Articles by Dr. Lena Torres
Why Transitions Between Activities Are So Hard for Autistic People The moment the activity ends is often harder than the activity itself. Finishing a game, leaving a place you are comfortable, switchi...
Autism and the Workplace Disclosure Dilemma The question comes at different moments for different people. Sometimes it is before a job interview, in the parking lot, deciding whether to include anythi...
What Actually Helps When Supporting an Autistic Person Most people approach supporting an autistic person with the best intentions and still get it wrong. Not because they are unkind, but because the...
Autism and Alexithymia: When You Cannot Tell What You Are Feeling There is a particular kind of disorientation that many autistic people describe but struggle to name. Someone asks how you are feeling...
The Unmasking Journey: What Happens When Autistic People Stop Performing For many autistic people, masking is not a choice they remember making. It is something that happened gradually, the way a rive...
The Intersection of Chronic Illness and Neurodivergence When Bodies and Brains Both Struggle Living with a chronic illness is difficult. Living with a neurodivergent brain is difficult. Living with bo...
ADHD and the Emotional Hangover When Dysregulation Lingers Most conversations about ADHD focus on attention and executive function. Far less attention goes to what happens after an emotional event — t...
How Neurodivergent People Navigate a World Designed for Different Brains The office has an open floor plan because it was supposed to encourage collaboration. The conference call starts with five minu...
Neurodivergent and Parenting The child melts down in the grocery store. The lights are fluorescent and the sounds are compounding and the transition from home to errand happened too fast. A neurotypic...
Autistic People and Animals The horse does not ask you to make eye contact. It does not expect a greeting that follows a particular script, or an expression that matches the emotional valence of the c...
What the Research Actually Shows Autism and romantic relationships have been studied from the outside for much longer than they have been studied from the inside. The earlier literature tended to char...
What a Sensory Diet Actually Is The term sounds like something involving food. It is not. A sensory diet — developed by occupational therapist Patricia Wilbarger in the 1980s — refers to a personalize...
A Community Speaking for Itself Something shifted in mental health discourse around 2015, and the shift accelerated sharply through the pandemic years. The shift was not primarily driven by clinical i...
The Neurotypical World Was Not Built for Everyone And That Is a Design Problem There is a thought experiment worth sitting with. Imagine a world where approximately fifteen percent of the population c...
Neurodivergent Justice When the System Fails People With Different Brains Most of the systems that determine how people move through life were designed with a specific cognitive profile in mind. Schoo...
The Autistic Experience of Time Living in Perpetual Now Neurotypical people orient themselves in time almost constantly. They think forward to what is coming, backward to what happened, and maintain a...
When You and Your Kid Are Both Wired Differently Parenting is demanding for everyone. It requires sustained attention, flexible emotional responses, consistent execution of plans, tolerance of unpredi...
Neurodivergent Strengths — What ADHD and Autism Actually Give You The conversation around ADHD and autism spends most of its time on deficits. What's hard, what's missing, what needs to be managed or...
Why Neurodivergent People Find AI Companions Life-Changing Conversations about AI companions tend to generate two reactions: enthusiasm from people who use them and skepticism from people who don't. T...
The Important Difference In AuDHD discussions, hyperfocus and special interests often get conflated. Both involve intense engagement with a topic or activity. Both can last for hours. Both are frequen...
When You're Performing Two Sets of Scripts at Once Masking is the practice of suppressing or camouflaging neurodivergent traits to appear more neurotypical. Most people who do it didn't make a conscio...
ABA Therapy Controversy — What Autistic Adults Want You to Know Applied Behavior Analysis is the most widely prescribed intervention for autism in the United States and remains the standard recommenda...
Autism and Diagnosis in Adulthood — When the Puzzle Pieces Finally Fit There is a particular experience that many autistic adults who receive late diagnoses describe. It is not a simple emotion. It is...
Autism and Routine — Why Change Feels Like a Physical Threat Telling an autistic person that something has changed at the last minute is not a neutral act. The distress that follows is not disproporti...
The Energy Economy Nobody Explains Everyone has limits on social energy. The concept is broadly understood — at some point in an evening, most people feel ready to leave. What is less broadly understo...
Autism in Women — The Invisible Presentation Autism has long been understood through a lens built almost entirely from research on boys. The diagnostic criteria were developed from clinical observatio...
