Neurodivergent Families in Military Life: Parenting, Systems, and Survival with Priscilla Corson

Episode Summary of “Neurodivergent Families in Military Life: Parenting, Systems, and Survival with Priscilla Corson”

Military families are often trained to be exceptionally adaptable. Between PCS moves, deployments, changing routines, and new bases, constant movement becomes the norm. But if you are raising a neurodivergent child or if you are neurodivergent yourself, that constant change isn’t just neutral—it can be incredibly expensive for your nervous system.

Have you ever wondered why military life feels harder for your family than it seems to be for others? You are definitely not alone. In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky sits down with Priscilla Corson—a military spouse, AuDHD-er, therapist, and researcher—to talk about neurodivergent families inside military systems. They discuss what gets destabilized, what gets misunderstood, and how to build sustainable emotional safety inside a life that isn’t always built for sustainability.

Key Takeaways

• The Unseen Cost of Transition: While military culture values an “embrace the suck” mentality, neurodivergent nervous systems take longer to recover from constant administrative and routine disruptions.
• The “Lost Generation” of Adults: Many military parents only discover their own neurodivergence (ADHD, Autism) after completing diagnostic evaluations for their children.
• Family Care Plans for Regulation: Why families need a plan for what co-regulation and shared language look like when both parents and children get overstimulated during deployments or moves.
• Reframing Resiliency: Real resiliency isn’t about pushing past your limits until burnout occurs; it means practicing “minimal effort” where appropriate and prioritizing self-care over absolute perfection.
• Finding Neuroaffirming Care: How to look for healthcare providers or coaches who focus on strengths and a social model of disability rather than deficits.

Free Relationship Pattern Assessment

Many couples assume they have a communication problem when they’re actually stuck in a relationship pattern that keeps creating the same conflict. Take the Free Relationship Pattern Assessment to discover what pattern may be keeping you stuck and learn what to focus on next.

Guest Speaker Bio – Priscilla Corson

Priscilla Corson is a therapist and founder of All Parts Included, a neuroaffirming practice centered on helping individuals, couples, and families build shared language and sustainable connection. Her work is shaped by the intersection of culture, identity, and lived neurodivergence, alongside life as a military spouse and parent of two.

Priscilla has worked across military systems, including roles supporting both the Army and Air Force in violence prevention efforts. She has also chaired Governor statewide initiatives focused on supporting service members, veterans, and their families, and has contributed to legislative efforts that expanded access to care supports within military communities.

Rooted in both clinical insight and lived experience as an AuDHD clinician, Priscilla is passionate about creating spaces where people don’t have to shrink, mask, or be “fixed.” Whether she’s supporting families navigating neurodivergence or consulting with organizations, her focus is the same: helping people untangle overwhelm, make meaning, and build lives where every part belongs.

Connect with Priscilla Corson here.

Episode Transcript for “Neurodivergent Families in Military Life: Parenting, Systems, and Survival with Priscilla Corson”

 Military families are often trained to adapt. New base, new school, new job, new routines, and for many families, that constant movement becomes normal. But if you’re raising a neurodivergent child or you’re neurodivergent yourself, that constant change isn’t just a neutral experience, it can be very expensive.

And if you’ve wondered why military life feels harder for your family than it seems to be for other families, then this conversation might be for you. Today, I’m talking with Priscilla Corson about neurodivergent families inside military systems, what gets destabilized, what gets misunderstood, and how to build something sustainable inside a life that often isn’t meant and built for sustainability.

Hi, I’m Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky, and you’re about to start communicating more clearly and feeling more connected in your relationships with this podcast. As a marriage and family therapist, I help people change relationship patterns that feel automatic, those reactions that just kick in before you even realize that they’re happening.

And for over 10 years, I’ve worked with people who do hard things for a living, and yet they still feel stuck when it comes to connection in their relationships. This podcast isn’t about scripts or formulas or doing relationships the right way. Instead, it’s about slowing down reactive moments, understanding what’s underneath them, and helping relationships feel more like a team again.

