A Different Perspective: The Gift of Neurodivergence
- Kai (Dr. Claudia Laufer)
- Mar 5
- 12 min read
Updated: May 13
It seems like every day, there are new articles and tips on how to overcome the challenges of neurodivergence. Whether it is yet another course on how to beat procrastination, or new ways of establishing rigid routines to “stay on track,” none of them ever seem to be a long-term solution to my struggles with functioning in a neurotypical world. Most of the time, these proposed “solutions” to my “problem” were never sustainable in real life. While they did seem to improve my frustrations for a week or two, mainly because my brain found a new project to be excited about, the amount of energy it took trying to follow these rigidly prescribed time tables and structures beyond the initial excitement inevitably led to complete burnout, and a complete collapse to all the “progress” I had made. Once my brain mastered the newly proposed way to maintain routines, it lost interest, and any attempts to force my being to continue with something it got bored with was met with exactly the freeze response the routines were meant to “cure.” What I found was that often, these well-meaning articles are written by either “successful” neurodivergents (someone who managed to make money of promising a one-size-fits-all fix), or by “experts” on neurodivergence who spent their lives learning about something they would never be able to experience themselves. What all these articles had in common was a belief that the mainstream system and narrative were the holy grail, and that neurodivergence is something that needs to be fixed to find the holy grail. This fix, of course, has very little to do with helping neurodivergents tap into their superpowers. It has all to do with fitting them into the rigid narratives and systems societies have developed over the centuries to cater to the human existential fears of the sometimes unpredictable and violent nature of life. What if neurodivergence is not a problem to be fixed? What if neurodivergence is a necessary evolution of the way humans interact with their environment? What if neurodivergence is an answer to how humanity can finally transition into a more peaceful and cooperative era of life, one without endless wars and the continued reliance on the destruction of ecosystems to keep the profit-mill going? What if neurodivergence is a gift, not a curse?
When my son got diagnosed with ADHD at age 6, I immediately went to the bookstore to see what was available in literature on neurodivergence. I had a general idea of what ADHD meant, but those ideas were all based on the stereotypical disease model the medical system pushes, along with all the drugs to fix it. I have always been cautious of the drug approach to healing diseases, mainly since none of them ever worked the way doctors told me they would. I had just started my studies in eastern medicine, and had successfully reverse an autoimmune condition with a combination of drugs, herbs, dietary changes, acupuncture, and lifestyle changes, along with regular Tai Chi. The doctors told me would require the removal of my thyroid gland. In typical neurodivergent fashion, I took my son’s diagnosis as the perfect opportunity to find out what neurodivergence meant to me, outside of the system prescriptions. The first book that fell into my hands was called “The Gift of ADHD”. What stood out about this book was that instead of focusing on changing the way my child functioned in the world, it focused on working with who my child was. Instead of focusing on the challenges the neurotypical society had with the way my child acted, it dove into what my child’s experience was living in a world that constantly judged him for who he was and how he was born. One of the chapters explained that children with ADHD are much more accident-prone, leading to increased criticism from others and significant drops in self-esteem and deeply internalized shame. The exercise this chapter recommended was to practice making mistakes, and teaching children that every mistake can be fixed and learned from. My son and I spent hours spilling glasses of water on the table, going “oops, we made a mistake, let’s clean it up”, and giggling all the way through the exercise. Back then, I hadn’t realized yet that I was neurodivergent as well. I had become a master at masking over the decades of feeling shame for being different, and was still young enough to not notice the physical and emotional toll this took on me. What I did notice though was that the exercises in this book helped me just as much as they helped my son. I was able to slowly redirect my internal dialogue from shame over making mistakes into acceptance of making mistakes. This reprogramming of my internal messaging not only enabled me to come up with solutions much quicker, but also to support my son in his journey without passing on the shame that was installed by my family and society at large.
It took more than a decade of advocating for my son and students I taught to realize that I too processed life differently. My quest to help others was nothing but a mission to understand myself outside of the masks I held on to for survival all my life, in typical ADHD tunnel vision. I spent countless hours reading up on different theories on divergent neurological systems and going over notes from my psychology classes on how bodies process information. I fought endless battles with the special ed departments at my son’s schools as well as with the administration of the university I taught at. Over the decades, I tried out a million-and-one tools I had come up with based on these struggles, integrating the feedback I got from my students about their lived experience with these tools and the results in the classroom. I came to realize that the problem was not my students or their neurological systems. The problem was the mainstream system that continued to insist that there is only one right way to do things despite all evidence that there wasn’t. In a world with a one-script-applies-to-all narrative solely based on maintaining the comforts of the status quo, those who happen lack the necessary plug-ins for this narrative are effectively left out to fend for themselves.
