The Gift of Knowing: AuDHD meets Extrasensory Perception

How My Neurocomplex Mind Accesses Hidden Channels
For most of my early life, I couldn't explain how I knew things. I just knew. And when I tried to explain my knowing to others, I was met with skepticism, dismissal, or worse—the suggestion that something was wrong with me.

I didn't understand that what felt like a liability could actually be an extraordinary gift, and that my neurocomplex mind was wired to access information through channels most people never experience.

It wasn't until my ADHD diagnosis in the early 1990s that I began to have an inkling as to what was actually happening. And even then it took decades to figure it all out. My autism diagnosis in 2025 was the final piece of the puzzle. But understanding my AuDHD is still only part of the story—I also had to recognise the additional neurological differences that came with it: intuition, empathic abilities, altered consciousness states, and more.

I call this combination my "neurocomplex" mind—not just neurodivergent, but a complex layering of AuDHD plus these other abilities that are so often intertwined with it.

My brain processes information through many interconnected abilities: including spontaneous intuitive knowing, advanced pattern recognition, deep empathic sensing, and natural access to altered states of consciousness. Each of these is powerful on its own, but together, with AuDHD, they create a way of experiencing the world that is both gift and challenge.

When Words Come Through You
The first time I actually remember being surprised by my own downloaded wisdom, was when I was about five years old. I noticed some girls bullying an African English girl because of her really dark skin. I heard myself saying to them—as if the words were coming through me rather than from me—"The reason she's got dark skin is because her ancestors come from a very hot country and  their dark skin helps to protect them from the sun."

I stood there afterward thinking, "Where did that come from? How did I know that?"

The teacher almost accused me of lying. Somebody must have told me, she insisted. But no, they hadn't. The very fact that I had to question myself proved that, and I was as surprised  as she was.

This pattern repeated itself many times before I had even turned six. I learnt early that my knowing made adults uncomfortable, that it was safer to not say anything at all.

How It Still Works
This is how it still works for me. I hear myself say something and then think, "How did I know that?" The knowing arrives complete and articulated, often surprising me even more than it surprises the person I'm speaking to.

I am much more articulate when information comes through me. In real life, my speech is very disjointed and in typical ADHD fashion, I am constantly searching for words to put my thoughts into order and context. But when I'm channeling this knowing, the words flow perfectly formed.
It's not that I'm accessing a memory or reasoning through to a conclusion—the information simply comes through me, as if I'm a channel rather than the source.

Intuition in Daily Life
This spontaneous knowing continues throughout my life in both profound and mundane ways. Knowing  who's calling before I answer the phone. Recognising when there's something wrong with someone even when they seem fine to everyone else.

As my children were growing up, I regularly intuited the extent of injuries or the nature of illnesses before medical confirmation. I would use muscle testing and pendulum to confirm my knowing, and I was consistently accurate—even when initial medical assessments suggested otherwise. Sometimes when it's hard to trust the knowing, I will still use these tools just to check. I'm right 99% of the time.

My whole art career was based on trusting an intuition. I began creating mandala oracle cards from my photography, and the entire project unfolded through a series of knowings, dreams, and intuitive hits. When I chose a publisher, I just knew  which one was right. He phoned me the day my work arrived on his desk. We had signed the contract within a week. 

Pattern Recognition Enigmas
Although I had always been brilliant at jigsaw puzzles, maths and spelling in my early years, I first became consciously aware of my pattern recognition ability around age eleven or twelve. I could figure out word games Hangman extraordinarily quickly.  In games like Mastermind, I usually got all the colours correct on the first go, just by feeling what colours that person would use and by my second turn had intuited or recognised the pattern..

After a few times having played these games at school, the teacher  banned me from playing because I always won. I had to sit and watch while the rest of the class played games. This probably contributed to my growing sense of being fundamentally different in ways that made others uncomfortable.

Here's an interesting point to note: Although I'm good at pattern recognition, it's only when I command myself to register patterns. Normally, in typical ADHD style, I go through life not seeing the small details of things at all. Or in autistic style, being bombarded and overwhelmed because there is simply too much going on.  I would make the worst witness because I rarely  absorb or retain visual information into my short term memory.  I may remember it some years later however.

And I'm not good at facial recognition. I have a degree of prosopagnosia or face blindness which frequently gets me into trouble because I have no idea who I'm talking to. I recognise actors and speakers by their voice rather than what they look like.  Luckily, if I see people often enough - family, friends -  the recognition will eventually stick.

I am much more able to recognise or feel energy. I could tell you how a person or place felt. I could tell you the emotion that was in a room. But the visual details? They simply don't register unless I'm actively focusing on them, because there is simply too much going on and I become  overstimulated.

Non-Linear Thinking
With AuDHD my thoughts don't follow a linear path. They never have. While most people think in a relatively ordered sequence—one thought leading logically to the next—my mind operates more like a vast web of interconnected nodes, all firing simultaneously.