So if you want things to feel better, to feel calmer, steadier, and more at ease in your closest relationships, then this podcast is for you. Because here you’ll start to learn how to pause conflict, understand what’s happening emotionally, and then respond instead of react. And when you do that, connection starts to feel more possible.

Quick note though, this podcast is educational only and isn’t a substitute for professional therapy or counseling. If you need individualized support, please consider working with a mental health counselor. Okay, let’s dive in. I’m really glad you’re here.

 Welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast. This is episode 86, Neurodivergent Families in Military Life: Parenting, Systems, and Survival with Priscilla Corson.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Priscilla, welcome to the Communicate and Connect podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Can you just tell us a little bit about you and your work with military families and neurodivergent families?

Priscilla Corson: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited about this. I am a military spouse myself, AuDHD-er myself as well, who is parenting two neurodivergent children and have a neurodivergent spouse. So we are definitely a very neurospicy family ourselves, and learned about our own forms of neurodivergence through parts of our own military experience and just continuing to see certain things.

Priscilla Corson: So it led me down a path of specializing in neurodivergence in the last few years from my own discovery. But for years prior, I was working for with next to the military. Still do during the day and learned so much about what I wish I had known early on in our military journey and how many families are navigating this space without, one, knowing, or if they do know the right resources or the resources might have massive wait lists.

Priscilla Corson: And so I’m still, learning to navigate this space personally while also just being really passionate about helping others navigate it.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes, you have such a wealth of experience, both personally and professionally with this, so I’m very excited about our conversation. Did you learn about your own neurodivergence, you and your partner, from your kids getting diagnosed first? Because I’m seeing that as being very common, that adults have no idea that they are neurodivergent. And then they’re navigating services for their children, and then like, “Oh, gosh, maybe I’m also neurodivergent.”

The “Lost Generation” & Diagnostic Changes

Priscilla Corson: So this is definitely something that’s very common. It’s often referred to as the lost generation. The diagnostic criteria for some of the very core forms of neurodivergence, so autism, ADHD, drastically changed in 2012. And so what we saw after that was a huge change in those that were able to access services, those that were able to gain that knowledge and information.

Priscilla Corson: And so you did have an increase in people that had that diagnostic clarity. In addition to that, you had a whole generation of parents that were seeking care for their children, filling out these assessments, seeing themselves in these assessments, and wondering, “Huh, there’s a highly genetic component here, it had to have come from you or me,” looking at their partners.

Priscilla Corson: And that’s really what happened for my own family, too. We were coming off of a PCS, seeing some major transitions and changes for our daughter, and had a lot of questions. And we were coming from overseas, now coming back to America and seeing the difference of her in a different system in America, wanting to know more.

Priscilla Corson: Went and did some testing, saw myself in those tests, and it really just goes to show how hard it is for us to get missed, in childhood, right? We’re talking about a clinician, and I had already been in practice for years.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah, you’re a therapist.

Priscilla Corson: Yeah, so as a fellow clinician, I didn’t even know about my own forms of neurodivergence. It’s literally what I’m doing my dissertation on, is what we wish we had known, from MSW programming around neurodivergence. And by and large, the data is showing even in that, that clinicians aren’t exposed to, what neurodivergence really is, what neuroaffirming care is.

Priscilla Corson: And so you’re also talking about a very limited populace of specialty care for then military families that are frequently transitioning, trying to find that very niched specialty care.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes. I’m glad we’re just taking a moment to talk about this because it’s really new for everybody to be so focused on it. I had my master’s degree then my doctoral degree, and I don’t think we ever talked about neurodivergence. And so it’s been like a huge thing to be learning about this now.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I’m over 10 years as a therapist and at this point being like, “Oh, okay, I gotta get up to date with working with neurodivergence.” And that’s been like a huge focus of mine in the last year and a half

Priscilla Corson: And that’s what happens for a lot of us. A lot of us are encountering it in some way, right? We know that as high as even one in four, experience some form of neurodivergence. And so what you have is a disproportionate number of the population that’s experiencing this.

