No, Really, Why Am I Like This?
Trauma-informed practice, the 'neurodiversity boom', and the benefits of hyper-connectivity.
When I was six years old, we lost our house. Careless, I know. Knowing it would be repossessed, my parents put the keys through the letterbox, and we (my mum, my dad, my sisters, the youngest a literal tadpole) drove to temporary accommodation in the next town. Two rooms in a hostel, a shared kitchen and bathroom. The corridors smelled of vomit, which I could identify, and weed, which I could not. The vomit was because every family in the hostel was afflicted by a horrendous stomach bug. The weed? Well, that wasn’t us. We stopped drinking the water, and we became well again. I had my seventh birthday in my grandparents’ magical garden, to which we had a few months before driven the plants from our own garden, a Crabtree sticking through the sunroof. I sometimes played with some sisters called Casey and Lacey, who encouraged me to play in the guest lounge, where I wasn’t allowed to go. Rolling around on a round foot stool, I split my lip open. I lied, said I did it on the slide.
Six months on, we were offered the council house I would live in for the rest of my childhood. My youngest sister was born two months later.
When I was nine years old, I remember standing in the playground with no idea who I should play with. I was probably wearing those knee socks that caught all your leg hairs and pulled them the wrong way, and left imprints on your legs for hours after you’d taken them off. Around me, everyone was in little groups, playing with balls or gossiping. But I was on my own. I had friends, but they didn’t always want to hang out with me, and there was a persistent rumour that I was a bit ‘weird’. Leading down to the playground, there were some steps, and next to the steps was a brick wall. The playground became a swimming pool; the brick wall a diving board. Entirely alone, I spent my playtime climbing the steps, pretending to dive from the wall, and swimming lengths of the playground. It didn’t occur to me that this sort of thing might be why I was seen as a bit odd. I’d always had this inner world that kept me company, usually pretending I had my own TV channel where I was the only presenter, relentlessly narrating my life. And that protected me from others’ perceptions to some extent, even if a teacher did write in one school report that I had “an unusual personality which may annoy others”.
As far as I can tell, I’d always had the unusual personality, and always found it difficult to know just who I was supposed to be playing with. Often my attempts to play with others were rebuffed.
I recall being nine, because after that it was difficult to ignore the comments levelled at me by my peers. By the time I got to secondary school, the gap in maturity and social understanding between me and others my age had widened from an estuary to a gulf. No longer could I retreat into my inner world, because the outside world kept interrupting. Every day there was something. People laughing because I read a history textbook ‘like a story’, others shouting “run, Nyika, run” in a pseudo-hick accent as I dashed between classes, desperate to avoid the taunts whilst invoking more.
School weren’t too concerned about me. I was bright (to the point of being irritating – I wish I could tell my 14-year-old self to put her hand down for once), and the main issue was that I defiantly wouldn’t do homework, and my handwriting looked, as one teacher said, like ‘a spider had fallen in an inkwell and danced around the page’. There wasn’t much they could do about the bullying. After all, you can’t tell an entire school to stop being horrible to the one weird kid. And they weren’t really worried that I sought sanctuary in the library every lunchtime, even if the kind librarians recognised that I needed a little more protection and a listening ear.
I’m aware I write a lot about my childhood, and the bullying I endured, to the point it’s probably a bit self-indulgent. I’ve written before about the magic of my adult dyspraxia and ADHD diagnoses in explaining why I am “the way I am”. I’ve written too about the NHS autism diagnostic assessment which unceremoniously labelled me as “just anxious”, and which cited my experience of “childhood and adolescent adversity” as the true reason I felt so incongruent. Although I often present myself as fine with my self-diagnosis of “probably being autistic even though the NHS says I’m not”, the reality is that I frequently experience inner toil about my identity. If I was autistic, surely I would have been given a diagnosis? But the service I saw is notoriously poor at diagnosing women, so maybe they were wrong? But what if they’re right? The dyspraxia and ADHD can go some way to explain things, and perhaps I need to accept that. And what part did those ‘adverse experiences’ play?
Recently, I attended a morning of training about trauma-informed practice. Generally, I am a fan of the trauma-informed stance. Our pasts and our experiences make up so much of who we are, and indeed, we should be asking “what happened to you?” rather than “what’s wrong with you?”. But during this training, I found myself raising my hand and challenging the narrative at various points. Diagnosis was being presented as wholly unhelpful, and young people ‘diagnosing themselves’ as neurodivergent was, as frequently happens, dismissed as some sort of internet phenomena. Instead, we were told, we should be curious about life experience, and discourage those we work with from self-diagnosis. Really, a person’s trauma could explain away a lot of what was being ascribed to neurodiversity.
Although I publicly dissented – talking about my previous role as a lead autism practitioner, and the value of diagnosis in the lives of those I’d worked with – this discussion brought up within me some disquiet. Was I being too stubborn about the effect of my own trauma? After all, I’d been told it was probably the source more times than I can count.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve tried nearly every IAPT therapy currently offered by the NHS. Talking therapy-based counselling, low and high-intensity CBT, even the utterly bizarre Group Analytical Therapy, I’d been referred and done my 6-14 weeks weeks with all of them. One thing all these therapists had in common was the “aha” look they got when I disclosed the homelessness. “That explains it” they would say, “you struggle to make friends/feel anxious all the time/feel inadequate because of your trauma”. It was never explored much more than that, except for the time the group analytical therapist suggested I read “Why Love Matters” because “probably your mother didn’t love you enough as a baby”.
