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Sita-Marie Pillay
About
Hi, I’m Dr. Sita-Marie Pillay. I’m a licensed clinical psychologist in California and currently live in Sonoma County. My background includes trauma-informed care, school-based mental health, program development, and working with neurodivergent clients across a pretty wide range of settings.
As a psychologist, I’m warm, direct, curious, and very much a real person in the room. I don’t expect you to communicate a certain way, make eye contact, sit perfectly still, or somehow know the “right” answer to my questions. My job during an assessment is to understand how your brain works and how you experience the world, not to see how well you fit into a textbook.
I want you to leave the assessment process understanding yourself better than when you came in, regardless of what the final diagnosis ends up being.
I became especially interested in working with autistic and neurodivergent adults because so many people spend years knowing that something about their experience is different without having language for it. Some people have learned to mask so well that their struggles are missed entirely. Others have been given explanations that never quite fit.
I think a good assessment can be incredibly meaningful when it helps you put pieces together and understand patterns that may have followed you for years. I’m also very interested in the ways neurodivergence overlaps with things like trauma, burnout, relationships, sensory experiences, culture, and identity, because people are a lot more complicated than a checklist of diagnostic criteria.
Mostly, I want you to feel like I’m trying to understand you rather than asking you to prove something to me.
I take an affirming and strengths-based approach, but that doesn’t mean pretending that challenges aren’t challenging. I think you deserve space to talk honestly about the things that are difficult without having those difficulties turned into a list of everything that is “wrong” with you.
During an assessment, I’m looking at the whole picture: your strengths, your support needs, the strategies you’ve developed, the things that drain you, the environments where you function well, and the ones where you don’t. I’m especially mindful of masking and of the fact that autism does not look the same in every person.
When we get to feedback, I’ll explain what I found in normal human language and give you space to ask questions. I want recommendations to actually be useful to you, not just a generic list at the end of a report. If a tool, accommodation, routine, or support makes your life easier, I see that as information about what works for your brain, not evidence that you should be trying harder without it.
