Neuronormativity is poison
a love letter to our shamed parts
Dear wolfe pack…three things before we begin:
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Shame…
It’s one of the most difficult emotions to feel, because we resist it so forcefully. We often don’t even want to admit that it’s there. Though our bodies are guest houses for a whole host of feelings (thanks, Rumi) shame is one of the few that we lock in the basement. When such guests are starved of nourishment and sunlight (love and acceptance) they will occasionally howl in the darkness. And oh, they will eventually break free - we will need to confront them. And though, when we do, they seem hostile - they aren’t. It’s not hostility, it’s neglect, it’s…desperation.
As Sonya Renee Taylor says, everything is asking to be loved. Yes, even shame. Especially shame. In Internal Family Systems, we recognize that we have parts. Parts that are angry at ecocide and the patriarchy. Parts that are sad that the ice cream shop down the street closed down. Parts that are worried about money. Parts that are quite young which were hurt when our minds were too young and innocent to defend ourselves. Parts that grew in response to being hurt and are protecting us from harm. Mom parts, dad parts, caregiver parts…there are many. We aren’t splintered, and this isn’t some kind of multiple personality kind of situation. It’s a recognition that there are sometimes multiple layers (or influences) in any given approach to our emotions. It often applies when we feel more than one way about something. Those are our parts at odds with one another. We’re complex. But what ties all of the parts together is the desire to be loved, enfolded into the arms of the fundamental self.
When a hurt part shows up, it is asking to be loved. It’s as simple as that. But due to years or sometimes decades of conditioning, we withhold that love, believing that this part of us doesn’t deserve it.
For me, shame - despite my conscious cohabitation with it, rears its head every so often in an ugly way. Each time I confront it I feel I inch (or millimetre) closer to not having such a large dysregulated reaction to it, but it is quite the effort. I feel the effort is tantamount to how engrained it is in different pockets of my system. It hangs uncomfortably from my ribs and smears itself all over my brainstem - and this is where it has always shown up.
I found myself thinking a strange yet unsurprising thought today. I thought, “I wish I’d been surrounded by neurodivergent culture throughout my life to at least the same degree as neurotypical culture.” This sprung to mind because occasionally, in my long-term romantic partnership, we come up against my limitations as an autistic person in a way that triggers my age-old shame. There are some - many - things that my allistic partner can do that I cannot. As I move more and more each year onto the continent of neurodivergence, I see how much I used to mask to be more ‘equal’ to him and everyone else. As I discussed at length in my recent piece I’m Still Not Unmasked, unmasking is a very, very long process that takes a great deal more time than we think it will. Unmasking isn’t just contained to the social realm - it’s linked to everything we do, including how we think about ourselves. Unmasking, fundamentally, is stepping out of shame and embracing ourselves as we are.
One of the myriad ways that my mask showed up was to push beyond my limits constantly. There’s gently stepping outside of a comfort zone (which can be healthy) and then there’s leaping all the way out to the middle of the ocean without a life raft - the latter is what I did regularly. I pretended - all the time in countless types of situations - that I felt good, happy, confident, safe when I most certainly did not. I did this because I didn’t understand for the life of me how I could essentially look and talk like everyone else but would also (seemingly) be suffering a great deal more than them. It made no fucking sense. People’s inner worlds were not often on display. When I was exhausted, wasted and making out with someone when I would have rather be at home in bed, we were not talking about our secret discomforts. Had we, I’d have felt a lot more seen and at ease. But when you’re younger, things just happen, and you don’t often talk about your feelings. There isn’t a lot of room for self-reflection - that is what tends to happen, as Carl Jung outlines, in the lunar phase of life (middle age and beyond).
All of the pushing I did stemmed from shame. I was ashamed that I was different. The things I struggled with were such a point of contention that I felt I had no choice but to bury my real feelings as often as I could. Being “different” - aka autistic - was like a dirty word. I overcompensated for what I felt was a deficit in myself all the time. Perceived deficit = overextension. Trying oh so hard. It often lead to me being the more raucous partier, the loudest in the room, the most sexual, the biggest rebel, the most ambitious - because I was attempting to make up for what I lacked. More than that, I was attempting to forestall what I concluded was inevitable shaming by creating a diversion. If I was the most or the best at something, no one would see that inside I was small and shaking. If I could perform normal really well, I could perhaps convince myself that I was and the inner turmoil would end.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way - it never does.
Had I been surrounded by neurodivergent culture throughout my life, I believe that I wouldn’t have held myself to such impossible standards for so long. And by autistic culture I don’t just mean a couple of neurodivergent people sprinkled in here and there. I had that, I still have that. These are my most cherished beings! I love them dearly and I always have - but we are like overflowing wildflower pollinator gardens hedged in by manicured lawns and concrete. We bloom despite it all, not because of it all. No - by autistic culture I mean if autism was not a minority, but of at least equal size and weight. The way I feel it might be in 30, 40 years. A much more inclusive, easygoing, forgiving, diverse system that does not know ableism. I’ve begun dreaming of this, feverishly. There is no turning back time, of course. But I now know that the amount of neuronormativity that I ingested over the course of my life was poisonous, and that poison is still leeching from me each time I encounter the shame that grew to protect me.
My resistance to the shame threatens to keep me locked into the pattern of masking, but I know enough now to go the other way and allow it to pass through me. I know that it is a deep cry from the basement of my psyche to love what was constantly covered up and neglected. My hope is that this takes me from the realm of shame into fully embracing myself, but my guess is that the road will be peppered with challenges. My first instinct is to mask, always. The second is to fawn if I admit I cannot do something, feeling immense guilt and shame. The third and final mode is to locate self-compassion and be resolute in my mission to be present with myself as I am. All else that arises before and after is simply noise.
We autistics can be very resilient. But in order for the neurotypical world to not be poison to us, we need to continue mindfully unmasking, dispelling our shame, and creating our culture loudly and proudly. Shame can be healed alone, but it does so much more abundantly, efficiently and joyfully with others.
Until next time,
Love and wolves.
D xx
Thank you for this. 💜