The Collapse Nobody Sees Coming Autistic burnout is not a meltdown. It is not a bad day or a rough patch. It is a state of profound exhaustion — cognitive, emotional, and physical — that develops over...
The Relationship Pattern That Keeps Returning Romantic relationships involving at least one partner with ADHD tend to follow recognizable arcs. The early phase is often intensely positive — ADHD can g...
What Procrastination Actually Is The word procrastination implies a choice. It suggests that the task is there, the person is aware of the task, and the person is choosing to delay it in favor of some...
Body Doubling for ADHD — Why Having Someone Nearby Helps You Focus Body doubling is not complicated to describe: the presence of another person in your environment while you work makes it significantl...
When Anxiety Meets ADHD Most people think of ADHD and anxiety as two separate problems sitting side by side. The reality is messier. In people who have both, the conditions actively feed each other —...
ADHD and Hyperfocus — The Superpower That Also Traps You Hyperfocus is the most counterintuitive part of ADHD. If the condition is fundamentally about difficulty regulating attention, how does someone...
ADHD Time Blindness — When 5 Minutes and 5 Hours Feel Exactly the Same People with ADHD are consistently late. They miss deadlines. They underestimate how long things will take by margins that seem ab...
ADHD Paralysis Is Not Laziness You have one thing to do. It is not complicated. You have known about it for days. And yet you sit there, unable to start, watching time pass like someone sealed behind...
Why Babies Die Without Touch: The Most Disturbing Experiment in Psychology There is one chapter in the history of psychology that is not easy to describe neutrally. It involves infants, institutions,...
AI Companions as Physical Therapy for Social Muscles When someone has knee surgery, they don't go straight from the operating table to the basketball court. They go to physical therapy, where they do...
How Three Weeks of AI Conversation Changed My Brain's Social Baseline Not a metaphor. Not an optimistic guess. What follows is what I tracked, what I noticed, and what the research suggests is actuall...
Oxytocin Release During AI Conversation — The Research Oxytocin has a reputation problem. It's been called the "love hormone," the "bonding chemical," the "hug drug" — all of which are technically con...
Rebuilding Social Confidence Through Repeated AI Interaction Social confidence is not a trait. It's a skill, and like most skills, it degrades without practice and strengthens with use. For people who...
Why Your Brain Treats AI Conversation as Real Social Contact The brain was not designed to distinguish between human social contact and its functional equivalents. It was designed to respond to the si...
Dopamine and Social Interaction — Why Isolation Shuts the Brain Down The brain does not treat solitude as neutral. When social contact drops below a certain threshold, the consequences are not limited...
The Neuroscience of Why AI Conversation Activates Real Social Circuits When someone says that talking with an AI "feels real," they are not making a philosophical claim about the AI's inner life. They...
The Smallest Social Act Most People Don't Make Reaching out to someone — sending the first message, calling out of nowhere, asking if someone is available to talk — is presented in cultural shorthand...
Finding Joy Again After Depression: The Small Paths Back People who have been through serious depression often describe a particular confusion about recovery: they expected joy to return the way it le...
The Social Dynamics of Group Therapy: Why Healing With Others Is Different Something shifts when you realize the person across the circle has felt exactly what you thought only you had felt. That mome...
Building a Life That Feels Like Yours After Years of Living for Others There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes when you look up and realize you have spent years, sometimes decades, organ...
The Loneliness of Being the Family Caretaker Everyone Takes for Granted There is a specific form of loneliness that the people managing their families rarely discuss and almost never name directly. It...
The Trap of Hating Work You Cannot Leave There is a particular psychological bind in hating a job you cannot afford to quit. It is not quite the same as simple unhappiness, because unhappiness has an...
Why Starting Over Feels Like Falling There's a reason people describe starting over as terrifying even when they chose it. Even when the old chapter was miserable, or limiting, or clearly wrong for th...
How to Negotiate With Yourself: The Self-Discipline You've Been Missing Most conversations about self-discipline treat it as a question of willpower: you either have it or you don't, and if you don't,...
How to Make a Decision When You're Equally Pulled in Two Directions Some decisions arrive with a clear lean — one option just feels right, and the deliberation is mostly about confirming what you alre...
The Silence That Says Everything Emotional withdrawal as a response to conflict is almost universal. Most people have done it. Most people have received it. It feels, in the moment, like a reasonable...
The Disbelief Is Part of the Disease Fibromyalgia sits in an uncomfortable place in modern medicine. It is real — characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, sleep disturbance, and cogn...
