Empowering Difference

I’m Marion Pilling, a UK-trained consultant psychotherapist and accredited coach specialising in autism, ADHD and demand-sensitive profiles. I hold an MA in Autism from the Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, I’m a trained autism assessor, a member of the International Coaching Federation, and registered in France as a specialist consultant. I’ve worked in this field for over 25 years.

The training is only half of it. I’m autistic and ADHD myself, and I raised two now-adult autistic children as a single parent in France. There was support, but not the right support. With no diagnosis and no one who really understood them, I had to make sense of my own children, and what actually helped, entirely by trial and error. I learned the hard way, and it was very hard. That mix, the clinical background and the living of it, is what shapes everything I do.

I work with neurodivergent people and the families around them: parents of autistic, ADHD and PDA children and teenagers who’ve been fobbed off by one service after another; autistic adults and young people; and late-diagnosed women working out, often well into midlife, how their own brains work. Most of the people who find me are isolated, overwhelmed, and carrying far more than anyone should have to carry alone.

My starting point is a simple one: people aren’t broken, they’re unsupported. So much of what looks like difficulty is an autistic or ADHD nervous system doing its best in a world that wasn’t built for it. My work is about understanding how someone actually works, easing the exhaustion of masking and overwhelm, and finding real, practical strategies that fit the person in front of me rather than a template. For parents, that means understanding their child, building resilience, and becoming a confident advocate. For autistic and ADHD people, it means self-knowledge, strategies, and the confidence to succeed at whatever success looks like for them.

I built my coaching programmes because I can only see so many people one to one, and there are far more families who need this than I could ever reach that way. Under all of it is the reason I started: so that other parents don’t have to go through what I went through.