WE'RE ALL ON A SPECTRUM

Blog Post 

The following thoughts represent only my own opinion based on qualitative research, observation, and intuition, from years of interaction with what we currently deem to be neuro-atypical relatives, friends, and dozens of therapy clients. I park it here in the hopes that someone with a more scientific frame of mind will take up this ball of findings…and run with it.

Like most clinicians, I am encountering more and more clients – and families of clients – who appear to be ‘neurodiverse’...which is like saying that only some people are unique!  In fact, so many people are being assessed this way, that I originally believed that the brain might be changing in some evolutionarily coherent way which might make us more compatible with a world driven by computer technology and artificial intelligence. However, since not all so-called ‘atypical’ folks have a head for tech, I subsequently came to believe that we are simply broadening our understanding of this characteristic and thereby identifying it earlier, as well as later. Please notice that I do not say diagnosing it earlier, as I do not see neurodiversity as a disorder. Most recently, I have concluded that the re-framing of autism as something that can be understood on a spectrum, was far more ingenious than it was ever even intended to be by those who contributed to the DSM. The roots of the word autism are from the Greek aut, (self), and ism, (the state of being); autism is the state of being oneself.

I now believe that autism is a quality that we all possess, which looks different on everyone, and which can range from dysfunctionality in one spot, to genius on another, and everything in between. Notice, too, that I say, one spot, rather than one end…I do so because I want to erase the notion of a linear hierarchy. I would like to suggest that our autism is a measure of how our brains and nervous systems respond to outside input; sensory, cognitive, and social-emotional. This is also a wide band and has its own subsets, and micro-subsets. That is, one can have a high degree of reactivity to sensory input, such as loud sounds, bright lights, sudden movement, crowded conditions, medication, rough textures – as I do – and yet be very rapid processors of language, color, music, and other people’s feelings – as I also am. Others can be slow processors of emotions and language, and yet rapid with things mathematical and mechanical – as I am not! Some can read a face or a room in a nano-second, as I can, have a high level of competency with activities of daily living – as I do – and not be able to easily read a map or remember/picture how many cups are in a quart. Some, like myself, can write well, and cannot spell well. Others can memorize and cannot intuit – that is not me! Some people have animated faces, some appear blank. Some people need quietude and solitude, others need social immersion – currently categorized as the personality traits of introversion and extroversion – with the former often being seen as less ideal. Some people crave touch, some recoil from it.

And these differences are also situational, not static. I have worked with blank-faced clients who sobbed at goodbye. Non-verbal clients whose poetry gutted me. Highly sensitive clients who loved sound baths, and seemingly low-attaching clients whose grief at the death of a parent or pet was inconsolable. My point here, is that we all have spots of slow and rapid processing along cognitive, sensory, and social/emotional lines, which may or may not change in different conditions. Some of us are very particular, and others are numb to their surroundings. We are all autistic in the sense that our states of being have individual and varying responses to input that can be deemed as rapid or slow, and our social constructions take the measure of these rates and pathologize some of them.

As Dr. Howard Gardner discovered years ago, there are multiple kinds of intelligences, and we all learn, and need to be taught, differently from one another. Not an easy feat in a one-size fits-all, overcrowded and underfunded public school system. But if the buildings can’t change, our metrics can. We are all fast and slow processors in different spots along a spectrum. Albert Einstein couldn’t tie his shoes but somehow understood, better than any human before him, that everything is relative.