digital age, this episode will inspire you to rethink how we teach, learn, and grow.

Perfect for educators, students, systems thinkers, or anyone eager to harness the potential of AI for genuine cognitive development — listen now and discover how to turn technology into a trusted partner in turning mistakes into mastery.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2o1CYNqhUTZHioqMlkhIFM?
si=69c0c7e4b9164546
Youtube: https://youtu.be/ylD74mjSQd0?si=tsUyB7t_lqcAV5MO
Substack: https://decodingpsyche.substack.com/p/why-you-think-the-way-you-do-the?r=2n5jhy

Perfect for educators, students, systems thinkers, or anyone eager to harness the potential of AI for genuine cognitive development — discover how to turn technology into a trusted partner.

26/05/2026

After a long time thinking about this project, the first episode of *Fragments of Reality* is finally live.

This first conversation is with Jade Ulani Young - a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and philosopher whose work explores psychosis, language, epistemic justice, neurodiversity, perception, and meaning-making.

We explore:
• rethinking psychosis beyond purely pathological models
• the relationship between subjective and objective reality
• the category error of reducing human experience solely to the brain
• psychosis as amplified and protective response
• heightened sensibility and meaning-making
• epistemic justice and the power of language
• supporting people without flattening them into diagnostic categories
• reframing “normality” and mental health terminology
• creating more humanising, needs-based approaches to suffering and difference

What I appreciated about this conversation is that it didn’t reduce people to simplistic binaries of “healthy” or “disordered,” but instead took seriously the complexity of human perception, context, trauma, neurodiversity, interpretation, and lived experience.

Whether people agree or disagree with parts of the discussion, I hope it opens space for deeper thought around how we understand mind, language, and reality itself.

Episode one of *Fragments of Reality* is now live!

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pzgqdKjlzqbLmtbQ9w36l?si=9lfTxtC9RKSpi10LPJ6ySg

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/dzT8E_0hCV4?si=5E4HgZ40Sa0WbtNY

The conversation delves into the rethinking of psychosis, language,...

15/04/2026

Trauma can alter a person’s relationship to aliveness.

One of the ways this happens is through emotional numbing: not simply “feeling less,” but losing access to parts of one’s emotional life. Feeling can become hard to reach. A person may remain functional, productive, social, and outwardly engaged while inwardly detached, unreachable to themselves, or unable to feel much except in extreme states.

People therefore mask to make it seems like they’re alive and happy.

From there, a confusion often develops:
arousal gets mistaken for aliveness/vitality.
But they are not the same thing.

What often gets mistaken for aliveness is actually overstimulation: a state in which intensity, urgency, pleasure, or absorption temporarily cuts through disconnection. The person feels more present, more engaged, more real, but that experience is being generated by external stimuli rather than by a deeper capacity to inhabit life directly.

This is what I mean by pseudo-aliveness.

Pseudo-aliveness is a stimulated approximation of vitality. It is the feeling of being brought to life by intensity, pleasure, immersion, urgency, or emotional charge. The person may appear highly engaged with life, but their sense of aliveness remains dependent on something external or intensified to sustain it.

Vitality is different.
Vitality is not a state of being jolted into intense overemphasized feelings.

Vitality is the capacity to feel alive without needing experience to be intensified first.
It is a more grounded sense of being here: present, connected, safe enough to receive life directly, and able to feel that being alive is good in itself.

Pseudo-aliveness depends on stimulation to produce the feeling of aliveness.
Vitality does not need aliveness to be manufactured in a controlled externalised way.

Pseudo-aliveness is contingent, externally driven, and intensity-dependent.
Vitality is inherent, present-based, and compatible with safety, stillness, and direct contact.

14/04/2026

I keep thinking about the more subtle architecture of the psyche in people who feel like they haven’t really experienced what some would consider trauma, and yet are still deeply shaped by things that affected them and their relationships without fully knowing it.