Psychology usually changes its pet reasonings faster than skirt lengths rise and fall out of fashion, but as with the enduring midi skirt obsession, the trauma paradigm seems to prevail. We really should stop diagnosing ourselves and instead accept that we are damaged by our experiences, we’re told. And perhaps some of us who identify as autistic are too stubborn to recognise that our quirks are not innate but made. Perhaps we are looking to the wrong source.
Of course, to debate whether we are simply the sum of our experiences is literally to just rehash the Kant vs. Hume argument. And if we consider the theory of generational trauma – that the experiences of our ancestors can literally change our DNA to dispose us to particular anxieties and phobias – then being “born this way” suddenly becomes the result of something our great-grandmother went through. But can the sum of these generational experiences and the experiences we’ve lived through mimic autism to such an extent that such a number of people are mistaken into self-diagnosis?
Of course, there’s growing recognition, strongly backed up by anecdata, that neurodiversity has a genetic component. Every other week a famous person with an autistic child reveals that they too have been diagnosed as autistic. It’s sometimes difficult, I admit, to see these extremely socially acceptable and popular figures get a diagnosis, when my weird, unpopular, not very socially acceptable self has been told I’m wrong.
Am I “like this” because when I was seven, we were homeless? Because when I was thirteen, I was bullied so relentlessly that I would push the point of my maths set compass into the skin of my arm? Or, perhaps, was I not as affected by the housing incident as therapists would like to think. Certainly, I am more worried about housing precarity and shortage of money than the average person. But the difficulty with others, the friends I haven’t kept, the skin I’ve compulsively chewed from around my nails, is that all because for 6 months of my life everybody was very unhappy indeed?
As for the bullying, something the trauma narrative often discounts is that to grow up neurodivergent very often is a traumatic experience, especially if you are undiagnosed. Everything is a little bit uncomfortable; Sarah suddenly doesn’t want to be your friend anymore and you can’t work out why; every time you walk across the playground somebody has a comment to make. You’re in detention every break and lunchtime (not an exaggeration) because you keep ‘forgetting’ to do homework, and yet you still can’t make yourself do the homework. You develop core beliefs that you are broken in some way. And so, it’s no wonder that an autistic person might exhibit similar symptoms to a trauma-experienced person – they too are trauma-experienced. The neurotypical world ensures this.
The frustration of psychology professionals with the seemingly TikTok-led rise in diagnoses is becoming louder. Having admired the thoughtful responses of Philippa Perry to people writing into the Guardian, I was disappointed to read that she felt too many people were identifying with neurodivergence. It’s something I’ve found echoed in mental health-related practitioners I’ve engaged with both personally and professionally. This being said, I myself sometimes get frustrated at yet another TikTok or Tumblr post positing a universal experience as a symptom of neurodivergence. Most people eat their dinner in some order of preference, leaving a bite of their favourite component until last. Most people do, in fact, have an internal monologue. Perhaps the bigger question is this: what is identifying as neurodivergent giving us that isn’t available elsewhere?
Within our hyper-connected yet increasingly individualistic world, we are all seeking community. Affinity bias means we will seek out those with whom we share similar traits, and historically for some of us, this has, for whatever reason, evaded us. And then one day, we come across somebody talking about their difficulty with certain textures, or their tendency to drink three drinks at once. And there they are. Our people, at last. And not only that, they have an explanation for our loneliness and our ‘quirks’. Once we accept that maybe we aren’t neurotypical after all, so much becomes clear.
Are too many people self-diagnosing? Does neurodivergence need the strict gatekeeping that psychologists and psychiatrists favour? The ‘explosion’ of ADHD diagnoses is often used as the reason for the current ADHD drug shortage (rather than the flawed ‘just in time’ production systems pharmaceuticals have moved towards). Those of us who continue to take ADHD medication after the first few months find we function better - we’re more productive, less anxious. For many, it’s nothing short of lifechanging. And yet we’re told we can’t possibly be correct in identifying ourselves as having ADHD, even though the medication works for us. Never mind the gendered perceptions of the condition in our youth, the Bart Simpson stereotype still strong in peoples’ minds, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
“Too many people” identifying as autistic doesn’t cause a drug shortage, and nor does it cheapen or reduce access for those who have an ‘official’ diagnosis. In fact, the usualisation of neurodiversity strategies benefits anybody for whom they help. A conference I attended had fidget toys to give away alongside the pens and notebooks. It’s becoming more accepted to want clothes which are comfortable, meaning they are more readily available, and fewer people bat an eyelid when somebody prefers texts over phone calls. In an ideal world, everything would be universally designed. People wouldn’t have to ask for reasonable adjustments, because they’d already be in place. Picking up a fidget toy alongside a free pen is just a small example of this becoming reality, of stigma slowly breaking down.
Maybe my sense of self, my quirks and my incongruences, are solely because when I was six, I lived in a hostel. Maybe they’re genetic, or innate, or just the way my brain is formed. Regardless, there are medications, strategies and adjustments which are allowing me, and others like me, to stride towards a less traumatic future. People are starting to understand me now, regardless of the source of my difficulties. Perhaps those who believe themselves to be neurotypical are finding the world isn’t solely designed for them anymore. Maybe the next generation of neurodivergent children won’t grow up into traumatised adults. A few people identifying with a diagnosis a psychologist would disagree with? Surely just collateral.