The typical escalator narrative of life is based on linear prescriptions. We go to school, graduate with a degree, then pick and work in a career. We get married, buy a house, send our kids to good colleges, go on vacations for a break of the daily routines, and then grow old together, enjoying retirement. On top of that, we have the cultural expectations and limited opportunities based on whether we are born male or female. Males are the go-getters, the protectors, the stoic and strong ones, the heads of the family. Females are the caretakers, the housekeepers, the emotional and soft ones, and the ones to keep the family organized and on the right track. For me, none of what was prescribed for me was ever attainable, despite my hardest and best efforts. I’m best described as autistic with ADHD tendencies, and a male-presenting soul in a female-presenting, somewhat androgenous body. The non-binary nature of my being simply wasn’t able to plug into the binary mainstream narrative of life. I was too loud, too strong-willed, too forceful, too restless, not girly enough, not conforming enough, and way too “crazy” to either find a man who wanted to share their life with me, nor to be able to stick with one career choice. While I was always top of my class in everything I studied and always successful at what I did for work, my neurological make-up simply didn’t allow for me to stick with any one thing after it settled into a predicable routine. Once I understood the patterns and nature of the job or studies I was immersed in, any continued work in the field led to physical diseases that literally froze my body until I found the courage to step out and start anew. I developed heart palpitations, crippling panic attacks, autoimmune condtions, and frozen backs that prevented me from moving or even sitting up, none of which my doctors could explain or fix. However, once I made the conscious choice to accept the shame that would come with disappointing my parents yet another time, and stepped off the escalator to find my next rabbit hole, all these symptoms and diseases vanished into thin air.
Once I moved to the United States and started studying psychology, I realized that these physical symptoms were psychological in nature; they were somatized traumas and shame. However, I think the typical neurodivergent freezes go deeper than those traumas and shame, even though I’m convinced that much of neurodivergence is rooted in unresolved ancestral trauma that has been passed down to us through the flesh of our mothers, and the memories of our fathers. I believe that our souls are the energies that decided to inhabit the flesh of our ancestors with its own ideas of how to evolve and resolve somatized trauma. In families that have put pride into conforming to traditions of generations past, rather than living up to the challenges of the ever evolving world in the present, the child’s soul’s curriculum is often in start opposition to the expectations of the parents. In a way, I see the body as the manifestation of the past ancestral life, the soul as a possible future of ancestral life, and the mind and nervous system as the tools to bring the past (body) and the future (soul) together in the moment. When the family insists on a being using its body in predetermined ways that are in line with their ancestral story, yet the soul has a mission of creating a new way of being which requires a different use of the body, suffering ensues. How does this relate to neurodivergence? In my opinion, when we go into the typical neurodivergent freezes, where our minds are trapped in circles while our bodies are drowning in a flood of overstimulation and unbearable physical sensations, our souls are putting our body’s ability to conform to outdated expectations on hold; they literally freeze us in one moment in time to give both the mind and the nervous system time to figure out the dissonance between the expectations of the world around us, and the dreams of our souls.
Our society, in its relentless efforts to escape its existential fears of death and uncertainty, has created a system of constant doing, constant striving, and constant busyness. We are fed a constant stream of distractions to keep us on our toes. We are bombarded with tailored stories of white heroes and black villains, of the “good” fighting the “bad” and the “good” being justified in taking the lives of the “bad.” We have stock markets and action movies, stories of self-made millionaires and billionaires, promising everyone that if they simply try hard enough, they too can fly to Mars or buy up half of the planet. We keep our adrenaline rushing with endless wars and corrupt elections, pandemics and horrible diseases, horror movies and daily news poisoning our environment with electromagnetic interference, carbon emissions, and destruction of original forests and ecosystems. While the neurotypical part of society has learned to mask against this constant assault on the senses, we neurodivergents are born without this ability. Instead, we are born with hypersensitivities that are easily overwhelmed by the sheer amount of senseless noise and activity all around us.