Priscilla Corson: They’re seeing it in their peers, they’re seeing it in their own families. They might be identifying it within themselves. And so talking about it from that lens, moving away from a lot of the models that we had historically, is drastically changing care in this area.

Military Culture, “Embrace the Suck,” and Dysregulation

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. What do you think that they tend to miss about neurodivergence, and especially how that relates to military life where there is kind of this constant change?

Priscilla Corson: We are used to experiencing different forms of change, transitions, lack of knowing what the next thing is for so many of us, right? We sit in a lot of somatic experiences with that, where we’re already heightened, we’re already concerned, and that becomes shared as natural language.

Priscilla Corson: That’s just the way the military is. Everyone experiences this. But there is a distinction to how those transitions impact neurodivergent families. And oftentimes because we’re already sharing a community culture of, ” Oh, you’re fine,” like this is embrace the suck mentality to a lot of our culturalisms.

Priscilla Corson: It’s very, very easy for families to not understand that the feeling like you’re going zero to 100 when one more change comes in. Those sensations often match that form of neurodivergence that you’re also experiencing and how do you support then your family through these transitions?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes. Military life does really value adaptability and resilience in like a cultural standpoint. But adapting to something does also require time and, like, a bit of a recovery time.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: And I was thinking about the interplay of this with neurodivergence and how neurodivergent families, you know, may never even just get enough time to fully recover to something.

Priscilla Corson: Absolutely. Also depending on what forms of neurodivergence we’re talking about, right? Like certain forms of neurodivergence like to jump from thing to thing, right? Like when you think about ADHD and all the studies on that, right? There is more inherent flexibility to those changes, more embracing of those changes.

ADHD vs. Autism in Military Life & Executive Functioning Load

Priscilla Corson: But oftentimes then they’re not noticing the executive challenges that involve in a PCS, right? We’re talking about a load of admin things that come with any transition or movement. Cancellation of bills in certain areas, making sure you’re forwarding all the different mailing addresses, right?

Priscilla Corson: That’s an administrative and executive functioning load that’s still gonna impact those that may love transition, that may love changes.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. I’m really grateful you’re doing this right now ’cause you’re also breaking it up between the types of neurodivergence, and that I think is really important because that is very different the way that military life Is gonna interplay and impact somebody who has ADHD versus somebody who has autism or some other form of neurodivergence.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: So I’m hearing like big challenges maybe for someone with ADHD they might be excited for, a move or a deployment or like things changing all of a sudden that they might be, feeling very emotionally stable in that environment, but they might be struggling with the paperwork and the bureaucracy pieces.

Priscilla Corson: You also see this in families that have different forms of neurodivergence. You may have a member of the family that’s very excited for that, right? And then somebody else is taking on a greater part of the cognitive load, and they’re feeling like, “Hey, I’m not getting the supports I need. And I understand that you’re excited, but I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I’m overstimulated, because I’m taking on the cognitive load of all this transition.”

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Ah, yes. If family members are different, then, they can have different reactions. How might that be different experiencing, you know, military life than maybe somebody with ADHD?

Priscilla Corson: So it can definitely vary, right? Like, you know the saying, “You’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” But speaking even from personal experience, it’s definitely dysregulating when you’re going through a move.

Priscilla Corson: You know, there’s the trope in military spouse culture, right? Just when you need to stop using the GPS and you finally know where everything is, you get orders to move. And that’s really how it feels, is that unsettling feeling of like, “I’ve just got my systems in place. I’m finally on my routine, and now we’re going to the next location.”

