Weldon Wellness

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Dr. Laura Z. Weldon is a naturopathic doctor and neurodiversity advocate who specializes in integrative mental health.

Dr. Weldon provides naturopathic consulting and health counseling services nationwide for people with chronic physical and mental illness via telemedicine. She has particular expertise in supporting neurodivergent and sensitive nervous systems, including a history of trauma, dissociation, ADHD, and autistic and highly sensitive people, as well as digestive health, nutrition, herbal medicine, physical medicine, and craniosacral therapy.

16/04/2026

I am now offering autism and ADHD diagnostic assessments for adults 18 and over who live in Oregon, through my private practice.

I have been providing neurodivergent-affirming assessments for several years, but this shift to my own practice allows me to:

- offer a three-tier sliding scale for payments
- provide lower-cost options for people who don't need a full diagnostic report (all assessments come with a letter of diagnosis and suggested accommodations, should you meet criteria)
- have more flexibility about the tools I use
- easily provide integration sessions or initiate counseling after the assessment is completed

All pricing is transparent on my website on the "Schedule" page with a full explanation of the sliding scale; link in bio.

I have particular expertise in diagnosing people who are/have:

- a history of trauma (complex or PTSD)
- women, non-binary, and trans
- twice-expectional
- high-masking
- dissociative disorders (including DID, when well-integrated/can report experience)

13/04/2025

On community as a web

As chaos grows on a national level, more people are talking about and turning towards local community. But what does that mean and look like in practice?

I've found that for many of us, showing up for community has felt ironically individualized. Our neighbor spent an afternoon helping us move, so we note that we should spend an afternoon helping them with their yard. Someone brought us a meal, so we hold that we owe them a favor, either a meal in kind or something of "equivalent value."

While well-intentioned, this is a highly transactional, scale-balanced, one-to-one way of thinking about showing up for our communities.

I have been reimagining community as a web.

Everyone we interact with is in our web. Our family, friends, neighbors, and people in our faith or interest groups often come to mind first. Beyond that, community includes those we may not immediately consider, such as the family who owns the convenience store we stop in after work, the person who delivers our mail, other regulars at the coffee shop, familiar faces at the library, and the houseless person we pass each day.

Everyone in this web has different resources to spare, both in quantity and kind. We each have different skills and amounts of open time, different things that come easily to us, and everyone's capacity ebbs and flows. There are times when we have much to spare and times of great need, and this can vary day to day and year to year.

If we contribute the resources we can most easily, when we have them, to whomever needs them, without keeping track of any "give and take," we can zoom out to see the balance. It comes on a larger scale, the community web taking care of itself and each other as everyone pays it forward.

A crucial piece for this to work: we must ask for what we need. This can be the hardest part for many, but it is essential; without it, others don't know how to show up.

In sum:

Recognize who is and could be part of your community web.

Consider what you can more easily give, spare, and do.

Ask for what you need when you need it.

When you hear others name a need you can meet, offer what you can.

Receive gratefully.

Give generously.

08/04/2024

In the last 24 hours, I felt the sun on my skin, the warmth of a fire, stood in the rain, swung in a hammock, saw two rainbows, watched a lightening storm roll in, and witnessed totality of a solar eclipse. ☀️🔥🌧🍃🌈⚡️🌑

From Virginia Woolf's diary in 1927, after experiencing totality: "What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing. Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness. How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it; being at the mercy of the sky; our own nobility; the druids; Stonehenge; and the racing red dogs; all that was in one’s mind."

20/03/2024

Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon 2017

More than the fuschsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.

Happy spring equinox 🌿

[There are three slides of images, all of my neighbor's magnolia tree in full glorious pink blossoms. The second is on a rainy day, glistening with droplets, and in the third is a bird's nest high in the branches, blue sky behind.]

07/10/2023

On coming home to my body 🏡

A month ago I took a yoga class - the first I was able to do in its entirety in nearly a year. Towards the end, I felt emotion stirring and my mind repeated, “Hi body, hi body.” Usually, I say this to myself when I feel pain, to acknowledge the sensations as communication from my body, but in this moment I was in none.

“Hi body.”

Then it hit me - I felt at home again. I had not realized I had been carrying fear that I would never return to my previous capacities. The relief was overwhelming in its familiarity, joyous in its possibility.

