Alchemind Psychology & Counselling

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our relationships with mentors and psychologists show us what’s still unresolved inside us. When something from our past hasn’t been dealt with—like an unmet need, a hurt, or a belief about love or authority—it doesn’t stay buried. It shapes how we see other people and how we interpret their behaviour. That’s projection.

Projection happens when we unconsciously assign someone a role from our old story. Instead of seeing them as who they are, we see them through the filter of what we’ve already experienced. The psyche does this because it’s trying to complete something that never got finished—it replays a familiar emotional pattern hoping to finally resolve it.

It can show up in all kinds of ways. For example:

When projecting onto male mentors or figures:
Expecting them to provide safety, structure, or protection that was missing from early life.

Looking to them for approval or recognition before trusting one’s own sense of worth.

Reacting strongly to authority—either submitting or rebelling—based on past experiences with men or father figures.

Feeling anger, admiration, or attraction toward them that belongs to a deeper narrative about the masculine.

When projecting onto female mentors or figures:

Comparing oneself, competing, or seeking approval in ways tied to early relationships with mother or sister figures.

Feeling both drawn to and threatened by her confidence, intuition, or warmth.

Expecting emotional nurturing, rescue, or unconditional acceptance beyond the professional dynamic.

Resisting feedback because it echoes an unresolved dynamic with a maternal or feminine authority.

As a mentor, you’ll eventually become the screen for these projections. I’ve done it too. For a long time, I was unconsciously projecting the psychological father image—the internal version of the masculine role model—onto my mentor. I expected him to embody both the man I had idealised and the one I had resented. When he didn’t fit into that box—when he was neither the rescuer nor the threat—I felt confused and angry. My reactions weren’t about him; they were about the collapse of my own internal storyline. He was simply a different kind of man, one who didn’t match either of my projections.

That’s the moment where you can actually see the pattern. The irritation or disappointment is data—it shows the gap between the image you’re relating to and the real person in front of you.

When the projection starts to dissolve, you begin to see people again. You notice that, yes, they might carry certain universal archetypal traits—father, mother, teacher, lover—because we all share a collective symbolic field. But you also see that they carry far more nuance than the role you cast them in. They’re not just “the father” or “the critic”; they’re a whole person with their own history, context, contradictions, and limits. That’s what reality looks like when the lens clears.
Once you notice the pattern, the work isn’t about blame or quick repair—it’s about awareness in motion. Instead of reacting from the old script, you pause long enough to navigate with new information. You stay alert to what’s real, not just what’s familiar.

A few guiding questions help expose the structure of projection in real time:

Who or what does this person emotionally represent for me?

What expectation or fear am I replaying through them?

How is my reaction larger than the situation itself?

Where do I need to stay conscious and accountable in the interaction—listening to what they’re actually pointing out instead of assuming they’re the “bad parent” or the familiar authority figure?

The point of this work isn’t to eliminate projection—it’s to recognise it quickly and use it as feedback. Seeing it clearly shows where you’ve been handing over responsibility: expecting someone else to fix, affirm, or stabilise what’s yours to develop. When you stop treating mentors as the ones who will save or complete you, you start seeing where your own effort and accountability are being asked for. Sometimes the very thing that feels like them “letting you down” is actually them holding you accountable to grow.

Over time, the relationship clarifies. The mentor stops being a symbolic father, mother, partner, or rival and becomes simply themselves. And that shift matters—because when you stop relating through projection, you gain access to reality. You can finally learn from who they are, not who you need them to be. The connection becomes cleaner, less charged, and more mutual. That’s where genuine respect, collaboration, and growth can actually happen.

When Trump said “Tylenol causes autism” (a remark people are also pulling out of context, apparently), the problem isn’t just that the science is shaky. It’s that the claim flattens autism into a single, uniform condition that could be traced back to one simple cause. Autism isn’t flat like that—it’s complex, varied, and irreducible to a single origin story.

Autism is a spectrum in the truest sense: a wide range of developmental profiles that look completely different from one person to the next. Some autistic people are highly verbal, independent, and gifted in memory, music, or logic. Others need daily, sometimes lifelong, support with communication and basic living. Many are both at once — extraordinary in one area, deeply challenged in another. That unevenness is the rule, not the exception.