Priscilla Corson: And it’s not just within PCSs, right? Like, that’s probably the most common transition or change. But we’re talking about even some day-to-day functions, right? Let’s say, the military spouse is the one that’s the autistic individual. Oftentimes a lot of things that relate to our healthcare, relate to our benefits, relate to accessibility to other services have to go through the service member.

Priscilla Corson: And so imagine then you’re married to a service member that that’s not their strong suit. That’s a lot of executive functioning. And now you’re having to feel destabilized that everything has to go through them when you know you have the capacity to handle those things because maybe executive functioning isn’t your area of difficulty.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes, I’m totally seeing this in the couple. I’m like seeing it play out. Like, I can imagine the couple sitting right here talking about how, like, “I’m always the one who has to do everything. You are clearly successful. You’re doing this at work, but you’re not doing it here at home.”

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I could totally see that conflict happening.

Creating a Family Care Plan for Regulation

Priscilla Corson: And that’s the hard part too, is, I often use this in my work, this language that we don’t necessarily have family care planning as it relates to our neurodivergent transitions. And so I always tell people, like, it’s okay to create a family care plan around what do you want shared language to look like?

Priscilla Corson: What happens when both of you are overstimulated? What happens when your children are overstimulated, right? What does co-regulation as a family look like? And that’s the family care plan we tend to leave off and don’t talk about as often.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. My husband is deployed right now. I suppose by the time this episode is released that he is back. When he left, I got this like a spiral-bound folder thing that gave me all these checklists and everything and numbers and resources and stuff.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I know I also have, a binder when we moved also with things like this. But neither of them really addressed many of the couple or family dynamics. We don’t have kids, so I’m not always as observant of those areas just because it’s not as applicable to our specific life.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: But it did have some resources for kids in there. But often not the relational aspects. of course, those never include anything about neurodivergence.

Priscilla Corson: I had a meeting not that long ago in my day job, and it was with some military leaders that wanted to run an event, that included families. Luckily, the two of us that were helping and having this conversation with them happened to also be military spouses. So we talked about some of the misconceptions that often come when military are attempting to coordinate these types of events.

Re-thinking Communication Expectations During Separations

Priscilla Corson: The presumption that spouses don’t have day jobs and we’re just gonna do it in the middle of the day. Childcare needs. But one of them brought up, “Hey, you know, our type of job, this is a job that doesn’t necessarily deploy but they frequently travel with local senior leaders. And so they’re constantly gone, but they’re gone in short periods of time.

Priscilla Corson: And one of the questions that he posed to us as the helping professionals, he asked, How do I help train families on what a communication look like?” And I turned to him and I was like, “Well, it’s a common misconception that communication needs to be like we’ve scheduled it at a very specific time. You know, I touch base with my significant other back home. And I told him, I’m like, “That’s not necessarily realistic for every single job.”

Priscilla Corson: And so the same way we tell couples all the time that come to sessions like throw out what you think you’re supposed to do. Any time you think that, you know, the proverbial we or they is saying that we’re supposed to do this, if you can’t concretely answer that, that’s usually an indicator that you’re following a specific social norm.

Priscilla Corson: And as neurodivergents, we’re more prey to that, right? We’ll categorize those social norms that we’ve learned and we’ve been taught in our childhood and adulthood. So we think we’re supposed to do something a very particular way. But our communication styles may be different and may look very different in real practice.

Priscilla Corson: So for example, my husband and I, any time he’s gone, we don’t have a presumption that we’re gonna have contact or regular contact or have it at any specific time. And when we finally took that off the table, and this is years into his military career, it was like, oh, okay, we didn’t feel the demand of avoidance that often comes, right?

