Key To Achieving Therapy Service Ltd

11/09/2026

Why are we so invested in making people push harder along established routes, when human intelligence, self-knowledge and genuine persistence might be found in creating another way? We seem far more comfortable asking people to increase their effort than questioning whether the route itself still makes sense.

For people with chronic conditions and disabilities that are fluctuating or largely invisible, capability can easily be mistaken for capacity. Once somebody has been seen working, travelling, dancing or managing well, that visible moment becomes the standard they are expected to sustain.

We reward persistence when it takes a familiar form: working the expected hours, maintaining the expected pace and continuing to do things in ways society already recognises. Changing the method, reducing the load or using support can be interpreted as giving up.

Finding another route may be one of the most intelligent responses available.

When we are in survival, however, it can be difficult to see beyond keeping the existing structure standing. We use our remaining energy trying to cope better with the same life.

I know this because becoming a mum as a neurodivergent woman with chronic illness led me into burnout. I spent years trying to make the old ways work through effort. Now I understand much more about what drains me, what gives me energy and what I need in order to function sustainably.

Self-knowledge is part of finding another way. So is knowing what support will make a genuine difference and where to find it. This is much of what I do in my work: looking beneath the immediate difficulty, making sense of the wider pattern and helping people find routes that work with who they are.

For me, “never give up” now means staying committed to the life I want while allowing the method to change. It means finding ways to be me without continually paying for it with my health.

When disabled people are judged by how much they can produce, how hard they will push and how little support they require, we keep locating the failure in the individual.

What if disabled people haven’t given up? What if society has given up on finding another way?

02/09/2026

02/09/2026

“Coping” tells us almost nothing about what made coping possible. We see the outcome and risk attributing it entirely to the child. My son walked in to his first day at school happily. From the outside the conclusion could simply be, “He coped brilliantly.” But that removes the context. We arrived early deliberately. We reduced the intensity of the transition. He had time to orient and make a connection. The outcome cannot be separated from the conditions around it.

The conditions that enable coping are individual.

This is where the one-size-fits-all argument becomes important. “Arrive fifteen minutes early” isn’t the lesson. For another child, arriving early could potentially make things harder. The lesson is that we need to understand what this particular nervous system needs in this particular environment. We can use evidence, patterns and clinical knowledge, but support still has to be individualised.

That’s a much more sophisticated professional point than “here are five things that help neurodivergent children start school.”

We don’t account for the cost of making coping possible.

Because there are actually two costs we can make invisible.

There is the cost to the child. A child may appear to cope in school while expending enormous effort to do so.

But there is also the cost around the child. The preparation, planning, adjusting, anticipating, regulating, changing work, holding uncertainty and creating the scaffolding that means everybody else gets to see a child who “coped”.

28/08/2026

A huge thank you to this parent for sharing their experience. It means so much to hear how Katie’s support has helped their family better understand their children and secure support that genuinely reflects their needs.💚

If their story feels familiar and you're looking for practical, neuroaffirming OT support for your child, we'd love to hear from you.

23/08/2026

I was diagnosed at 39 years old and finally my whole life started to make sense. However, pretty much all the support I have received of any meaning or benefit has been self-funded.

Awareness is increasing, but I still see the tumbleweed reactions when I mention to professionals that I have connective tissue disorder and I'm hypermobile.

So many of the clients I support also present with connective tissue disorder, and connecting the dots of how this impacts on health and function is often challenging because of the lack of awareness within many systems, health, social and education.

This is why moments like this matter. Speaking out at Number 10 about hEDS is the kind of visibility that could shift things for individuals/families who have spent years being dismissed, self-funding their own answers, and doing the connecting of dots that systems should be doing for them. I'm sharing this because awareness at that level is long overdue.

20/08/2026

A huge THANK YOU to this wonderful parent for sharing your experience. Your words means so much and help other families feel seen, supported and hopeful we are so grateful to be part of your journey.

12/08/2026

A lot of emotional avoidance does not look like avoidance.