This is not to say that I am physically unchanged. The space of me is different now, softer, rounder. I try not to place demands, I buy bigger clothes. I'm learning to take up space while letting go of the need to fill it.

The body that is my home has never been the most comfortable of places, but it is gloriously mine and it deserves to be celebrated.

I am listening to “The Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros. The main character, Violet, is the hero - and she is hypermobile. In the opening her mother says, “Violet has experienced more pain by breakfast than you have in your entire life; she can handle it.” The novel explores the manifestation of strength beyond the physical and I imagine what it would have been like to read this as a teenager, to be inspired by her determination and see myself in her.

I have been relishing the simple physical things I can do again, taking extra long walks with Huxley. I am finding new ways to accommodate myself. As a lover of the physical page and pen this was not without heartbreak, but I bought a trifold keyboard so I can write away from my computer without pain; I’ve written 3x as much since. I was craving speed and nature, so we “biked the railroad” (easy recumbent exercise) and I laughed with joy. I got a beautiful shower stool. I wore the BodyBraid while moving and landscaping and could do more than I ever thought possible (and looked a bit like a superhero).

My home went through major trauma and it carries metaphorical and physical scars. But it is here, saying hello, welcoming me back into myself, and asking me if I’d like to dance.

Image descriptions ⬇

31/05/2023

My schedule is officially fully reopened!

In person appointments at , virtual naturopathic sessions, and adult autism and ADHD assessment schedules are all available.

Photos are from our trip to St John, a few more highlights I wanted to share.

[Image 1 is what I believe is a red frangipani blossom. Image 2 is a ruin of a sugar plantation with shadows from the roof beams on the ground. Image 3 is of a handmade bowl carved into stone at the petroglyph site next to a freshwater pool. Image 4 is of the St John petroglyphs and their reflection in the water, which archeologists believe were carved by the Taino people a thousand years ago - this felt like a healing place. The spider lily in the background was the only one I saw in bloom on the island. Image 5 is of a tree overtaken ruins of a plantation - reclamation. Image 6 is a sacred kapok tree, seemingly covered in eyes. Image 7 is a view of Reef Bay, with native palms in the foreground. Image 8 is of Drew sitting down beside cacti overlooking the sea, island shore in the distance. Image 9 is from a roadside overlook of a bay with bright blue water and a few boats.]

19/05/2023

On finding balance in the sun and sea 🌊☀️

I've come, in my personal and professional life, to hold deeply the importance of balancing life's traumas and challenges whenever possible. Not to erase the pain, certainly, or even to lessen it, but to bring balance to the complications of being, to experience the fullness of life in all its intensities. There will be pain - let there also be pleasure. There will be sadness - let there also be joy. Grief and connection. Work and play (and rest).

For six weeks after losing the twins, I let the world recede and sat in the quiet. And then Drew and I took a trip, our first real vacation together in a decade, to St. John in the Virgin Islands. I alternated between floating in the sea, staring at the sky and mountains, and sitting in the sand, staring at the sea and soaking in the sunshine. I did a puzzle, enjoyed a fantasy audiobook, walked in nature, listened to live music, and looked at the horizon line instead of a screen two feet away. We spent time being rather than doing, and it restored us.

Someone asked me how my heart was doing. “Huge,” I said. The grief takes up no less space than it did before, but somehow my heart has grown around it, the capacity to hold it has expanded to make room for more life, more love, more hope. It is strange that in many ways our lives have returned to how they were before the pregnancy, daily patterns unchanged, and yet my body and our hearts are forever transformed; I am, in as many ways, someone different now. Being in a place entirely different for two weeks helped me integrate this, and being surrounded by such natural beauty helped me drop the need to make sense of it all. Sometimes things simply are. When we stay open to the expanse of human experience, we can see the beauty around us offering its balance.

May beauty surround you.

P.S. If anyone wants to do a study on how salt water (drinking it, floating in it) is a treatment for hEDS and POTS, this mermaid will happily volunteer.

24/03/2023

An (un)announcement: on pregnancy, love, and loss.

For nearly 5 months I carried identical twin boys Drew and I were thrilled to meet this summer.