Priscilla Corson: We talk about persistent drive for autonomy. We didn’t feel that demand avoidance about like, “Oh, I gotta make sure I’ve checked in today. I’ve gotta make sure I’ve sent this text message.” And that naturally even just shifted our dynamic. I know other families that have very specific schedules around that, and that helps them feel stable and secure in their relationships in that, it can look different, and that has to be a part of the conversation.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah, like what is gonna work for us, both as the couple, like if it’s a neurodivergent-neurotypical relationship or if it’s different types of neurodivergence. How do we navigate this that meets both of us? But then I’m thinking it’s also so much more complex than when you also are having kids, and it’s the entire family, and we are trying to figure out how to make this work for everybody.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Any thoughts or tips when it’s related to kids and, how military might be impacting neurodivergent kids. What then parents can be doing to support that?

Priscilla Corson: A lot of us of a particular generation were raised with very particular forms of parenting, right? And even for many of us that find out later in life, we’re trying to navigate what does it mean to change a lot of the norms that we were taught as children in the ways that we’re parenting our kids.

Parenting Neurodivergent Children & Establishing Shared Language

Priscilla Corson: So for example, like the use of character labeling, right? Like, “This is an unkind behavior,” turns into, for a lot of those adults, right? The trauma, the internalization of a lot of that, the shame cycles. So I think a lot of us are trying to do that as parents of neurodivergent children. We’re trying to kinda adapt and change to that.

Priscilla Corson: But when you think about it, many forms of neurodivergence learn off of some kind of model. We tend to learn from example. It’s why we tend to learn scripts and the things that we like to use from movies and television. And there isn’t a lot of examples of what neurodivergent parenting can look like.

Priscilla Corson: And it may not apply to your unique child and your unique child’s way of expressing their own forms of neurodivergence. And so I’m always telling parents that the best thing you can do is find that shared language with your kid. Your needs do not supersede your children’s needs. nor do their needs supersede your needs, right?

Priscilla Corson: It’s about having some kind of collaboration with your child on what their needs are. But if you don’t already have an open channel of communication with your kiddo around what their needs are, and they don’t have that language to utilize to express their needs, it’s gonna be 10 times harder when you’re asking them to express their needs in a way that makes sense to you when you’re in a deployment, when you’re in a TDY, when you’re in a PCS.

Priscilla Corson: That’s not the time to establish language, right? That’s period of time that’s unstable, that many of us don’t feel grounded. And so that’s not the best time to start asking your kid, how are they experiencing this? What do they need in those moments? It’s about establishing that when you do feel like there’s some semblance of stability for your family

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. As you’re talking, I find my mind almost creating like a list of everything that is involved in that. And so I’m hearing that pre-planning is really important. That you’re not figuring this out in the middle of a deployment, in the middle of a PCS move, that you guys have communication already and have talked about needs.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: But I’m also thinking about how many skills go into communication, and then also communicating about neurodivergence like having language for the experiences that are not neurotypical, like a sensory experience. Especially if a parent is neurodivergent and they are just finding out how much they’re gonna need to develop an understanding of a language for what they’re experiencing. And then help develop a language for their child to use about what their experience is, and then have also this flow of open communication between them.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: And do all of that first, so that way then you can come up with a plan and know what’s gonna help us when the next deployment comes around or something like that.

Priscilla Corson: Absolutely. And I’ll name one more thing on that too. And then also managing the shame cycles that come with neurodivergence and the ways that we experience our own forms of parenting when we’re overstimulated, when we feel unregulated, and how easy it is for us to slip into that second-guessing, the shame associated with our parenting when we feel like we haven’t gotten it right.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I’m really glad you’re bringing that up because that’s another common, misconception about military life. Like I’m thinking about the resilience narrative, where I handle hard things all the time.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I handle hard things all the time. We’re a military family. We do this especially when we’ve done it for many years. And people often do feel like what is wrong with me, that I’m not either functioning the way that other people are, I’m not handling this the way the neighbor family is, or I’m not handling it the way I normally would.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I know everybody has shame, right? Like we all have moments of insecurity where we think like, “Oh gosh, am I wrong? Am I not doing it good enough?” Like that’s a human piece.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: But then we have a military piece on top of the human piece of like, am I not doing this good? Am I not resilient enough? That I think almost all military families experience. And then if you’re also neurodivergent on top of a military family, then there’s like an extra layer of, wait, now I’m not doing it.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Am I doing it wrong compared to the other military family?

