Internal Realities

Internal Realities: Tuning Into Your Neurodivergent Body with Dr Clare Jacobson

Late diagnosis neurodivergent body signs often show up long before anyone has language for them. A racing startle response. A body that never quite knows where it is in space. A sense of taking in more of the world than everyone else seems to. For Dr Clare Jacobson, a Specialist Clinical Psychologist with over 20 years of experience, these signs were there for decades before her own neurodivergent identification gave her the words to name them.

In this episode, Dr Emma Offord is joined by Clare, who established and continues to lead an award-winning NHS Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Psychology Service. Over the past year, Clare has been navigating her own neurodivergent identification, a journey that has opened up a profound reckoning with embodied experience, internal realities, and what it means to finally have language for things she had always felt but never been able to name. Clare brings a rare dual lens to this conversation: a clinician who holds the stories of hundreds of patients, and a late-identified neurodivergent person who spent decades suppressing the parts of herself that didn't fit the dominant script.

Diagnosis Is a Clue, Not the Whole Story

Clare treats psychiatric diagnosis as one lens on a person's experience, never the whole picture. She describes it as "a clue to the story underneath," useful for naming patterns but never a substitute for the fuller, messier truth of a life. Approaching someone's inner world with curiosity, rather than certainty, is what she says makes the difference.

The Secret Garden of Trust

Clare calls the therapeutic relationship a "secret garden", a private, intimate inner world that a client invites you into at their own pace. Trust has to be earned, not assumed, and once inside, the work is to go carefully: noticing what's a weed and what's a flower, and letting the person show you what they're ready to show you.

Clare's Own Neurodivergent Identification

Clare's own journey began with what she calls bombshell revelations after each of her pregnancies, moments where her brain seemed to stop protecting her from linking the dots. After her third child, it landed fully: her son was neurodivergent, and so was she. Three years of research followed, and she and her son received their diagnoses within months of each other.

The Hunter and the Farmer

Clare uses the hunter-farmer analogy to explain why ADHD can feel like a mismatch rather than a deficit. A hunter needs to be impulsive, alert, and quick to follow instinct. A farmer needs consistency, patience, and attention to detail. Both are valuable. A hunter raised in a farming village will always feel othered, not because anything is wrong with them, but because the context doesn't fit.

Playing the Card Game by Your Own Rules

Clare's card game metaphor reframes what looks like unreliability as a different kind of care. She may not send a birthday card on the exact right day, but she'll send one out of the blue on a random Tuesday that says more than a timely one ever could. Letting people play by their own rules, she says, can be a deeper form of love than forcing everyone into the same script.

The Call Isn't Coming from Inside the House

Late identification, Clare says, gives language to experiences that were always there but never named. The harsh inner critic so many late-identified adults carry isn't really their own voice. It's internalised, built from years of being an undiagnosed neurodivergent child, teenager, and young adult in a neurotypical world with no language for what they were experiencing.

The Neurodivergent Body: Hypermobility, Proprioception and Inflammation

This is where the late diagnosis neurodivergent body signs become most concrete. Clare describes proprioception, the sense of knowing where your body is in space, and how getting it wrong (bumping into furniture, catching a sleeve on a door handle) keeps the nervous system on extra alert. She talks about interoception, not registering hunger or the need for the toilet until the signal is shouting, and about the extra inflammation and fatigue that so often accompanies a hypermobile, neurodivergent body. None of it shows up neatly on a scan. All of it is real.

Receiving Extra Data

Clare describes neurodivergent perception as receiving extra data that neurotypical people simply filter out. That might mean picking up someone's hidden hostility as a physical force, or feeling a nervous-system-to-nervous-system connection with another person before either of you says a word. Clare goes further still, describing a theory of collective consciousness she calls "the original Internet", one possible explanation for why so many neurodivergent people describe a kind of knowing that defies straightforward explanation.

Authenticity, from Beginning to End

Clare draws a line between the authenticity of small children, who are simply themselves before the world teaches them otherwise, and the authenticity she has witnessed at the end of life, when people finally stop performing for anyone. Somewhere in between, she says, most of us get hooked by other people's scripts. Her own diagnosis has been a way back to that early, unguarded self.

Keeping the Compass Pointing North

Clare closes the conversation with the object she brought to represent grounding: her son's compass. As a child, her own compass needle spun without settling, and she learned to override her gut with her head. Now, she teaches her own children something different: your body knows. Tune in.

This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast is hosted by Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Lives. For every neurodivergent mind that was masked, misread, or missed.