I've been okay all along.
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[00:00:00] Not why the addiction, but why the pain, asks a popular Canadian physician, and it makes me nervous. So much of what we talk about regarding any behavior or relationship with food, drugs, both prescribed and recreational, and of course interpersonal relationships, come from what I perceive as a very binary feed in for our current approaches to behavior.
Let me unpack this a little. Neurodivergent people, we use, for lack of a better word, resources, both within ourselves and outside of ourselves, to regulate, to soothe, to recalibrate. Screens, food, drugs, alcohol, relationships, sex, passions, breathwork, yoga, exercise, writing, and so many other forms of creativity, and so much more.
Just as non neurodivergent people do. Yet, we often do it bigger, harder, faster, [00:01:00] more often. When it comes to our current understanding of addiction, our focus is narrow. We automatically assume that if a person is engaging with the same thing, Person, place or thing repeatedly, it must be an addiction. This is particularly true of how professionals zoom in on neurodivergent culture, or they say it's dopamine seeking or chasing.
And yes, these things can be real. They are sometimes, of course, true. And they're real. They can be reductive, dismissive, pathologizing, and ableist. They're limiting in terms of how we come to understand human experience, divergence, diversity, and they continue to box us all in as normal or abnormal, functional or dysfunctional.
While it's true that so many of us as neurodivergent people come into [00:02:00] adulthood with significant trauma, so much of this is related to displacement.
Displacement being the disconnection from ourselves and who we are born to be as whole and complete. Instead, spending our lives being seen as broken, seeing ourselves as broken, or second rate versions of typical people. Therefore, we're always seen as more prone to addiction rather than having a completely divergent neurobiology, not just a different way of thinking and processing.
Therefore, sensing divergently on emotional, physical, sensory, energetic and spiritual levels. This in itself can be painful, yes, but the response to it, the response I received as an extremely sensitive human being growing up was not good. It was not nurturing, it was not [00:03:00] kind. My sensitivities were interpreted as weakness, as embarrassing, as failures, as less resilient.
And the adults around me were conditioned to always be projecting into the future to avoid any outcomes around who I might become rather than who I was. They were bullied by Societal ABA, Applied Behaviour Analysis. Everybody is inadvertently and advertently bullied by Societal ABA. When you know from an early age that you are not acceptable and you find a means to change that, you cling to it.
I grew up around a lot of alcohol, a lot, and I vowed to never drink. At 14, I found alcohol and I found freedom. I was able to magically appear typical. I could be [00:04:00] uninhibited and loud, talk to anyone without social anxiety, and talk about my inner world. I could have fun, sing and dance, and be what I perceived as normal.
I ended up in AA at 22 and got sober. And over the years, I continued to watch what I used to term, alcohol obliterate my family. But now I say, I continue to watch my family seek belonging. Displacement is very real. It can result in a person not only feeling complete disconnection from the outside world, but a complete disconnection from the inside as well.
To the point of depersonalization and derealization. Which is very, very common for traumatised neurodivergent people. Yes, there is pain. Absolutely. But it's not always that straightforward. There is pain from our [00:05:00] sensory worlds that cannot be dulled without tools. One of my children has worn headphones every single day from the time they were five years old.
And yes, we've been told many a time to wean her off as it's unhealthy. The pain she is in without them is unimaginable for most. It's a whole body pain. When we engage in our passions, we're told it's unhealthy. We're pathologised in the DSM. Restrictive, pettitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following.
I won't go on. You can access what they say about us as autistic people. But they basically say, it's unhealthy. that we are abnormal based on the way we engage with our interests and our support tools. Bad, bad, bad. And no, you may not use those [00:06:00] tools or resources to ease the burden of navigating a world not built for you.
Many of us do become addicts, alcoholics. Our intergenerational trauma, our stories of displacement are peppered with other various forms of trauma along the way. People who take advantage of our trust, parents and educators encouraged to see us as weak, never resilient enough, intentionally pretending to be disabled in various ways, not being able to get over the anxiety or attend school without fear or resistance.
Even now, so many disabled adults are afraid to admit to themselves that they are disabled because they don't feel that they are disabled enough to be able to refer to them as disabled. That is an example of internalized ableism [00:07:00] from societal bullying. What happens next? We realize we're traumatized and that becomes our special interest.
It becomes our lifelong focus, especially, especially, especially when we do not know we are neurodivergent. I spent my life, until the age of 33, telling myself, both consciously and unconsciously, if I just get better, be better, do better, life will finally be okay. I'll be a better parent, a better partner, a better child, a better friend, a better employee.
Jesus, where does it end? Where does it ever end? Where, what, is the end point? Not enough of us think about that. This is so normalized to always be striving to be bigger, [00:08:00] better, faster, stronger. At what point do we feel we're good enough? Is there always room for better? Most of society will tell us that there is always room for improvement.