Priscilla Corson: Oh, I’ll tell you, so day job, literally run the resilience office for the Pentagon and for Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. And I remember I had a very young child, and we’re talking like months old. We were PCSing from overseas. I had another child that was once again navigating their forms of neurodivergence, having meltdowns, all the things.

Priscilla Corson: My job, being a different job and changing and transitioning into a directorship. My spouse being in one of those high rapid travel type jobs. And I was over there like, “I know the language. I have all the skills. I’ve been– I teach these skills, to other organizations,” and I still felt like I was lacking.

Internalized Ableism & Re-defining Resiliency

Priscilla Corson: I still felt like, “Why can’t I keep pace how I have before?” and that’s where that internalized ableism narrative gets so hard for us as military families that are also neurodivergent. Because you have the military whose ideals and norms are produce excellence, right? And that doesn’t just extend to the service member, like that extends to the family unit as a whole.

Priscilla Corson: Everyone feels a part of that mission set that we’re going to produce excellence, right? And then we’re gonna produce excellence, as service before self.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah.

Priscilla Corson: And we’ve internalized both of those narratives, and those aren’t bad narratives. Like, I greatly believe in a lot of these things too, right? I’m a civilian while also being a military spouse and work very closely with this.

Priscilla Corson: You know, I’m definitely pro-military, right? But at the same time, when you compare those narratives to what we know about neurodivergence and what we know about internalized ableism, we hit this crossroad of two identities. And then people don’t know what do I do with the duality of this, where I know that I’m pushing my body outside of its levels of capacity.

Priscilla Corson: I know that I have fluctuating levels of capacity, and at the same time, I have ideals and standards of excellence.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes.

Priscilla Corson: It’s a journey for everyone, and even my own journey on this, I had to come to terms with what resiliency really meant for me. And for me, it really really settled on the fact of I can still be resilient and take care of self. Like, resiliency does not mean exclusive sacrifice.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes.

Priscilla Corson: It may look different for each family. It may mean that I show up to this thing, but I’m not showing up to that thing. It may mean that I’m okay with showing up late, and that’s not poor planning. That’s my child is dysregulated. They’re having a meltdown. I’m gonna attune and sit and wait through that.

Priscilla Corson: and we’re gonna show up when we’re feeling our best selves.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I like that we’re talking about this because it does feel like, in military culture, I’ve got to be 110, 150% all the time. It’s like excellence always really really high to the expense like service over self.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people push and push and push and then burn out. But I have also been thinking about like the more that people are like identifying what they need, are finding ways to meet their needs, actually the more resilient they are. Or the more able they are to continue on with military life versus pushing and pushing and pushing.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Pushing feels like the recipe for burnout and for people leaving military life compared to meeting our needs first. Them being the way that we can still be very successful and it’s what allows us to do hard things.

Priscilla Corson: Even on my evaluations, cause I do autism and ADHD evaluations, and one of the things I write in the reports is learn when to apply minimal effort.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I like that.

Priscilla Corson: And this is something that is really hard for a lot of us because most of us have grown up and become serious perfectionists.

Priscilla Corson: I always say all the time, like autism and ADHD that go unsupported often turn into third friend, and that third friend is OCD or CPTSD. So we develop all these cycles to scaffold and protect ourselves, from not knowing, being late diagnosed. And so then imagine you’re then put into a culture that continues to say, like, “You need to perform at this level.”

Priscilla Corson: And you think about the vast majority of individuals that also join the military. A disproportionate number come with very high ACE scores, for adverse childhood experiences. They’re coming from different families that had all kinds of different trauma experiences, which means you’re at greater risk of re-traumatization.

