Stop Asking a Fish To Climb a Tree (For Clinicians, Educators, Psychologists, Coaches, etc)

Take your time to look at this image and reflect on what it may mean before expanding the answers.

 When a neurodivergent person struggles in a particular setting — school, work, social situations — the instinct is often to ask what's wrong with them. But this card asks a different question: what's wrong with the environment? A fish isn't broken because it can't climb a tree. It's simply in the wrong environment for its particular brilliance. The same person who fails in a rigid, one-size-fits-all system can be extraordinarily creative, deeply focused, and highly intuitive in the right one.

What This Means in Real Life

• School struggles don't predict life outcomes for neurodivergent people

• The right job, relationship, or environment can unlock capabilities that seemed absent before

• Masking — performing neurotypicality — is exhausting and leads to burnout

• Their strengths are real, but may only be visible in the right context

What Helps

• Focus conversations on environment fit, not personal failing

• Help them identify and seek environments where they naturally thrive

• Recognize and name their strengths explicitly and often

• Challenge the narrative that they need to be fixed

Signs You're Seeing This in Daily Life

• They thrive in some settings and struggle enormously in others

• They light up around specific interests or topics

• They've been told they're "not reaching their potential" repeatedly

• They carry shame about past failures in environments that weren't built for them

This visual encapsulates the neurodiversity-affirming position that ability is contextual rather than fixed — and that neurodivergent struggle is frequently a product of environmental mismatch rather than inherent deficit. It is highly effective for reframing school and work "failures," challenging deficit-based narratives, and opening strength-based conversations with clients who carry significant shame about their history of underperformance in neurotypical systems.

Theoretical Links

• Neurodiversity paradigm (Armstrong, Singer)

• Social model of disability

• Strength-based therapeutic approaches

• Contextual behavioural science — behaviour as function of environment

• Masking and autistic burnout literature (Pearson & Rose, 2021)

• Self-determination theory — autonomy, competence, and relatedness in context

When to Use This in Session

• When a client has a history of academic or professional failure and carries associated shame

• When exploring masking, its costs, and its relationship to burnout

• When helping a client identify environments and contexts where they naturally thrive

• When working with families who frame the client's struggles as motivational rather than contextual

• As an introduction to strength-based goal setting

How to Introduce It Suggested script:

"Before we talk about what's been hard, I want to show you something. Take a look at this — what does it bring up for you?"

For families:

"I'd like to reframe something we might have been looking at from the wrong angle. This image might help."

Suggested In-Session Questions

• "Where in your life have you been asked to climb trees?"

• "Where is your ocean — where do you feel most capable and most like yourself?"

• "What would it look like to build more ocean into your daily life?"

• "What strengths become visible when you're in the right environment?"

• For families: "Where have you seen them thrive? What was different about that context?"

Client Homework / Between-Session Reflection

• Strength mapping exercise — identify three contexts where they feel most competent and what those contexts have in common

• Identify one area of life currently asking them to climb trees — and one small way to introduce more water

• For families: observe and record one moment this week where their person visibly thrived — bring it to next session

Common Client Responses to This Visual

• Emotional recognition — particularly from clients with long histories of being told they aren't reaching their potential

• Hope — the ocean reframe can be genuinely transformative for clients who have only ever seen themselves through a deficit lens

• Anger — toward educational or professional systems that never questioned the tree

• For family members — can shift the conversation from "what's wrong with them" to "what's wrong with the environment"

Contraindications / Clinical Cautions

• Be mindful of clients who may use the environment frame to avoid developing any adaptive skills — balance validation with gentle growth orientation

• Strength-based work can feel invalidating to clients who are deep in burnout and cannot yet access their strengths — meet them where they are first

• Share it — send it to someone who needs to understand you, without having to find the words yourself

• Use it in conversation — open it together and say "this is what happens for me"

• Use it in session — clinicians: introduce before or during psychoeducation discussion

• Print it — stick it somewhere visible as a reminder

• Use it as a starting point — you don't have to explain everything, just say "read this first"

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The content, images, and patterns shown on this website are common observations and personal insights – not universal rules. Individual ADHD experiences vary significantly.

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