I've had a lot of powerful conversations on this podcast, but this one with Lisa Richer stuck with me in a way I didn't expect. Lisa is a neurodivergent success partner and neurodiversity consultant, and she spent decades of her life not knowing why her body and brain worked the way they did. What she shared with me touched on something I think about constantly in my own work. The nervous system knows things long before the mind catches up.

Lisa grew up undiagnosed. As a kid, she was called too loud, too talkative, too emotional, too much. And the word that came up over and over in her childhood was "why." Why are you so loud. Why can't you sit still. Why do you always do that.

She told me that word, "why," still has a sharp edge to it for her. It lands like judgment, not curiosity. But when someone asks her "help me understand" or "how did you get there," something in her body physically relaxes. Same basic question. Two completely different nervous system responses.

This might sound small, but it's not. Language either signals safety or signals threat to the body, often before the brain has even processed the actual words. If you're a parent, a partner, a teacher, or a therapist, the way you phrase a question can be the difference between someone opening up and someone shutting down.

I think about this with my own kids now. I think about it with clients. The shift from "why did you do that" to "help me understand what happened" isn't just a nicer way to talk. It's a nervous system intervention.

Here's where Lisa's story took a turn I didn't see coming. She was an elite level gymnast, training on the junior national team, putting in five and a half to eight hours a day in the gym. For years, she was inconsistent on certain events, especially anything involving a mount or a dismount, like getting onto the beam or coming off the vault.

Her coaches noticed. They'd ask why she kept changing her steps before a vault run. Nobody had an answer. Lisa didn't have one either.

Decades later, she was sitting in her son's vision therapist's office and the therapist looked at her and asked if she used to compete in gymnastics. Turns out, Lisa has a visual processing disorder that affects her depth perception. The exact skill you need to judge distance to a springboard, a bar, or a beam.

Suddenly, an entire career of inconsistency made sense. It wasn't a mental block. It wasn't a lack of focus. Her body had been compensating for a visual difference nobody knew existed, and it had been doing an incredible job of it for years.

Lisa put it this way. Her body knew what she needed before her mind did.

I hear versions of this constantly in my own practice. Someone can tell you exactly why they do what they do, they've done all the reading and all the therapy homework, and the pattern still hasn't shifted. That's not failure. That's the body holding onto something the insight alone hasn't reached yet. Lisa's story is a reminder that the body isn't the problem to solve. It's the messenger we haven't learned to listen to.

One of the most important reframes in this whole conversation came when Lisa talked about being diagnosed with anxiety in her twenties. She was handed a prescription and sent on her way. Nobody told her what to actually do with the diagnosis. How to manage it. How to understand it. How to explain it to the people around her.

She said something that I think should be printed on the wall of every doctor's office and every school counseling room. She said, "It wasn't a label, it was data to inform how we work together."

That single sentence flips the entire conversation around diagnosis. A label suggests a box. A permanent category that defines you and limits how people see you. Data is different. Data is information you can use. It tells you and the people who love you how to actually show up for each other.

This matters especially for parents who resist getting their kids evaluated because they don't want them "labeled." I understand the fear. But Lisa's point is worth sitting with. The problem was never the diagnosis itself. The problem is a system that hands you information and no instructions for what to do with it.

Lisa also talked about how well many neurodivergent people mask, especially in environments where their body feels good, like the gym. She pointed out that even her coaches, who spent hours with her every single day, didn't recognize the signs of what she now understands as ADHD and a visual processing disorder. Not because they weren't paying attention, but because she had gotten so good at adapting that the differences were invisible.

This is such an important point for anyone in a helping profession. The people who seem the most put together, the most high functioning, the most capable of holding it all, may be working the hardest behind the scenes to make that look effortless. Lisa's own burnout, after years of masking, is proof of what that costs over time.

Near the end of our conversation, Lisa built out a framework in real time that I haven't stopped thinking about. We were talking about the process of getting back in touch with parts of yourself that got buried under years of being told you were too much.

She said healing isn't one step. It's three, in this order.

First, you have to remember who you were before the world asked you to shrink. Then, you come back to that person. And only after that can you actually reclaim them.

Remember. Come back to. Reclaim.

She pointed out that you can't skip the first step. You can't reclaim something you haven't remembered yet. And remembering, she said, can bring up a lot of hard stuff before it brings relief. That's part of the process, not a sign something's going wrong.

Whether you're a therapist, a parent, or someone doing your own healing work, this conversation offers a few things worth carrying with you.

The way you ask a question can either regulate or dysregulate the person in front of you. Try replacing "why" with "help me understand" and notice what shifts.

A diagnosis, for yourself or someone you love, doesn't have to be a limiting label. It can be information that helps you build a better system around that person's actual needs.

The body often knows before the mind catches up. If insight alone hasn't shifted a pattern, that doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It might mean the body still has something to say.

And if you're in the process of finding your way back to yourself, remember that remembering comes first. Reclaiming comes later. Give yourself permission to move through it in that order.

Here's the thing Lisa's story points to that I sit with every day in my own work. She understood her patterns. She could explain her whole life clearly, in detail, on a podcast. And her body still needed years to catch up.

That gap, between what you understand and what you actually feel in your body, is something I see constantly. It's the whole reason I built From Lock to Liberation. Not because people need more insight. Most of the people I work with already have plenty of that. It's because the body needs to feel safe enough to actually release what it's been holding, and that takes more than understanding alone.

If that gap sounds familiar to you, it might be worth exploring what's actually possible on the other side of it.

If this resonated, I'd love for you to hear the full conversation with Lisa. She's honest, funny, and generous with her story in a way that made this one of my favorite episodes to record.