I think in pictures, words, sounds, smells, and feelings all at once. A single question can trigger a cascade of associations across multiple domains: visual memories, emotional impressions, physical sensations, abstract concepts, and intuitive knowing, all arriving together in a complete gestalt.
For years, I believed this was a problem. But maybe I was wrong.

Being an Empath
I didn't understand my empathic ability until quite late in life. When my husband's father passed away—someone I didn't know very well—I suffered from extreme grief. I couldn't understand why. It wasn't my grief, and I knew it wasn't my grief.

A healer friend explained that I was taking on my husband's grief and that of the whole family. She told me I was a strong empath, leading me to begin researching and realising that so much of the emotion that I felt wasn't even my own emotion.

In my teens and twenties, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. But I always knew it was something else and I tried to explain. And I was right. The medications I was given were trying to treat symptoms that weren't actually mine—they were everyone else's emotions that I was absorbing. 

As a child, this manifested in what looked like martyr behaviour, often taking the blame for my younger brother's mistakes and transgressions. It was simple logic: If I was going to feel his emotional pain anyway when he was being punished, I might as well take the blame and spare him the additional suffering.  I had also been taking on my mother's emotional and physical pain for years.  

This is because I also have a strong physical empathy—otherwise known as mirror-touch synesthesia. I don't just empathise with others' pain—I physically feel it in my own body. These are some of my neurological realities. My brain processes sensory information differently, picking up signals others miss entirely.

This is helpful for working as a healer, but it has also been very overwhelming for most of my life. 

Interestingly, because I'm autistic, I don't always register my own emotions straight away. Sometimes it can take me days to realise, "Ah, that's what I was feeling." And yet I pick up other people's emotions almost immediately.

The Toll and the Protection
I have learned to turn this empathy off to a certain extent, although I find it very hard to do around family. I have to remember to cleanse my energy field after spending time with people. When I remember, I can draw in the light to fill myself up, and that helps protect me.

On days when I forget to cleanse after being with people, I can get very tired and even sick—I can feel as if I've had the flu, very achy with specific pains sometimes. And it can take me a week or more to cleanse if I let it get that bad. And it can also trigger overwhelm, and my ME/fibromyalgia.

The Bliss State: Bringing in the Light
As a child, I could often, in times of stress, enter what I would call a bliss state. I would be filled with light and would suddenly know that everything was going to be okay. Everything seems brighter. The world seems more beautiful.

This happened frequently through my childhood and especially in my early teens, when I had quite a lot of traumatic times. I would purposely go outside to feel it. I'd be terrified to go to school or afraid to go home, and I would just walk outside and close my eyes. Suddenly, I would be flooded with light. It would pour in through the top of my head. I'd just be filled with light and bliss, safety and calm. I think that is really what kept me going.  After being ill in my late teenage years, I lost this natural ability and I had to learn to access this light energy on my own.  It no longer happens spontaneously.

Alpha-Theta Consciousness and the Thin Veil
I have learned that there are four main types of brainwaves: Beta (alert, focused), Alpha (relaxed awareness), Theta (deep meditation, memory access), and Delta (deep sleep). Most people spend the majority of their time in Beta.

In my work with ADHD and Autistic people over the decades, I have noticed that many neurodivergent people are different. We naturally inhabit the Alpha-Theta realm much more frequently. This is why we appear "off with the fairies" or "daydreaming." But what looks like inattention from the outside is actually something profound happening on the inside—we're accessing layers of consciousness that others struggle to reach.

I've come to understand that many neurodivergent people have what I call a "thin veil"—the barrier between this life and previous lives, between individual consciousness and collective consciousness, is more permeable for us. We carry trauma from not only this life and our childhood, but from past lives and from generational patterns stored in our DNA.

This thin veil is both burden and gift. The burden is the weight of all that feeling and unprocessed trauma. The gift is the ability to access it, recognise it, and heal it—not just for ourselves, but for all who came before and all who will come after.

The Challenge: Learning to Trust
All of these abilities working together create a form of perception that's difficult to explain but extraordinarily accurate.

The challenge isn't having these abilities—it's learning to trust them in a world that doesn't understand or value them.

I'm in my sixties now, and I'm still learning to honour these gifts. Still learning when to speak my knowing and when to hold it. Still learning to not apologise for processing differently. Still learning to trust the daydreams, the visions, the sudden certainties that arrive without logical preamble.

The empathic abilities that can be overwhelming when I don't know how to protect myself. The alpha-theta states that were punished as daydreaming and not paying attention, that caused me to suppress my natural way of processing. The intuitive knowing that made adults uncomfortable making me stay silent. They are all part of me. And I'm learning to embrace them.

The journey of reconnecting to source, understanding my neurodivergence, healing trauma, and finally learning that I don't need to be fixed—that I just need to be me—it's all part of the same path.

I'm still learning. I'm still growing. And I'm finally understanding that this is exactly as it should be.
The knowing was never the problem. The problem was believing them when they said there was something wrong with me for knowing.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book about my neurodivergent journey. If this resonates with you, I'd love to hear your story. Do you experience any of these abilities? How have they shaped your life?