COME AS YOU ARE. RAW, REAL, AND YOURS. (PART 3 OF MY STORY) | SUPPORTING TONES MUSIC THERAPY | VANCOUVER, WA | NEURODIVERSE | WOMEN | MENTAL HEALTH | EXPRESS RECLAIM CELEBRATE YOURSELF |

How everything I went through became the reason I built a space for the woman holding it all together, alone.

If you’ve been following along, you know where I’ve been.

The drowning. The going numb. The depression medication that didn’t fix what it was never designed to fix. The four emotions I had to take apart piece by piece, guilt, shame, anger, grief, just to find out who I actually was underneath all of it.

This is the part where I tell you what I found.

And why it changed everything about what I decided to build.

What Happens When Everything You Believed About Yourself Turns Out to Be Someone Else’s Story?

Years of shame. A deep, bone-level belief that I was somehow not worthy of happiness. A “you made your bed, now sleep in it” mentality that I had internalized so completely I didn’t even recognize it as a belief anymore. I just thought it was truth.

All of that, every single bit of it, shattered when I went back to school.

Not because someone told me I was wrong. But because for the first time, I was in a space that required me to look at myself directly. To ask: what do I actually believe? Not what was I taught. Not what was I told. What do I actually believe?

I didn’t know. And that was terrifying.

I had spent so long seeing everything through the lens of what I’d been taught that I had no idea where that ended and where I began. I didn’t trust my body. I didn’t trust my gut. There was so much cognitive dissonance, the constant feeling of fighting yourself, the split between what you’re told to feel and what you actually feel, that I had learned to override my own instincts just to function.

My black and white thinking shattered. And for a while, that felt less like freedom and more like standing in the rubble.

Why Does Self-Care Stop Working? What ADHD and Nervous System Dysregulation Actually Feel Like

On top of everything else, I was struggling with depression and anxiety. But I know now what that really was: burnout. A completely dysregulated nervous system. Undiagnosed ADHD that nobody had ever named or seen.

The hypervigilance was real. It was the thing that kept me on top of everything, the schedules, the needs, the mental load, the constant management of everyone else’s worlds. It worked, in the way that white-knuckling works. But it also made it impossible to relax. Impossible to enjoy anything. Impossible to be present even when I wanted to be.

My brain never shut down. Ever. And I thought that was just how I was wired. I thought everyone lived like this.

I didn’t recognize that what I was calling “being responsible” was actually my nervous system idling permanently in fight, flight, or freeze. I didn’t recognize that what I was calling “being a good mom” was actually survival mode wearing a smile.

I was practicing self-care. Doing all the things. And my brain still wouldn’t stop, because surface-level self-care doesn’t reach a dysregulated nervous system.

Can Music Actually Regulate a Dysregulated Nervous System?

Going back to school made me confront all of it. It made me dig deeper than I ever had. It made me reflect on everything I thought I knew and make intentional decisions, for the first time in my life, about what I actually wanted for myself.

And in the middle of all that confrontation and reflection and slow demolition of everything I thought was true…

I started writing music again.

I started playing music again.

I found a space that was my own.

And I realized something I had never been able to name before: music had always been a regulator for me. My whole life. Long before I knew what that meant. When I was a kid singing in three choirs. When I wrote songs in high school to process what I couldn’t say out loud. Music was the thing that held my nervous system together when nothing else could, and I had lost it so gradually I didn’t even notice it was gone until I got it back.

Getting it back didn’t just feel like relief. It felt like remembering who I was.

Does Music Therapy Work for ADHD and Autism?

My son has ADHD and autism. He wouldn’t respond to his name. We’d say it over and over. Nothing.

One day, out of frustration and desperation, I sang it instead.

“Can you hear me?”

He turned around immediately.

Even now, as a teenager, when he’s stuck, when words don’t reach him, music does. Every time.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it matters.

Neurodivergent individuals spend enormous amounts of their lives being asked to adapt. Sit still. Make eye contact. Respond the way people expect you to respond. Their nervous systems are constantly being pushed against their own grain, and most of them are trying, genuinely trying, in environments that were never designed for how their brains actually work.

The mental health cost of that is real and it is significant. Anxiety. Shame. The slow erosion of believing you are fundamentally difficult. Fundamentally too much. Fundamentally wrong.

What I brought in the music therapy space was something completely different. These kids weren’t being asked to adapt. They were being met. Music gave their nervous systems something to organize around, the rhythm, the pattern, the predictable structure, without any demand to perform or comply. They could just be in it. And in being in it, they connected. They expressed. They showed up in ways that left everyone in the room a little stunned.

I started working with other neurodiverse people and watched the same thing happen again and again. Music reached places that words, instructions, and conventional therapy simply couldn’t. Not because those things are wrong, but because for a neurodivergent brain, music is a different door entirely.

And I needed to understand that better so I could use it on purpose, for more people.

