The Need For Neutrality

There is a lot of discussion around the strengths of being Neurodivergent in neurodiversity advocacy. Often this narrative is used to make us sound more attractive to employers - as I’ve touched on in previous articles. Another way this is used is to combat negative and ableist stereotypes about various mindbodies - that Autistics lack empathy, have poor social skills, that ADHDers are disorganised and unreliable, that Dyslexics have poor communication skills. It is right that we counter discriminatory attitudes and educate about the realities of our mindbodies, but then we often cross that line and start getting into ‘superpower’ territory. ‘My ADHD gives me the superpower of hyperfocus’, ‘My Autism gives me the superpower of a strong work ethic’, ‘My Dyslexia gives me the superpower of big picture thinking’. Not only does this reinforce the idea that we need to be talented and productive to be worthy, it creates a hierarchy within these identities - glamourising the ‘elite’ and further pathologising those with these identities but without these ‘superpowers’.

I understand the desire to be more than when you spend your life being told you are less than, but it is a trap. There is no ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ because the ‘normal’ in the middle doesn’t really exist. It’s another false binary that reinforces hierarchy - a tool of colonialism. And while celebrating our strengths can help heal wounds, we need to be mindful of how we think and talk about those strengths in relation to our neurodivergence to avoid reinforcing ableism. Part of this is becoming proactive about evolving the language we use. 

A great example of this is the Māori word for Autism, coined by Keri Opai: ‘Takiwātanga’ meaning ‘in their own time and space’. Judgement-free, neutral, descriptive. It speaks to difference, not deficit and not superiority.

How often are we thinking about the roots and stories of the terms we use? How often do we consider how the limitations of our language keep us trapped in colonised thinking?

Let’s stay on autism to demonstrate. 

Autism comes from the Greek for ‘self’ and means 'Selfism'. It was coined by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler and was considered to denote 'morbid self-absorption'. 

According to Bleuler, 'autistic thinking was characterised by infantile wishes to avoid unsatisfying realities and replace them with fantasies and hallucinations'.

By the 1970s, this definition had been thrown out in favour of an equally offensive one that was quite the reverse. Psychiatrists and psychologists had decided by this time that Autistic children lacked any kind of internal processing at all. That they were devoid of imagination, that they had 'a complete lack of an unconscious symbolic life'.

Fast-forward to the 21st century. It must be better now, right? Well, sort of. Neuroscience has enabled us to understand more about what goes on at a neuronal level in the brain of an Autistic person. (Mostly) gone are the highly offensive and subjective descriptions of the Autistic experience by non-Autistics, but the colonial bias rife in research still couches facts in negative judgements if anything differs from the construct of ‘normal’. 

For example, one neuroscientific description of the increased synaptic connectivity of autistic brains reads 'a surplus of synaptic connections'. The intimation being that there are too many. These synaptic connections are surplus to requirements! My question is, whose requirements? Who decided there was an optimal number of synaptic connections? Optimal for what? Acting in accordance with colonial norms? Performing neurotypicality? Why should those be the goals of my mindbody rather than honouring the needs and uniqueness of my neuro-normal?

We cannot continue to evoke colonial concepts with our language and expect it not to shape our thinking, our approach to and our understanding of our own mindbodies. We have to start challenging every aspect of our language that reinforces a ‘right way of being’.

And while Keri Opai was clear that his term can be used by people of non-Māori heritage, borrowing terms from other languages (even when we are certain it isn’t cultural appropriation) means we miss out on an opportunity for depathologising and decolonisation. As speakers of colonial languages and the descendants of colonisers, it is our job to pro-actively decolonise our language and depathologise our identities from the clutches of ableist colonialism and to use more accurate and liberating terminology. 

What if we let go of thinking about ourselves and others in comparison to an imaginary ‘normal’, and start describing mindbody differences with neutral, judgement-free, descriptive language? If we deliberately cultivate neutrality, what freedom may follow?

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

1. Think about the features of your mindbody, your own neuro-normal, what language are you using to describe these? Are you using binary, less than/more than terms? What neutral language could you introduce to decolonise your thinking around this?

2. Think about the names and terms for different features of your mindbody. Where do they come from? Are they pathologising? What alternative names and terms might you want to use that are neutral, judgement-free and descriptive?