What's With The Baby Ducks???

An introduction to how I modify CBT for neurodivergent clients

NATALIE FURDEK, M.ED., LPC

Hey there! Just to kick things off, I'm all about person-centered counseling, but I also use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) a lot in my practice. When it comes to autistic and ADHD clients, CBT needs some tweaking, and I'll be chatting about that quite a bit here.

Now, about those ducklings—if I have any “autistic superpowers,” it's probably my knack for coming up with random metaphors to explain mental health stuff. These ducklings will be joined by uranium, traffic barricades, gardens, gas stations, and more in my future posts!

CBT basically says our emotions mirror our thoughts. Whatever's on your mind is likely what you're feeling. That's a super simplified version, but it sets the stage for the baby duck metaphor.

Sure, most of the time our feelings follow our thoughts like baby ducks follow their mom. They're kind of wired to do that through something called imprinting, but they don't always get it right. When everything's smooth and chill, our emotions do trail our thoughts, just like those ducklings in the pic above follow their mom.

But think about all the stuff that can throw baby ducks off in a day, making it tough for them to do what they're meant to do. The same kind of things can happen in a neurodivergent person's day.

Two big examples are “meltdowns” and rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD). CBT isn't going to help with these, and trying it can actually make things worse.

Picture those ducks on a calm, sunny day... just swimming along, babies trailing mom, everything's perfect.

Now imagine a speedboat zooms by and sends a big wave crashing over them. Mama and the babies might get dunked for a second, spun around, and have to find their way back to mom.

That's what meltdowns and RSD moments are like, and we need to ditch CBT for other approaches that actually help clients find relief and get their emotions in check.

Only after that do we get back to “thinking about our thinking” to see if those thoughts make sense. Sometimes the event really does need attention; other times, not so much.

One last thing (and maybe the most important) about the metaphor. I didn't plan this, but it's been awesome to see my clients use the baby duck image to remember self-compassion. And self-compassion is the best CBT tweak I know. (Sneak peek: my next post will dive into a fresh-off-the-press research article on self-compassion and camouflaging in autistic folks).

That's your intro to the baby ducks! Hope you dig the imagery, and I'll be chatting more about these cuties in the future!