We the neurodivergent are genetically different. We experience the world through a hypersensitive nervous system which informs every aspect of our thinking, our behavior, and our social values.
The dominant social group labels our way of being in the world as disordered because they don’t understand us. Even though they don’t understand, the dominant culture controls the narrative about our differences.
Society believes the experts who are not part of our culture, who see brokenness where there is order. We gradually start to believe the myths ourselves and lose all sense of self-esteem. We come to hate ourselves for being different.
They have largely not tried to understand the biological mechanisms that create our experience of self. Instead they have tried every means possible to force us to act neurotypical.
Some of us can pretend to be neurotypical, for a while, at great cost to our health and happiness, but we cannot change our neurotype. We are neurodivergent.
Our behavior and social values are different because the way we think is different. The way we think is different because our moment-to-moment experience of the world is different.
In this article, I’ll explain the key ways in which neurotypical and neurodivergent people misunderstand each other.
Source: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence | by Trauma Geek | Medium
This is a great piece of research-storytelling from the intersections of neurobiology and sociology. I highly relate to all of it. Here are the 8 key ways that are covered:
- Emotions
- Empathy
- Nonverbal Communication and Body Cues
- Words Mean Things
- Social Rules
- A Different Value System
- Skills and Abilities
- Reactions to Stress, Pain, and Overwhelm
Read the whole thing, and follow the thoughtfully curated links.
Check out Trauma Geek for more great articles, including one on “Discovering a Trauma-Informed Positive Autistic Identity”.
Previously,
- Interrogating Normal: Autism Social Skills Training at the Margins of a Social Fiction
- The Meaninglessness of “Evidence-based”
- Behaviorism: Measuring the Surface, Badly
- The Problem with Behaviorism
- Autism, Trauma, and Stress
- Persuasion and Operant Conditioning: The Influence of B. F. Skinner in Big Tech and Ed-tech
- Behaviorist Ed-tech — Ed-tech from the 1940s
- Neurodiversity in the Classroom
- Normal Sucks: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences
- Titrating the Whelm: Perceptual Capacity and Autistic Burnout
- Type Integrity: Falsification of Type, Prolonged Adaptation Stress Syndrome, Minority Stress, Masking, and Burnout
- Anxiety, Ambiguity, and Autistic Perception
3 thoughts on “Lost In Translation: Ways in Which Neurodivergent and Neurotypical Social Languages Differ”