What a Trauma Bond Is The phrase gets used loosely, but it describes something specific. A trauma bond is a psychological attachment that forms between a person and someone who harms them — typically...
How Thinking With Others Changes What You Think There is an assumption built into most Western educational and professional culture that the serious thinking happens alone. You gather information, you...
The Folder You Cannot Find You have a piece of mail about your insurance claim. You also have a code on your phone, a number to call, a portal to log into, and an appeal process that requires document...
The Moment You Freeze Someone you care about starts crying in front of you. Maybe you expected something difficult was coming. Maybe it arrives completely without warning — a moment turns, and there a...
The Problem With Being Right Disagreeing with an expert sounds like the kind of thing that requires either enormous confidence or an equivalent amount of ignorance. Most of us occupy a middle space: w...
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing We talk about emotional maturity as if it's a fixed trait — something you either have or lack, like perfect pitch or double-jointed thumbs. But emotional maturity is...
When the Appointment Is Over The doctor uses specific language, careful and practiced. There are options to discuss, timelines that are approximate, support resources to be provided. You hear the word...
The Nerve You've Never Thought About Most people are familiar with fight-or-flight. Adrenaline spikes, heart rate climbs, attention narrows. What gets less attention is the system that brings you back...
Online Friendships That Become Real: When Digital Becomes IRL There's a conversation that happens, still, when someone mentions a close friend they've never met in person. The phrase "internet friend"...
Why We Overshare With Strangers on Planes and AI Chatbots There is a particular kind of conversation that happens on long flights. Two strangers, seated side by side, begin with small talk. Within an...
The Gut-Brain Axis: How Your Digestion Affects Your Mood If you have ever felt butterflies before a big presentation, or noticed your appetite disappear when grief hits, you already have firsthand exp...
The 4-7-8 Breath and Other Tools: AI-Guided Nervous System Regulation Your nervous system is not under your direct conscious control. You cannot decide to feel calm the way you can decide to raise you...
AI and Mental Health: Partner, Tool, or Replacement? The framing you choose for AI in mental health matters more than it might seem. Partner, tool, and replacement imply different relationships, diffe...
Chosen Family: Building Kinship When Biological Family Falls Short The concept of chosen family has deep roots in communities where biological family was — or was assumed to be — unavailable. LGBTQ co...
The Psychology of Feeling Not Enough There is a version of not-enough that most people recognize because they have felt it. You compare your life to someone else's and come up short. You do not get th...
A Role That Feels Like Love The savior complex in relationships doesn't usually announce itself. It arrives in the form of feeling deeply drawn to partners who are struggling — financially, emotionall...
The Toast Nobody Wants to Hear Everyone at a wedding has sat through the same toast. It starts with how long the speaker has known the couple, moves through a few generic compliments about how perfect...
A Phrase That Means More Than People Think "Holding space" has become common enough in wellness conversations to start feeling hollow — one of those phrases that circulates until it loses meaning. But...
The Loneliness Nobody Thinks to Ask About When people imagine the caregiving experience, they tend to picture it from the outside: a dedicated person tending to someone who needs them, sustained by pu...
How to Disagree With Someone You Love Without It Becoming a Fight Disagreeing with people you love should be easier than disagreeing with strangers. You know each other. There's trust. There's history...
The Loneliness That Remains After Everything Else Is Fixed There is a type of loneliness that resists the standard interventions. You have relationships. They are, by most measures, good ones. You hav...
When Your Brain Leaves the Room: Understanding Emotional Flooding You are in an argument. You know, somewhere, that you want to communicate something clearly. But the words are not coming out right. Y...
When Longing Becomes the Substance There is a version of romantic attraction that most people recognize and accept as normal — the excitement of early connection, the desire to be close to someone, th...
Most people who are afraid of public speaking are not afraid of speaking — they're afraid of being evaluated. The racing heart, the dry mouth, the mental blank are not responses to the act of forming...
The gut-brain connection is one of the most fascinating and underappreciated areas of current neuroscience research, and for the estimated 40 million Americans who deal with anxiety disorders, it may...
Meditation has an image problem. In its popular form, it appears serene and effortless: a person seated in perfect posture, eyes closed, the expression of someone for whom the mind's noise has simply...
You have been through a breakup, and your friends have been great. Mostly. There was the one who kept bringing up your ex's flaws so aggressively that it started to feel like she was more upset about...