Centuries of wars and oppressive systems have dulled nervous systems to the suffering created by our insistence on maintaining the comforts of the status quo at all cost. We have grown numb to the deaths of wars, deaf to the plight of the poor, and blind to the damage to the ecosystems by our constant thriving for perfection. Comfortably numb, we continue on our destructive path to an uncertain future, unable to see the world for what it has become. This is where our curse of hypersensitivity, which freezes us in overwhelm, gives birth to our superpower: the ability to see through the veils of smoke and glitter to see the world exactly as it is. Most neurodivergent humans become shining stars when they are allowed to step out of the monotonous beats of life and are given a safe space to express their own perspectives and perceptions of life without having to conform to the fear-driven expectations of the neurotypical world. Autistic humans are often able to see and understand the underlying patterns that lead to chaotic presentations in detail and are able to find solutions to the ensuing problems other can’t. Humans with ADHD have an uncanny ability to hyperfocus in times of distress when every neurotypical person freezes in fear and overwhelm, being able to finish projects in hours that others see as lost causes. The lack of filter and masks is what gives us the ability to speak the truth buried underneath the courtesies and prescribed complaisance despite the negative responses we get for breaking the rules. It is exactly their difference in processing life that allows them to step up when the rest of the world is at a loss. It is exactly our differences that hold the solutions to so many problems we keep on running into as a collective.
We have the necessary wiring to plug into the natural rhythms of nature, free of the walls and filters and masks that keep the neurotypical world in its monotonous track. We have the ability to help humanity find a new, more inclusive narrative to life. Mainstream narrative insists that time is linear and happens in regular increments and expects us and everything else to stay within the confines of regular routines. Yet, we need to add one extra day to our calendars every four years to continue the delusion that a year can be measured in 365 days. A day can mean anything from a full 24 hours, which includes the night, and the time between sunrise and sunset, which means the length of one day differs from where you are at the moment; it is day in Los Angeles in the United States while it is night in Athens in Greece. Nature changes beats with each season, and each lifeform adjusts to the change in beats in their own way. Bears hibernate during winter; birds migrate to warmer climates. Deciduous trees lose their leaves during winter; evergreens remain green all their lives. Annual plants grow to produce seeds and then die at the end of the year, leaving their seeds to start the cycle anew the next year; perennials produce seeds, but then retreat into their roots at the end of the year, just to rebirth themselves the following year. Yet humanity insists that we work 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day, no matter how dark or light it is at that time. Why do we expect that more than 7 billion different human beings, each one with their own unique configuration of family histories, nervous systems, body shapes, cultural background and sense perceptions all dance to the same tune? Why do we continue to insist that drugging those we don’t understand to fit into our troubled systems, instead of taking a step back and honestly looking at what we are doing?
Life on this planet depends on diversity, not conformity and uniformity. When populations become too small and uniform, genetic defects increase to the point of species extinction. When monocultures in farming are hit with sudden environmental changes like droughts or floods, all crops die, leaving famine and destruction in their way. When medicinal herbs are farmed in fields, nourished and watered on regular schedules, they may look large and perfect, but their medicinal values are greatly reduced. This is in stark contrast to herbs that grow in the wild and go through periods of struggles over resources due to environmental factors and other plants; these herbs are far superior in their medicinal properties despite looking smaller and more wrinkled. Just as life cannot thrive in severely chaotic conditions with unpredictable and sudden changes, it is also damaged by perfectly predictable settings without any naturally-occurring changes. Life doesn’t happen in pure perfection or total chaos, just like it doesn’t happen in absolutes of good or bad. Life happens on the spectrum between polar opposites, with both qualities always present, just in different proportions. The light of days casts shadows just as the light reflected on the moon’s surface adds light to the dark of night. A normal neurological system is just as valid as a divergent neurological system, neither is good or bad, both are simply one of the billions of possible ways a neurological system can work.
It is time for humanity to embrace the fact that our narrative of life fitting neatly into boxes of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and good and bad has outlived its purpose. We need to accept that evolution happens whether we like it or not, and that change is the only constant in life. The temporary chaos and the associated discomfort that comes with it are important and unavoidable side effects of material manifestations morphing into new shapes and forms to keep life sustainable. To insist that the key to a healthy life is found in the narrative of our ancestors and that of continued ascend to material success is not only hurting our children, but it is painting a scary future. We need to rethink our definition of disease and acknowledge that just because something puts us at dis-ease (not at ease) doesn’t mean that it needs to be fixed or cured. Our children struggling to maintain the status quo of ancestors who have long left this world is not a sign of a disease, it is a sign that our ways of life have grown incompatible with the evolution of life. Instead of continuing to poison our children with drugs to numb them to the horrors we hide in the shadows of our glorified narrative, we need to see them as our teachers that are trying to move us into a more sustainable direction. That direction means the inclusion of all that is different, and a redefinition of what we consider the norm. It means embracing our neurodivergent and genderfluid and otherwise different children, and learning from them how we can finally move our bodies into the next awareness, one of inclusion and cooperation, not exclusion and competition. For that to happen, we need to collectively find the courage to look into the mirror and ask ourselves why it is so easy for us to sacrifice humans perceived as “other” at the altar of patriarchal, hierarchal traditions and monetary success, and why we are so reluctant to let the divergents lead the way.
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