A lot of people are still looking for trauma in its most obvious forms: something dramatic, catastrophic, or undeniably harmful. But there are also people who experience more subtle, subjective, developmental harms, and because we as a society often do not pay attention to these quieter forms of injury, they go unnoticed by most people and get absorbed into what is assumed to be normal.

One of the most prominent forms of this is emotional neglect.

Emotional neglect is when a child’s inner world is not really being met. The parents may be physically present and even providing outwardly, but they are psychologically not there enough to notice, respond to, help regulate, or make space for the child’s feelings, needs, fear, confusion, or interior life. So the child learns to live without being deeply felt.

A child can be outwardly cared for while remaining inwardly alone, and in that kind of aloneness they often begin growing up too early, becoming self-sufficient, undemanding, and “mature” in ways that are really shaped by having to organise themselves around the absence of being deeply held.

That kind of emotional neglect often does not leave behind one dramatic memory. It shapes the way a person comes to relate to themselves. They may not know what they feel until long after they feel it. They may struggle to know what they need. They may self-silence automatically, overfunction, become strangely cut off from their own desire, and become highly attuned to others while still having very little direct access to themselves.

Then there is fear of abandonment.

Fear of abandonment can develop when someone who made life feel more survivable, familiar, or safe becomes less and less available in ways that feel unpredictable and impossible to stop. That may be a sibling disappearing into addiction and vanishing for hours, a parent who makes honesty feel dangerous because the child gets dismissed or attacked for telling the truth, or a partner who has already left the relationship inwardly and will not be honest about it. Across very different situations, the psyche starts learning the same thing: someone important can become unreachable while you are still attached to them and still depending on the bond.

Later, this can live on in the person as a constant sensitivity to small signs of withdrawal. A delayed response, a different tone, a change in energy, a little more distance than usual, and suddenly the whole system is reacting because it already knows what it is like for someone important to become unavailable. Sometimes that shows up as panic, clinginess, or overreading every shift. Sometimes it shows up as the opposite: becoming so self-reliant that needing anyone at all starts to feel dangerous.

Then there is moral injury, which can feel deepest of all because it affects not only safety or trust, but the person’s relationship to their own conscience, sometimes leaving them feeling as though something in them has been stained by what they had to do, allow, or survive.

Moral injury can begin very early when a child has to do what feels wrong in order to survive, stay attached, or keep life from getting worse. Sometimes that means acting against their own internal moral and ethical compass. Sometimes it means standing inside what they know is wrong and being unable to stop it. Either way, something in them registers the self-betrayal, and later that can live on as a kind of contamination, a feeling that they are stained or unlovable because of what they had to do to survive.

This can look like having to sit at the table with the person who hurt them and act as though nothing happened. It can look like learning that telling the truth will bring denial, punishment, or more instability, so they stay quiet. It can look like protecting the person who caused harm, going along with the family version of events, or showing affection to someone their body has already learned to fear.

The injury is not only in what happened to them. It is also in having to participate in, adapt to, or stay silent around what they know is wrong. Later this can show up as guilt, shame, self-condemnation, and a feeling of being contaminated by what they had to do to survive, even when those choices made sense within the conditions they were living in.

What threads through all of these is that they do not always produce someone who looks obviously traumatised.

They may produce someone highly functional.
Very capable.
Very self-contained.
Very perceptive.
Very responsible.
Very helpful.
Very insightful.

And because we live in a world chaotic enough for subtle injury to pass as ordinary life, a lot of this gets normalised. The injuries get normalised. Then the behaviours they produce get normalised too.

So when someone says, “nothing really happened to me,” sometimes what they mean is that what happened is the kind of harm people only recognise when they still have a clear relationship to ethical principles, truth, and compassion.

11/04/2026

AuDHD can hide giftedness. They interfere with each other, mask each other, and distort how other people read the child.

A gifted child is often assumed to look obviously capable, verbally smooth, productive, organised, and consistently high-performing. AuDHD can thwart that picture.