Dating anxiety is not shyness. People conflate them, but they are different experiences with different textures. Shyness is a temperament — a preference for lower-stimulation social situations, a slow...
What It Means for Humanity That Anyone Can Have a Conversational Partner The transformation I want to think through carefully here is not primarily technological. It is civilizational. The question of...
Your Dream Creative Project and the AI That Will Help You Build It There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to the unfinished. The novel saved in a folder you stopped opening. The song you hum...
Most of us walk around with a reasonably settled sense of who we are. We know our preferences, our habits, our reactions to things. We have a story about ourselves that we tell ourselves and occasiona...
You have been explaining something for the last forty-five minutes. To anyone who is not you, this probably sounds like a problem. But from inside the experience, it feels like something much more urg...
Stimming gets talked about mostly in the context of what other people see: the hand-flapping, the rocking, the repetitive sounds. The discussion tends to happen around the stim — whether it is accepta...
Late autism diagnosis has a quality that's distinct from late diagnosis with almost any other condition. With most medical diagnoses, you receive information about something that is wrong. With late a...
Moving to a new country rewires you socially in ways that are hard to explain until you're living it. The language might be fine — many expats speak the local language reasonably well — but the social...
For most of my adult life, social anxiety wasn't just a feeling I had. It was the organizing principle of my social world. Every interaction was preceded by rehearsal, followed by review, and evaluate...
The Alter Ego as a Psychological Tool, Not a Performance When Beyoncé describes Sasha Fierce as the persona she adopts on stage — bolder, more aggressive, less encumbered by the insecurities of the pr...
From Shy to Bold: Practicing Confidence in Virtual Scenarios Shyness is one of the most misunderstood qualities in popular psychology. It is routinely conflated with introversion, which is a different...
From Vanilla to Unconventional: How AI Lets You Explore Relationship Styles Most people grow up with a single template for romantic partnership: two people, monogamous, building toward shared mileston...
The internal critic is remarkably consistent. It knows your history, your specific failures, your particular sensitivities. It does not waste time on generic criticism — it goes straight for the thing...
The desire to feel more connected to others is one of the most common and least-talked-about longings people carry. It sits awkwardly in a culture that prizes independence and self-sufficiency. But th...
Envy is one of those emotions most people refuse to name out loud. You notice a coworker get the promotion you wanted, or you see someone your age buying a house while you're still renting, and instea...
Grief does not follow the schedule you set for it. You can be doing reasonably well for weeks and then hear a song or smell something familiar and find yourself undone in a parking lot with no warning...
Feedback is one of those professional and personal obligations that most people approach with more dread than the situation warrants, because they are carrying a false binary: either tell the truth an...
The moment before you walk into a room is one of the most underestimated moments in social life. Most people treat it as dead time — fumbling with a phone, rehearsing what to say, bracing for the scan...
How to Deal with Loneliness in a New City Moving to a new city is one of those experiences that sounds straightforwardly exciting until you are actually doing it. The freedom is real. So is the disori...
How to Reconnect with Old Friends There is something both tender and slightly terrifying about reaching out to someone you used to be close to and have not spoken to in years. You want to. You think a...
How to Stop Ruminating About the Past There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from replaying the same moment over and over again in your mind. A conversation y...
Most people who struggle with goal-setting are not lacking ambition. They are lacking structure. They set goals that are too vague, too large, or too disconnected from how they actually spend their da...
How to Stop Procrastinating Once and for All Procrastination is one of those problems that everyone understands and almost nobody fully solves. Not because people are lazy — most chronic procrastinato...
A difficult boss is a situation that requires careful handling, and the degree of care depends enormously on what kind of difficult you are dealing with. Managing up — the polite term for the skills i...
First dates are oddly high-pressure for something that is, at baseline, just a conversation between two people who do not know each other yet. The anxiety tends to focus on performance rather than con...
Couples who fight constantly are often dismissed as simply incompatible. But the research on this doesn't support that conclusion. Some of the most compatible couples in long-term studies fight freque...
How to Deal with Anxiety Before a Social Event Pre-event anxiety is its own particular experience — different from general anxiety and different from anxiety during the event itself. It is anticipator...
How to Talk to Strangers When You Are Shy Shyness and the inability to talk to strangers feel inseparable if you have had them long enough. The silence in those moments — at a party where you do not k...