Then there’s hyperlexia, where a child can read far earlier than expected but with uneven comprehension — a profile that often shows up alongside autism and sometimes overlaps with gifted traits. Even here, there are different types: hyperlexia in otherwise typical children, hyperlexia as part of autism, and hyperlexia that appears with autistic-like traits in childhood but fades as the child develops (insert me ☺️). That one example alone shows how uneven and unpredictable these developmental patterns can be.

Sensory life is another area of difference. For one person, the flicker of a fluorescent light or the texture of a shirt tag can be unbearable; for another, pain barely registers. Some are hypersensitive to sound, touch, or smell, while others are hyposensitive, seeking intense input just to feel grounded. Add in co-occurring conditions like ADHD, epilepsy, anxiety, or depression, and the profiles multiply again.

So when someone says “Tylenol causes autism,” they’re not just misusing science — they’re collapsing all of this complexity into a caricature. Autism isn’t a single disorder with a single cause. It’s a diverse spectrum of human neurodevelopment, with different strengths, challenges, and ways of perceiving the world. You can’t explain both the gifted engineer who thrives in systems but melts down under sensory overload, and the child who reads whole books without understanding them, and the adult who needs lifelong care, with one over-the-counter painkiller.

Autism is many things, not one. That’s why single-cause stories don’t hold up. And if we want to respect autistic people, the first step is refusing to flatten them into a soundbite.

I’ve sat with so many families caught in the same exhausting loop: a teenager who wants to do well but gets stuck, shuts down, or explodes… and a parent who’s trying everything they know—reminders, structure, consequences—only to watch things spiral into another power struggle.

From the outside, it looks like laziness or attitude. Inside, it feels like a nervous system trap: starts that never happen, steps that vanish, time that slips away, emotions that flare fast, and effort that comes in streaks instead of steady.

It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that their brain and body can’t regulate the way we expect—and both sides end up frustrated, hurt, and stuck in the same story.

I wrote about what this actually looks like at home, and why common strategies so often backfire. Most importantly, I share what parents can do to break the cycle and find a way forward that builds trust instead of tension.

If your teen seems “too smart to be struggling,” this is for you.

Order Without Force: Helping Your ADHD Teen Build Executive Skills - AlcheMind Psychology & Counseling What Executive Dysfunction Actually Looks Like at Home (And Why It’s Not Just “Laziness” or “Attitude”) I’ve worked with many teenagers who are bright, creative, intense—and struggling. Often, the thing getting in their way isn’t laziness or defiance. It’s something quieter, harder...

One of the most life-altering conversations I’ve ever had was about the tension between idealism and reality. He told me that having an ideal is beautiful, necessary even—but it isn’t how reality works. Not quite yet, anyway. Ideals don’t usually live in the here and now. They arrive from some place ahead of us, a not-yet that visionaries catch sight of. And that’s exactly why they’re called visionaries—because they can see what isn’t present, what doesn’t exist yet. Some people think that’s a kind of superpower. Honestly, it is—especially when paired with creativity.

But reality moves slowly. The world is clay, not lightning. To bring an ideal into form, you have to practice, stumble, refine. Creation means repetition and revision until the form outside begins to resemble the vision inside. Think of it like sculpting: you might imagine an intricate, nuanced statue, but what you begin with is just a rough block. You chip, you sand, you ruin pieces, you start over—until what you hold in your hands echoes what lived in your mind.

And here’s the thing most people overlook: it’s not just the vision that matters, but the inner architecture required to midwife it into matter. Patience to tolerate the slowness of becoming.

What actually enables this translation are not just the ideals themselves but the psychological traits that sustain enactment:

Patience and temporal discounting: the ability to tolerate delayed gratification and invest in outcomes that may take years to manifest.

Conscientiousness and self-regulation: the consistency to apply effort even when motivational states fluctuate.

Frustration tolerance and resilience: the capacity to metabolize failure without abandoning the project.

Cognitive flexibility: the willingness to revise strategies while holding the larger vision constant.

Grounded optimism (or agency-based hope): a future orientation that combines belief in the attainability of the goal with pathways thinking—“I can find a way to get there.”

Without these, ideals collapse back into abstractions—brilliant but impotent. With them, ideals become scaffolds for real structures in the world. The visionary sees, but it is the disciplined builder who ensures that vision endures.