Adam Kootman

Performing on Command

Before becoming a therapist, I spent more than a decade working professionally as a musician in Los Angeles.

I released four full-length albums. I toured the country. Later I composed music for film, television, and advertising, including campaigns for Disney, Toyota, Porsche, and American Express.

That world has its own version of workplace masking. The pressure to perform. The uncertainty between projects. Rejection. Self-doubt. Burnout. Perfectionism. I know all of it personally.

I know what it's like to perform on command, have your worth tied to your last output, and fall apart quietly while everyone assumes you're fine.

Music also gave me somewhere to put my intensity. I spent years paying attention to emotion, tension, timing, and subtle shifts.

Turns out that's good training for this work.

I also mentor neurodivergent young adults on the work side of life. Executive functioning. Self-advocacy. Confidence on the job. So when you tell me about the meeting that wiped you out, or the unwritten rules nobody explained, you won't have to explain it twice.

Seeing Myself Differently

I was diagnosed with AuDHD in my late 30s.

Suddenly, hyperfocus, sensory sensitivity, emotional overwhelm, masking, rejection sensitivity, impulsivity, and forgetting things I genuinely cared about had more context.

For years, I had treated many of those things as evidence that I needed to try harder.

The diagnosis helped me start asking a different question.

What if understanding my brain was more useful than constantly fighting it?

Misread

A lot of autistic men spend their lives being misread.

You go quiet, and people decide you're cold. You get direct, and it lands as harsh. You take someone at their word, and find out later they meant something else. You feel something intensely, and what comes out is irritation. Or a shutdown. Or "I'm fine."

You're not any of those labels. You're being read through the wrong lens. After enough years, you may have started reading yourself that way too.

Then there's the work of performing neurotypical all day. Scripting small talk. Manufacturing eye contact. Holding it together through meetings. Coming home with nothing left for the people you care about.

That isn't laziness. It's what masking costs.

Men, Neurodivergence, and Masculinity

Being a neurodivergent man can create some strange contradictions.

You may feel things intensely but struggle to put them into words. You may want connection and still need a lot of time alone. You may care deeply about someone and struggle to show it in the way they expect.

Men are often taught to hide sensitivity, loneliness, fear, or uncertainty, so those feelings can come out as anger, withdrawal, shutting down, or simply saying, "I'm fine."

Men's therapy, to me, is partly about figuring out the difference between who you are and who you learned you were supposed to be.

That can include relationships, dating, sex and intimacy, fatherhood, masking, burnout, rejection sensitivity, shame, sensory overload, loneliness, identity, sexuality, and deciding what masculinity actually means to you.

Relationships, Divorce, and Fatherhood

I was in a relationship for more than 15 years before my diagnosis.

Looking back, I can see neurodivergence showing up long before I had language for it. Forgetting something could become much bigger than the forgotten thing. Getting overwhelmed could turn into shutting down.

When nobody understands what is happening, everything can start to feel personal.

I went through a divorce. I started over. I dated again. That made me think differently about intimacy, attraction, attachment, and the parts of myself I had spent years masking or apologizing for.

I'm also a dad. My daughter has two homes. Her other parent and I went into co-parenting therapy to build a stable life for her across both.

That took work.

When my daughter and I are together now, we're usually hiking, climbing, or out exploring somewhere.

Dating. A relationship in trouble. Fatherhood. Life after a breakup. I've been in a lot of those rooms myself.