Who Supports the Mom of a Neurodivergent Child? What I Witnessed That Changed Everything

Then I started watching the moms.

Mom after mom walking her child into a session. And every single one of them had the same eyes. I knew those eyes. I had worn them for years.

I started having real conversations with them. Not the “how are they doing in school” conversations. The real ones. And what I heard, over and over, was: I am barely holding it together. I am exhausted in a way I can’t explain. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m doing everything for everyone and there is nothing left for me.

Let me tell you what a day in her life actually looks like.

She wakes up already running her mental checklist. Who needs what today. Which therapy appointment is when. Whether her child slept, and what that means for the morning. She navigates the morning routine with the precision of an air traffic controller, managing sensory sensitivities, meltdowns, transitions that take three times as long as they should, while also feeding everyone, getting herself dressed, and making sure nobody forgets anything.

Then she drives her child to the appointment. Sits in the waiting room. Scrolls her phone but doesn’t really see it. And when someone asks her how she’s doing, if anyone asks, she says fine.

She has become so good at holding it together that nobody knows she’s not.

Here’s what I also know: many of these moms are themselves neurodivergent, undiagnosed, late-diagnosed, or quietly recognizing themselves in their children’s evaluations. They are managing their own dysregulated nervous systems while trying to be everything for a child whose needs are enormous. They are drowning in systems not built for them, advocating for children in rooms where they don’t feel heard, and carrying a grief that doesn’t have a clean name, because they love their child fiercely and they are also just so, so tired.

Imagine spending your child’s entire life in therapies designed to change who they fundamentally are, watching someone you love be told, appointment after appointment, that they need to be different. Imagine what that does to a mother’s heart. Imagine carrying that grief alongside the mental load, the hypervigilance, the constant advocacy, and the daily performance of being fine.

And then imagine that not one single person in that entire system ever stops and asks: but how are you doing?

Who sees her? Who gives her a space to exhale, to express, to exist without performing? Who tells her she doesn’t have to hold it all together to deserve support?

I had been that woman. I knew exactly what that dark, exhausting, endless place felt like. And I couldn’t unsee it in the faces of the women walking through those doors.

So I Built Something Different

That’s when I decided.

My focus would be women. Moms. Neurodivergent individuals. Not to change them. Not to fix them. But to create a space where they could come exactly as they are, raw, real, and take back who they are.

Because here’s what I know now:

You are allowed to release every emotion you’ve been holding without judgment.

You are allowed to put yourself first.

You are allowed to celebrate yourself and who you are without changing a single thing.

That’s not a revolutionary idea. But it felt revolutionary to me the first time I actually believed it. And I’m willing to bet it feels revolutionary to you right now too.

This Is What Supporting Tones Is

Everything I went through, the years of believing I wasn’t worthy, the nervous system that never stopped, the grief for the woman I used to be, the music that came back and brought me with it, the tired eyes I recognized in other moms, all of it led me here.

Supporting Tones exists for the woman who has been holding everything together, alone, for so long she can’t remember what it felt like to put something down.

It exists for the neurodivergent person who has spent their whole life in spaces designed to change them, and who deserves, desperately, a space that celebrates who they already are.

It exists because I have been in that dark place. I made my way through. And I refuse to let anyone stay there longer than they have to just because no one told them there was a door.

You are not too much. You are not broken. You are not stuck.

You are a woman who has been carrying too much alone, for too long, without the right information about her own brain or the right space to finally set it all down.

Come as you are.

Raw. Real. Exactly as you are right now.

That has always been enough here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is trauma-informed music therapy for women?

Trauma-informed music therapy is a client-led approach that uses music intentionally, not as entertainment, but as a tool for emotional expression, nervous system regulation, and identity reclamation. It’s designed to create safety first, honor your autonomy always, and never ask you to perform or pretend. For women who have spent years managing everyone else’s needs, it’s a space to finally exist as themselves.

Can music therapy help with ADHD and anxiety in women?

Yes, and this is where the research is genuinely exciting. Music engages the brain’s dopamine system, supports rhythm-based regulation of the nervous system, and gives ADHD brains a structured sensory experience that words alone often can’t provide. Many women with undiagnosed or late-diagnosed ADHD find that music has always been their most reliable regulator, they just never had a name for it.

Do I have to be musical to benefit from music therapy?

No. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about music therapy. Music therapy uses music as a tool for your own process, rhythm, sound, listening, creating, whatever serves what you need that day. Being “not musical” is not a barrier. Being human is the only requirement.

What does Supporting Tones Music Therapy actually offer?

Supporting Tones provides client-led, trauma-informed music therapy for women, mothers, and neurodivergent individuals in Southwest Washington and surrounding areas. Sessions are fully guided by you, your goals, your pace, your process. The focus is not fixing or managing symptoms. It is expression, reclamation, and celebration of who you already are.

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And if someone in your life is wearing those tired eyes right now, send them this. It might be exactly what they need to read today.