It can look productive, responsible, organised, helpful or fiercely independent.

It can look like keeping busy, working too much, cleaning the house, exercising, filling the diary, picking up the phone the second there is a gap, asking for reassurance again or analysing something so thoroughly that we never actually have to sit with how it feels.

The behaviour itself does not tell us enough.

Going for a run might help one person regulate and help another person stay away from what they are feeling. Keeping busy might give someone purpose and meaning, or it might mean they never have to find out what happens when they stop. Researching and analysing might help someone understand an experience, or it might become another way of avoiding the uncertainty of not knowing.

The occupation can be identical. What it is doing for the person can be completely different.

That is the part I think we miss when we talk about emotional regulation.

We are very good at asking what helps a feeling reduce in intensity. We are less practiced at asking what the feeling is responding to, what we feel compelled to do next, and what that response might be telling us too.

Not every uncomfortable emotion needs to be removed.

Not every strong feeling means our interpretation is accurate.

And not every emotional response is asking us to regulate ourselves better.

Sometimes something actually needs to be acknowledged, understood, changed or stopped.

I’ve written a longer piece about this on Substack because I think learning how to regulate emotion is only part of the work. We also need to learn how to read it.

Data needs interpretation

11/08/2026

People judge the output, because the output is the only bit anyone can see.

In May, my MP invited me to a Mental Health Forum. The brief was the challenges facing young men. Two months later I had a 112-page book, printed, in a box, ready to hand out in the room.

That reads as fast. It was not fast. It was twenty-two years of delayed output arriving at once.

Neonatal through to palliative. Secure mental health through to education. Everywhere I have worked, I have met neurodivergence, named or unnamed.

What May provided was not the idea. It was the conditions:

A brief from outside me, not a goal I set myself at eleven at night.

Real interest, rather than obligation.

A deadline attached to actual people in an actual room.

Permission for the output to be tangible rather than perfect.

When those line up, the stored material moves. When they do not, nothing moves, and no amount of discipline changes it.

Discipline has never once been the deciding variable.

I am writing this because surge-based work can be read as luck, or as the easy route, or as evidence that someone is not serious.

It is none of those. And the two decades that load it are invisible, as is the quiet stretch afterwards where nothing gets made at all.

If inclusion means anything at work, it has to include this. Not only space for different needs in a room, but space for people to produce in the way their nervous system actually produces.

Link to the substack article and the book on Amazon in the comments....

09/08/2026

I was glad to attend this Mental Health Forum in July.

When I was invited earlier this year, the brief around young men’s mental health stayed with me. It connected with something I have been seeing for years in practice: we often meet boys and men too late in the story.

After the crisis. After the withdrawal. After the anger. After the shame has already settled in.

I’m really glad to see this conversation happening locally, and I hope it keeps widening.

08/08/2026

When handwriting is difficult, practising handwriting isn’t always enough.

Handwriting is a complex functional task. It relies on a number of skills working together, and there can be many different reasons why a young person finds it difficult, slow, tiring or hard to keep up.

That’s why an Occupational Therapy assessment isn’t simply about looking at the handwriting itself.

We look more broadly at the young person, the task and the demands being placed upon them, to help identify the barriers that may be affecting their performance.

We have a range of standardised and functional assessments available, including the DASH-2 for handwriting, which we can use alongside our wider OT assessment and clinical observations.

The aim is to understand what might be making the task difficult, and from there identify practical strategies and support that are appropriate for that individual young person.

Because when everyday tasks repeatedly feel harder than they should, the impact can extend beyond the task itself. It can affect participation, confidence and how a young person begins to see their own abilities.

Difficulty with the task is the thing we can see. Understanding what sits behind it is where assessment comes in.

We offer face-to-face functional OT assessments from our Ilkley office on Saturdays and Sundays, subject to availability.

If your child is struggling with handwriting or another day-to-day functional task and you’re not sure why, you can contact Key to Achieving to discuss whether an assessment may be helpful.