We were waiting until the second trimester to publicly announce, but we learned about serious complications affecting one of the babies. After extensive testing and consultations, it was evident this baby would not survive; he passed at 19 weeks. Shortly after, I was hospitalized for two weeks while we did all we could to save the seemingly healthy baby. After many tests, three procedures, and brief moments of hope, this baby’s heart also stopped; we are not certain why.

I am home now and recovering, my body faster than our hearts. We have been surrounded by incredible support and generosity, near and far, and are deeply grateful for it all: texts, cards, prayers, emails, flowers, dinners, financial support, visits, places to stay, broth, rides, bodywork, gf baked goods, puzzles, dog-sitting, cozy socks, shared stories, and love. There are honestly too many of you to list, which is an unbelievable gift and will get us through these difficult months.

I do want to name the medical staff at UK labor and delivery, our doulas and , my mother .weldon18 for insisting on being there every day at the hospital, community at , and for flying in to provide support my first week home (and for leaving me with a freezer of Laura-friendly foods).

The pregnancy was not easy. All of my chronic conditions flared: near-constant migraines, tachycardia, joint subluxations, and pain severe enough to warrant purchasing and using a wheelchair for the first time.

But those early months were also full of excitement, joy, hope, and so-much-love. There are moments I will cherish, like when Drew said having twins was like winning the lottery, or the day I knew they were both facing anteriorly and I went swimming, all three of us floating on our backs together.

These are the photos I want to share and remember, the ones that capture some of that joy for the months we had together. Image descriptions are in the comments.

01/01/2023

The view into the year ahead may not yet be clear, but I can see the beauty through the frost and fog (and I hope you can, too).

Happy new year, everyone.

Some Weldon Wellness 2022 highlights:
✨️ I worked with 97 clients and patients
✨️ recommended pedicularis more than any other herb (an ally for the stressed and restless)
✨️ joined part-time and gave 8 autistic and 5 ADHD people their formal diagnosis
✨️ presented to naturopathic doctors about dissociation, counselors about neurodivergent- affirming therapy, and MDs about the neurodiversity paradigm and autistic burnout
✨️ served on the board at .theory
✨️ celebrated two years in private practice and as part of the wonderful community at

[Image is of frost on a window pane, looking out through porch posts to a foggy Ohio River.]

07/11/2022

Offering virtual adult autism and ADHD assessments!

Appointments are available and I offer free consultations. You can learn more at AdultAutismAssessment.com or email [email protected] to schedule a consultation or assessment. I personally provide assessments for people who live in Oregon, but we have other (also neurodivergent!) providers who can do assessments ANYWHERE in the United States.

Many autistic and ADHD children make it to adulthood without a diagnosis. Maybe you were missed because you masked your differences, lacked access to resources, your providers carried misconceptions, or you came from a largely-neurodivergent family where your differences weren’t seen as anything out of the ordinary.

As an adult, you may have self-identified and now need a formal diagnosis to access accommodations at work or school, or perhaps you have suspicions but want a professional assessment for validation.

My assessment process is neurodivergent-affirming, which means that we approach these differences neutrally - as an identification of a different way of being, thinking, and experiencing the world, not as a diagnosis of pathology (while fully acknowledging the challenges that being different in these ways can bring). One of the sessions is focused on uncovering masked autistic traits.

The assessment is over telehealth so you can be in the comfort of your own space. If you have family members who you would like to contribute information about your childhood that is welcome, but not necessary.

The practice is cash-based and does not accept insurance. Because of this, we can ensure that you have total control over the disclosure of your diagnosis; if we accepted insurance we would have to submit the diagnosis and it would become part of your permanent medical record. For some, this isn’t a concern, but for many adults, privacy is a priority. Rates are transparent and available on the website, and all autism assessments start with a screening; if it is clear that you will not meet the criteria for a diagnosis from the start, there is no charge.

Have questions? Leave a comment, send me a message, or schedule a free consultation.

[Image is of the rocky Oregon coastline in July with waves crashing on the shore and grasses in the foreground. Text overlaid reads: Adult Autism and ADHD Assessments, Neurodivergent-Affirming, Virtual Appointments, Accommodations Letters, Family Input Optional, No Wait List, Adults 18+.]

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+15028057807

Website

http://weldonwellness.com/

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