Why wouldn't you want to be better? But what if, just what if I've been okay all along? What if I've been enough? What if I am enough? What if? This way of being, feeling deeply, thinking that runs for miles, needing processing time without saying additional, because it instantly others me and compares me to people who don't need a whole lot of time to think, is more than enough.
How much longer will I torture myself with the need to overcome? And what the hell am I overcoming? Do I even know? Is my [00:09:00] pain mine to process? and overcome? Or is it years and years of being told I am unacceptable? That messaging isn't always direct and verbal. It riddles society like a cancer. The lines around trauma and pain are very quickly blurred.
And here's the final point, that I want to make about behavior and being neurodivergent. We are still being pathologized even in therapy. We're still being examined via the lens of behaviorism. You're drinking a lot, there must be pain that needs to be overcome. I didn't eat, drink, or drug myself into oblivion because I was solely in emotional pain only.
I was opting out. I was checking out of a world that [00:10:00] hated me. rejected me and wouldn't teach me or support me to know and understand my difference as a perfectly whole and complete, naturally occurring variation of human being and doing, a divergence. I was escaping from a world that I had to process, think about, feel and sense because I had no choice.
Sometimes there is no overcoming. Sometimes there is. There can only be supporting, flipping narratives, overturning who we've been told we are. We are telling children that their challenges and their struggle is a weakness on their part. We are telling their parents that they are not raising their children.
well enough for them to be [00:11:00] resilient whilst they continue to live in a society with such institutional power that oppresses many forms of divergent people. We're telling people what's wrong with them and giving them absolutely nothing else. Even when we find tools to support ourselves, we are othered and bullied.
But what other tools do we have? I will always live with pain. As a PDA autistic person, always, and I can still be happy and whole, but I need support and I need community to be immersed in a world that normalizes my experience. What if my screen use, vaping, exercising, our [00:12:00] relationships with food and eating, what if those things are not related?
to emotional pain that needs to be resolved or overcome. But sets of tools and supports we have discovered in the abandonment we have experienced as a result of societal rejection. What if in therapy all you have to offer me will never be what I need as a neurodivergent person? I've talked about it for over 30 years.
I've talked about my pain, I've used CBT, I've used so many of the most recommended approaches. I've been immersed in trauma therapies with human beings who sat across from me truly believing themselves to be equipped to provide answers and solutions for me and this is part of the problem. I switched from trying to [00:13:00] overcome to working toward embodying my autistic self a number of years ago and this.
is radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is not accepting children's behavior unconditionally, as I see people discussing. It's not about behavior. God, it's not about behavior. Radical acceptance is when we're shifting away from trying to overcome what may not ever be overcome and finding ways to support ourselves inside of the pain, inside of the chaos.
It's radical honesty. If I have 45 years of experience with myself, knowing this is how I think and feel, this is how I process. There is true wisdom in preparing for those moments where CBT isn't going to cut it. Imagine just living. [00:14:00] I know, imagine it! Imagine just gardening, or creating, or showering, or resting without hating ourselves for it, because we should be doing something else, somewhere else.
Imagine remembering that this is the only life we get to be who we are now. Imagine not being solely focused on how we support ourselves as either good or bad. Instead of being curious, imagine instead of centering on someone's behavior, we step back and radically ask ourselves with honest curiosity, what is it that they're getting from drinking that they need?
What is it that they're getting from gaming that they need? [00:15:00] Because sure, we can figure out the pain or think that we have, but what happens when the pain hits harder one morning? What then? Knowing what it is won't be enough. Having additional pressure to not go to a bottle of alcohol or to spend 24 hours straight immersed in gaming isn't going to prevent the pain, it's going to add to it.
Particularly for a PDA autistic, adding rules into our lives, for anybody, creates additional pain. Why can't we meet ourselves where we are, call in our pain, meet it with a cup of tea and have a conversation with it without judgement. The thing is, I know how to breathe deeply. I know how to cry. I know how to write, I know how to talk, I know how to move my body, and I take responsibility for all the [00:16:00] things I can in order to support myself.
But I cannot be responsible for a world that will not listen. and actively chooses not to understand me. A society that is encouraged to actively misunderstand, overlook and outright abuse neurodivergent people. Our focus is on changing people in childhood in order to avoid being targeted, right?
Autistic children are a prime example. When we immerse them in social skills training without their consent. When we believe that a generic framework of occupational therapy, psychology and speech pathology is all they need just because we identify them as autistic, we displace them. We overlook the individual.
We displace them [00:17:00] in childhood. We create their pain. Am I saying not to seek support or treatment for trauma? No. And having to address all the, what about? And the, are you saying? are also a byproduct of us not being able to just live and let live. It's active participation in societal ABA. Not being able to read, acknowledge differences and move on without making someone wrong is active participation in societal ABA.
I won't give up another moment of my life trying to overcome. I'm actively spending the next 45 years of my life immersed in loving all my parts, wholly and completely. And whilst I know there is pain and there is trauma, I also know I'm okay. I am enough. And enough is [00:18:00] enough.
