Working with Neurodivergent Clients in Conflict: Foundations
A comprehensive online course for conflict resolution practitioners.
Your clients deserve practitioners who truly understand them.
You’ve been trained in mediation, conflict coaching, or dispute resolution. You know the frameworks. You understand the process.
But what happens when a client doesn’t make eye contact? When someone needs three times longer to process what you’ve said? When a parent melts down in the waiting room before the session even begins?
Standard conflict resolution training assumes everyone communicates, processes, and regulates in roughly the same way. But they don’t. And when your practice is built on neurotypical assumptions, you risk excluding the very people who need support the most.
This course changes that.
Working with Neurodivergent Clients in Conflict gives you the practical knowledge and skills to make your practice genuinely inclusive – not through checklists or accommodations bolted on as an afterthought, but through a fundamental shift in how you understand human difference.
What you'll learn
Foundations you can build on
- What neurodiversity actually means (beyond the social media version)
- Why "high functioning" and "low functioning" labels cause harm
- The double empathy problem and why it matters for every session you run
Concepts that change your practice
- Spoon theory and why your client arrived already depleted
- Masking, and what it costs the people doing it
- Rejection sensitivity as a trauma response, not a personality flaw
- Why literalness isn't rudeness and directness isn't aggression
Who this course is for
- Mediators and dispute resolution practitioners
- Conflict coaches
- Complaints handlers and ombudsmen
- Lawyers working in family law or employment law
- Family dispute resolution practitioners
- HR professionals and workplace investigators
- Counsellors and social workers
- Anyone whose work involves helping people navigate conflict
About your facilitator
Samantha Hardy
Samantha is the founder of Conflict Management Australia and an internationally recognised expert in conflict coaching and mediation training. With over two decades of experience, she has trained thousands of mediators and conflict resolution professionals. Samantha brings particular expertise in advanced mediation theory and the integration of coaching approaches into mediation practice.
Sam is also autistic, diagnosed as an adult after her daughter’s diagnosis. This course draws on both her professional expertise and her lived experience to offer something you won’t find elsewhere: practical guidance grounded in genuine understanding.
Recognition:
- 2021 Australian Resolution Institute Award for Service to Dispute Resolution
- 2022 Conflict Coach of the Year
What makes this course different
It's not about ticking boxes.
This isn’t a compliance exercise or a list of accommodations to offer. It’s about understanding why standard practices don’t work for everyone – and what to do instead.
It's practical.
Every concept connects to something you can apply in your next session. Scripts, strategies, and real examples throughout.
It challenges assumptions.
Including yours. The most important shifts happen when we examine what we’ve always taken for granted.
It's grounded in respect.
Neurodivergent people aren’t broken neurotypicals who need fixing. This course helps you work with difference, not against it.
Course structure
NOTE: This is the full course structure, which will be released in the coming months. The course access provides you most of the content from the Foundations and Key Concepts modules.
Foundations
Understanding neurodiversity, paradigms, the spectrum myth
Key Concepts
Masking, sensory experience, capacity, trauma, the double empathy problem
Contextual Considerations
Person and environment, when it’s trauma vs neurodivergence
Practical Application
Flexibility, intake, shuttle mediation, neurotypical assumptions, being an ally
Advanced Topics
Co-regulation, documentation, consent, decision fatigue, self-care, and specialist family practice content
Delivered through video lessons with downloadable resources. Work at your own pace.
What participants are saying
This course is a must not just for anyone working in conflict resolution, but for anyone living in our diverse world. Once again, Samantha uses her gift for simplifying complex topics and delivering them in a way that is accessible, analytical and enjoyable. The course is short enough to make it easy for busy people to find the time to do it (for me, it was my weekend mornings in bed, just to prove how much I enjoyed it), and long enough to teach you the important stuff. Every part of the course, every example she gave, made me think of someone I encountered in my work, my life, and how I might have misinterpreted certain behaviours. Thank you Sam for enriching my practice and my life.
Nurit Zubery
Mediator Beyond Conflict New Zealand
This course provides a solid base for understanding neurodivergent experiences of conflict, with a strong focus on autism. Samantha Hardy uses lived experience and scholarship to offer understanding and suggest action when facing a neurodiverse conflict resolution setting. The approach is welcoming and engaging and the information is thought-provoking. This course is essential for any mediator or arbitrator wanting to provide neuroinclusive services, which, hopefully, is everyone.
Chris Klassen
Neuroinclusive Mediations Canada
I took this course to assess it for professional development in my coaching work, with my clients in mind. I did not expect it to affect me personally. The material on spiky profiles, alexithymia and masking gave me an entirely different way to understand a close family relationship that had long puzzled me. Behaviour I had read as anger or judgement made sense in a new light, and I could see how much of my interpretation had rested on my own expectations. The educative effect has been genuinely impactful.
Anonymous mediator and coach
Australia
Really interesting course – lots of food for thought thank you. I really liked the way the threads started to pull together for practical application and supporting clients – in the neurodiversity and trauma, and experiences of conflict modules.
Andrew Freeman
Mediator, New Zealand
The real question
How many of your clients have walked away from conflict resolution processes feeling unheard, overwhelmed, or pushed into agreements they didn’t fully understand?
How many didn’t come back for a second session?
How many never reached out in the first place because the process seemed designed for someone else?
You can’t know the answer. But you can change what happens next.
Ready to transform your practice?
CPD points available. Group discounts for organisations. Concession rates for students and not-for-profits.