Priscilla Corson: Okay, throw in neurodivergence and whoof, man. We’re really not necessarily setting ourselves up for success. And what I know in that, though, is on the day-to-day, oh man, there’s so many characteristics that I see day in and day out where forms of neurodivergence, oh wow, their strengths are leveraged in the military.

Priscilla Corson: I mean leveraged. When you talk about certain career fields, you talk about how they’re showing up, they’re being leveraged. And if we could openly talk about neurodivergence as part of that. Wow. Think about the way we increase our operations in that sense, the way we support the family unit as a whole.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: I hope for the day that that is the norm because, like you mentioned the adverse childhood experiences, which is just basically like the amount of traumatic experiences someone has gone through in their life prior to the age of 18. We’re still getting used to talking about mental health so much in the military, in society as well.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: So I think society’s a little further on than military culture. But one of my friends who joined the military like several people actually wanted to hide their mental health history. Which many people who are joining the military have mental health challenges, and those are going untreated, like no support. People aren’t even thinking about what do I need in regard to this area, and that’s just mental health. We’re not even entering neurodivergence yet.

Priscilla Corson: Let’s take just one piece of that, access to care.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah.

Systemic Barriers & Accessing Care in TRICARE

Priscilla Corson: Right? We know that it is way harder to access care when you’re a military family. A lot of people on the outside, they see it as like, “Okay, you’ve got this insurance that covers everything, you don’t have to pay anything.”

Priscilla Corson: Hmm. Let’s see that in practice, right? The number of people that can actually be TRICARE providers, right?

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yes, I mean, I tried to find a dentist when we moved here. There were three in all of the Hampton Roads, which is seven different cities, and all of them were very far away from where I lived. Like, they were very rural on the outskirts.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: People don’t wanna be a TRICARE provider because of low reimbursement.

Priscilla Corson: You have tons of wonderfully capable humans that have lived experience in this culture that can’t even get TRICARE credentialed. So for example, if a military spouse is also working for the government, you can’t be a government employee, you can’t be a reservist, you can’t be active duty and get credentialed with TRICARE because it’s considered double-dipping.

Priscilla Corson: So if you have a side practice where you’re fantastic at working with military ’cause you’re military itself, you can’t even take TRICARE, to support other military.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah. Military life is harder for neurodivergent families, and there are many, many aspects that go into that, and it’s normal.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: So if you’re a neurodivergent or if you’re thinking maybe I am because my kids just got diagnosed, yes, there are challenges, but there are also a lot of strengths that you bring to military life and that, thinking about what do I need, finding ways to meet all of our needs around our neurodivergence is actually gonna help us be more sustainable long term in military life.

Finding Neuroaffirming Care & Alternative Support (Coaching)

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Do you have any other advice, coping skills or things that you would really want neurodivergent parents or families.

Priscilla Corson: It is hard to find care and so the easy things that I always tell people is when you’re trying to find neuroaffirming care, which means individuals that are trained to not just look at perceived deficits around neurodivergence, but also are looking at the strengths. They’re looking at it through a social disability model lens, which what that means is that in different contexts, this person could be extremely successful, and that certain contexts don’t always support them.

Priscilla Corson: So if you’re looking for those types of providers that are wanting to work with the full spectrum, ways that I always tell people is, you know, look for providers that are putting out there that they’re neuroaffirming. Other language to avoid is if you see on a provider’s website where they say ASD. That’s probably not gonna be your most neuroaffirming provider because ASD is a shorthand language for autism, but it stands for autism spectrum disorder.

Priscilla Corson: And so most neuroaffirming providers won’t put that on there because they understand that autism can also be very much viewed as an identity lens, and they move away from the medical model of disorderly thinking around autism. So that’s another great way of finding a good neuroaffirming provider.

