Today we’d like to introduce you to Cassie Roybal.
Hi Cassie, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ve been working in the mental health field since 2012 and as a therapist since 2016. I’ve had a lifelong interest in people—why we are the way we are, how our experiences shape us, and what makes each of us experience the world so differently. I’ve also always been deeply empathetic and attuned to other people, so mental health was a pretty natural fit for me.
Over the years, I found myself working with more and more neurodivergent people, and my professional expertise grew alongside my understanding of my own neurodivergence. I was diagnosed with ADHD during COVID and then realized I was also autistic a few years later. The more I learned, the more pieces started clicking into place for both my clients and myself.
Eventually, though, that understanding came with a pretty significant reckoning. I hit autistic burnout hard enough that I stopped working entirely for over a year. I spent a lot of that time reorienting what I knew about myself, my capabilities, my limits, my needs, and also my strengths. It was an incredibly difficult period of my life, but it fundamentally changed the way I understood neurodivergence and what meaningful support for neurodivergent adults actually looks like.
Ironically, I had never wanted to own a private practice. But while I was trying to navigate burnout and rebuild my own life, I couldn’t find a therapist who really understood what I was experiencing. I realized there was a huge gap between knowing about neurodivergence clinically and understanding what it actually feels like to live inside a neurodivergent brain. Somewhere in that process, I realized I was uniquely qualified to help fill that gap. I had years of clinical experience, growing professional expertise in neurodivergence, and lived experience that gave me an entirely different understanding of the people I wanted to serve. That’s ultimately where EmpowHERed Divergence Therapy came from.
Today, I specialize in providing individual therapy to neurodivergent adult women (primarily autistic and AuDHD—autistic and ADHD—women), especially those who are late-diagnosed, high-masking, and navigating autistic burnout. I help them better understand their brains, reconnect with themselves after years of masking and adapting, and figure out what it actually looks like to build a life that works for them. It’s definitely not the career path I originally planned, but it feels very much like the one I was supposed to find.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has definitely been anything but smooth! Autistic burnout has probably been the biggest challenge I’ve faced, both personally and professionally. Before I burned out, I had spent most of my life being incredibly capable and pushing through things because I could. I didn’t realize how much of that capability depended on overriding my own needs and limits until I couldn’t do it anymore.
Taking more than a year away from work was incredibly difficult. There was a lot of grief involved in realizing that I couldn’t simply recover and go back to being the person I had been before. I had to learn the difference between what I was capable of doing and what was actually sustainable for me, which required rebuilding my life around a much more honest understanding of myself.
Starting a private practice while still navigating that process has definitely had its challenges, as well. I’ve had to build a business differently than I would have before burnout (and differently than most therapists do). It’s required much stronger boundaries around my capacity and a willingness to define success in ways that aren’t based on how much I can produce or accomplish.
In a strange way, though, those challenges are also what make me better at the work I do now. I don’t just understand burnout theoretically. I know what it’s like to lose access to parts of yourself you thought were permanent, to grieve who you used to be, and to slowly figure out who you are when you stop measuring yourself by how well you can push through.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I am the owner/founder of EmpowHERed Divergence Therapy—a therapy practice serving neurodivergent adult women throughout Colorado. I primarily work with autistic and AuDHD women, especially those who are late-diagnosed, high-masking, and experiencing autistic burnout. What really defines my practice is the intersection of my professional expertise and my lived experience. As I began understanding my own neurodivergence more deeply, I also started realizing how incomplete our traditional understanding of autism and ADHD has been in the mental health field, especially when it comes to women. So much of what I experienced, and what I was seeing repeatedly in my clients, wasn’t adequately captured by the clinical frameworks I had been taught.
Neurodivergence in women can look very different from the stereotypes most people are familiar with. Many of the women I work with are incredibly insightful, empathetic, capable, and successful on the outside while privately struggling with sensory overwhelm, executive functioning, relationships, chronic exhaustion, or the enormous amount of effort it takes to maintain that appearance of functioning. And most of them have spent years in therapy without anyone recognizing the neurodivergence driving all of their struggles.
My own experience helped me recognize that these women don’t just need the same therapy with more awareness of autism or ADHD added in. Sometimes the framework itself needs to change. My work is much less about teaching someone how to function more successfully and much more about helping them understand how their brain actually works, what their nervous system needs, and how to build a life around that knowledge.
That’s probably what I’m most proud of about EmpowHERed Divergence. I’ve created the kind of practice I desperately needed when I was trying to understand myself and couldn’t find it. My clients don’t have to spend half of therapy translating their internal experience or convincing me that something really is as hard as they say it is. They get to start from a place of being believed and understood.
In addition to individual therapy, I also offer neurodiversity-affirming autism and ADHD assessments for adults of all genders. I use measures that are less pathologizing and better at recognizing the different ways autism and ADHD can show up in women or other gender minorities, high masking individuals, and BIPOC individuals. Everything I do is ultimately rooted in the same idea: neurodivergent people deserve more than learning how to APPEAR okay. Instead, they deserve the opportunity to actually understand themselves so they can create lives in which they ARE okay.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I’m an almost compulsively creative person. Outside of therapy, I’m usually sewing/quilting, doing photography, watercolor painting, making digital art, DIYing home projects, or picking up some other creative hobby I absolutely did not need. My brain is pretty much always making something.
I’m also a huge Swiftie. Taylor Swift’s music has been a surprisingly important part of how I understand and process my own internal experiences. I’m someone who experiences things very deeply but doesn’t always have language to outwardly describe those experiences to others. I’ve found a lot of that language through her music over the years and found that incredibly powerful.
Pricing:
- Intake Session: $250
- Individual Therapy Session: $200
- Autism Assessment: $950-$1450
- ADHD Assessment: $550-$950
- Autism + ADHD Assessment: $1250-$1850
Contact Info:
