Stop Asking a Fish To Climb a Tree (For Clinicians, Educators, Psychologists, Coaches, etc)
Visual Explainer: Environment matters — ability is contextual for the AU+DHD mind
Read the full article here.
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"