Priscilla Corson: Most that will use the infinity symbol versus a puzzle piece that signifies that they’re coming from a space that is from other lived voices of neurodivergent adults and children, versus a spaces that were designed primarily from parents that may not have been neurodivergent themselves but had neurodivergent children.

Priscilla Corson: So these are just small ways to how do I find a provider that will kind of meet that neuroaffirming lens that will understand that I still want resiliency language as part of my narrative, but also start challenging where I need my own care in that. So that’s a really great way in terms of finding neuroaffirming providers.

Priscilla Corson: You know, also looking for those that have understanding of military cultures. We’re talking about you’re taking two identity lenses, and they’re very unique in and of themselves. So trying to find both, I get it. It’s even harder, right? Like we’re looking for the needle in the haystack. Also looking to see if you can find language around that. So that’s for finding care.

Priscilla Corson: In terms of what support can look like, think about finding support in alternate ways too. We may not always have the best accessibility to maybe like specifically therapeutic care. But understand that there’s other things that might be out there like coaching in this space.

Priscilla Corson: There’s a lot of parenting programs that are in this space, you know, forms of couples therapy, right? So there are other ways to get care that aren’t just the therapy space. And so understanding if there’s concerns around what is the impact to my clearance? There are plenty of neurodivergent coaches out there that are just as fantastic around creating shared language in your household. And that might be a softer point of entry.

Priscilla Corson: It’s also easier to retain a coach if you’re moving because a therapist is tied to a license to their state, whereas a coach isn’t. So I have seen a lot of success for neurodivergent families that are military using coaches versus therapists, so that they can transition with the family virtually versus only for that state, that location, and having to restart and establish care.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah, I know like my most recent therapist lived in another country and that was great. And then the one that I had prior to that, I just asked her if she’d be willing to get licensed in the state that I was moving to and she was willing to, thankfully. Of course, maybe not everyone can do that but those could be options too.

Priscilla Corson: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: So I’m so glad you mentioned that about ways of finding neuro affirming care because those may not be things that people would know to look out for. And thinking about neuro affirming care, I’m thinking you have a practice, right? Like you see clients, they could work with you if they wanted to, right?

Priscilla Corson: I do.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: And how people could find you or work with you.

Priscilla Corson: I do own a practice that’s actually more in the coaching realm when it comes to the neurodivergent work that I do, called All Parts Included. And so you mentioned earlier, like how do families start with that language? We actually just started a brand new program, we’ve only been doing it for about a month, where it’s actually wrap around care for families. It has coaching that does skills-based work, it has therapy for individuals, it has couples therapy.

Priscilla Corson: My favorite part about the coaching element that’s tied to it, is she can meet with the whole family. Maybe next week it’s one parent and one child, maybe it’s the couple. She mixes and matches to the needs of that actual family. But the intent is, we’re gonna create shared language as a household around this. So instead of us keep missing each other in cross neurotype interactions, we have a baseline language for our transition.

Priscilla Corson: It is a lot of information to learn when you just find out about your neurodivergence. And as I was navigating this for myself, I’m like, I don’t just need it for myself. Like, I’m trying to educate my spouse. I’m trying to educate my kids on this. And there wasn’t a whole lot out there. So that’s why we started the Neuroaffirming Homes program that I’m super excited about.

Priscilla Corson: All Parts Included is the company that I own and work for. One thing I’ll say on that is, families you have it. You have all the things already. It’s more about finding what those things are, bringing them to the forefront, and navigating the differences.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah, great. For anybody who is, listening to this and they’re interested in learning more about your work, or working with you guys, we have those links in the show notes. So that way you can just go click there and learn more directly through the podcast episode.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: So, Priscilla, thank you so much for coming to be on this podcast and talking about, your work, but also some, things that neurodivergent families can keep in mind as they are navigating military life.

Priscilla Corson: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited, to see that we’re openly talking about neurodivergence and how it is with the military. This is such an important conversation, so thank you so much for holding it.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinksy: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for being here.