This Voice is Mine: the Unquiet Podcast

What does it take to build a movement of over a million people when you started secondary school unable to speak a single word?
In this episode, Dr Emma Offord speaks with Eve Harrison, founder of Let's Make A Difference, a grassroots campaign raising awareness about communication challenges and the power of small acts of understanding. Eve is autistic, learned BSL during the pandemic when speech was not available to her, and has since used that journey to educate, include, and advocate for others.
This conversation moves through selective mutism, the invisibility of quietly struggling neurodivergent young people, diagnosis, the SEND white paper, and the raw truth about what schools do not yet understand. Eve is 18 years old and already changing the conversation.
Different, not less. That is the message. And it has always been true.
Connect with Eve on Instagram: @lets.make.a_difference1
This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast is hosted by Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Lives. For every neurodivergent mind that was masked, misread, or missed.

What does it actually mean to take care of yourself, when every version of self-care you've tried has felt like another thing to fail at?
In this episode, Dr Emma Offord speaks with Suzy Reading, Chartered Psychologist and author of How to Be Selfish, about what it takes to heal our relationship with self. 

Not with a checklist or a spa day, but with the slow, courageous work of coming home to your own needs. 
Suzy unpacks the gender conditioning that teaches women their worth depends on how much they give, why selflessness is a coping mechanism rather than a virtue, and why the resentment and anger so many women feel when they begin to say no is not the problem, it is the signal. 

She also guides the group through two simple somatic practices that are more powerful than they look.
This is a conversation about permission; permission to receive, to rest, to be one person, and for that to be enough.
Connect with Suzy on Instagram: @suzyreading suzyreading.co.uk
This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast is hosted by Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Lives. For every neurodivergent mind that was masked, misread, or missed.

Ryan Swain was told from childhood that his energy was too much, his focus was wrong, and his way of being didn't fit. Teachers called him a liability. Nobody asked why.
In this episode, Dr Emma Offord talks with Ryan, founder of the You, Me & ADHD awareness campaign, about growing up undiagnosed in a system that had no language for who he was. Ryan shares the story of finding skateboarding at eleven and how it gave him something school never could: a space where his neurobiology made sense. He also introduces his tornado analogy for ADHD, one of the most grounded and accessible frameworks for understanding why environment is everything.
This is a conversation about survival, self-acceptance, and what becomes possible when you finally find your thing.

Connect with Ryan on Instagram: @officialryanswain ryainswain.co.uk
This Voice Is Mine: The Unquiet Podcast is hosted by Dr Emma Offord, clinical psychologist and founder of Divergent Lives. For every neurodivergent mind that was masked, misread, or missed.

What happens inside a child's body when they hold it all together at school, only to fall apart the moment they walk through the front door? And what does that cost the parents who are there to catch them, every single day?
In this episode, Dr Emma Offord is joined by health psychologist, CBT therapist, and EMDR practitioner Jo Rodriguez for an honest, warm, and deeply grounding conversation about what it actually means to parent neurodivergent children inside a system that was never built for them.
Jo brings more than 20 years of clinical expertise and something equally important: her lived experience as a mum to three neurodivergent boys. She speaks with clarity and compassion about the gap between what professionals are trained to know and what parenting actually feels like on the ground. About the exhaustion of being the family's main regulator. About the invisible grief of watching your child mask all day, then come home and need somewhere safe to fall apart.
Together, Emma and Jo explore what is really happening in a child's nervous system when they suppress their needs to fit into environments that were not designed for them. They talk about the long-term cost of unmetabolised stress, the moment a nervous system reaches its limit, and why the post-school meltdown is not a behaviour problem. It is a body trying to return to safety.
They also speak honestly about what this does to parents. The burnout that builds quietly. The pressure to know the answers. The loneliness of advocating for your child when the system keeps telling you that you are overreacting. And the small, cumulative ways that parents can begin to resource themselves, even when the big solutions are out of reach.
This is a conversation for every parent who has sat in a parents' evening hearing "no bother at all" while knowing something else entirely.
Connect with Jo: Instagram: @straightforwardpsychology

Lisa Galley built her career in autism the long way round: studying part time, raising three children, sitting her finals at nine months pregnant, and working in high-pressure NHS autism outreach before burnout took it all away. What followed was years of frightening physical symptoms, a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, and a profound loss of identity. What she built on the other side was something she never planned: a community, a business, and now a book.
In this episode, Dr Emma Offord and Lisa explore what parental burnout really looks like when it is severe, somatic, and relentlessly minimised by the medical system. They talk about regulation-first parenting, why beige food and unlimited screens are not lazy choices but genuine nervous system tools, and why the instincts parents already have are so often buried under shame and social pressure. Lisa also shares the story of her daughter, identified as autistic only in adulthood, and what that taught her about quiet masking and the cost of being told you are the good one.
This is also a conversation about bravery. The courage to advocate differently when colleagues, critics, and old professional identities are watching. Lisa's debut book, Parenting Your Autistic Child: Permission to Do It Differently (Penguin Random House, August 2026), is exactly what the title promises: not a manual, but a permission slip.
If you have ever felt judged for parenting your way, dismissed when you knew something was wrong, or like burnout had taken everything you worked for, this episode is for you.
Connect with Lisa: Instagram: @schoolrunmumautism
Find the Autism Parenting Revolution membership at Lisa's website. Pre-order Parenting Your Autistic Child: Permission to Do It Differently (Penguin Random House, 27 August 2026).
Connect with Divergent Lives:
 Instagram: @divergentlives Website: divergentlife.co.uk 
Free 15-minute consultation: [email protected]