The child may have advanced pattern recognition, unusual depth, rapid abstraction, or intense originality, while also being dysregulated, distracted, sensory overloaded, inconsistent, resistant to ordinary classroom demands, socially atypical, or unable to translate inner complexity into neat output.

Adults often trust the visible performance more than the underlying capacity. So they see the friction and miss the mind.

There are a few common ways this happens.

The first is asynchronous development. A child may think far beyond their age in some domains, but lag in executive functioning, emotional regulation, handwriting, task initiation, or social adaptation. So you get a child who can perceive complex structures, ask unusually deep questions, or intuit systems quickly, yet cannot pack their bag, complete repetitive worksheets, tolerate noise, or shift tasks smoothly. Adults often interpret this as laziness, immaturity, defiance, or unevenness rather than giftedness.

The second is output failure. Giftedness is often identified through what the child produces. AuDHD can disrupt production. ADHD can interfere with working memory, follow-through, sequencing, and sustained attention. Autism can affect processing speed in certain contexts, flexibility, tolerance for socially imposed tasks, and willingness to perform on demand. The child may know far more than they can show under institutional conditions. They may speak brilliantly in the right moment and then fail ordinary school tasks. This creates the illusion that the intelligence is exaggerated or inconsistent but really its just various levels off functioning.

The third is masking by disability effects. If the child is overloaded, anxious, sensory defensive, or chronically recovering from effort, their cognitive gifts may be occupied with survival, compensation, or pattern-monitoring. A lot of their intelligence gets used upstream just to remain functional. Instead of looking gifted, they may look scattered, oppositional, shut down, perfectionistic, or emotionally “too much.” What others call dysfunction can partly be the cost of carrying a very active mind inside a nervous system that is easily flooded.

The fourth is misreading intensity. Gifted children often show intensity anyway. AuDHD can make that intensity sharper, stranger, or harder to socially package. The child might seem bossy, obsessive, pedantic, hypersensitive, overly literal in one area and wildly associative in another, deeply imaginative yet unable to tolerate interruption. Adults may pathologise the intensity without recognising the advanced cognition inside it. Or they may do the reverse and romanticise the intelligence while missing the actual support needs.

The fifth is compensation that lowers visibility. Some AuDHD gifted children become very good at camouflage. They infer patterns, mimic others, memorise scripts, rely on strong verbal ability, or use insight to compensate for executive and social difficulties. This can hide both the neurodivergence and the giftedness. They may appear merely “fine,” “quirky,” “sensitive,” or “capable but inconsistent.” Because they compensate, nobody sees the whats fully happening internally. Then later they burn out, collapse under complexity, or realise they have been surviving by overbuilding conscious strategies for things that were meant to be more automatic.

Giftedness itself can mask AuDHD. A very bright child may use reasoning to compensate for social confusion, use pattern recognition to work around attention problems, use verbal sophistication to hide comprehension gaps, or teach themselves enough structure to delay detection. So the giftedness covers the neurodivergence, and the neurodivergence covers the giftedness.

This is why some gifted AuDHD children get classified in distorted ways:
smart but lazy
capable but not applying themselves
emotionally intense
oppositional
perfectionistic
socially odd
anxious
underachieving
“fine because grades are okay”
“not gifted because they’re too disorganised”
“not autistic because they’re too insightful”
“not ADHD because they can focus deeply on interests”

A more accurate model is this:

Giftedness concerns the level and form of cognitive complexity.

AuDHD concerns the way attention, sensory processing, regulation, executive functioning, and social processing are organised.
A child can have very high complexity and still have major difficulty with translation into ordinary performance.

Sometimes the giftedness shows up not as conventional excellence but as:

unusual questions
deep pattern detection
existential or moral intensity
rapid grasp of hidden structures
originality that does not fit the task
boredom with low-level repetition
frustration when others move too slowly or too imprecisely
intense need for autonomy because externally imposed structure feels both cognitively deadening and neurologically abrasive