In Nurturing Neurodivergence, you provide neurodivergent individuals with practical advice and guidance for navigating a neurotypical world. Why was this an important book for you to write?

Nurturing Neurodivergence is actually birthed from a group therapy program that I wrote not long before deciding to publish it in book form. That was a big step for me, but I wanted to do my part in making neuroaffirming support more accessible. In my years working with neurodivergent people (both as a teacher previously and now a psychologist), I find that one of the biggest challenges is to explain some ultimately abstract concepts that are essential for building healthy relationships (e.g., emotional accountability, healthy boundaries, even emotions in itself) in very concrete ways. To do that, I always try my best to ground any new learning that I’m presenting someone in everyday things or events that are already very familiar and relatable for that person. And it’s not that this need for making connections between old and new knowledge in learning is exclusive for neurodivergent people – rather, it’s a shared humanity, really. But I do think that this need is taken up a few notches for many neurodivergent people. Growing up, most kids somehow seemed to simply understand new concepts taught just by listening to the teacher reading from the textbook. I’d be as lost as Alice, but if someone were to whip out everyday objects – oranges, apples, toy figures… – and explain it to me again using those things, often, I’d get it.

Every neurodivergent person is different, but many of us are concrete thinkers. It’s a myth that all of us aren’t capable of understanding metaphors or analogies. We know from developmental psychology that the concrete learning phase needs to happen before abstract thinking can develop, which is why almost every child goes through a phase where they have and need much more certainty in what’s good and bad, right and wrong. As we grow, it’s not that we completely ‘graduate’ from concrete thinking altogether, but that we generally start requiring less of it and become more accustomed to moving onto more abstract thinking at a much quicker rate.

The way I see it, neurodivergent people are the same, but we just have a higher need to stay grounded in the concrete before we can incorporate the abstract. So, to explain to my clients why our attempts to ‘control’ our undesired emotions could instead magnify the very same emotion, for example, I might do a psychodrama experiment with them where I wear a tag that says “big anxiety” around my neck, and ask them to do their best to “get me out of the room” while listening to a played recording that is supposedly their loved one confiding in them about something important, before discussing their experience of whether they really were engaging with their “here and now” during the experiment, or with me, aka their anxiety.

I’d argue that learning life skills, including how to build healthy relationships, is just as important as learning fundamental literacy and numeracy skills, but there is never a school for it. And perhaps some folks who manage to learn things without explicit teaching could pick them up as they go and apply them in their lives to build healthy relationships, but the rest of us would be as lost as I was in classes where teachers read from the textbooks (except in this case, it’s more like teachers who told you to figure it out yourself without providing anything). This is why it’s so important for me to write this book.

Neurodivergence has so many facets. Did you find anything in your research for this book that surprised you?

Neurodivergence is incredibly multi-faceted, indeed. My lived experience and years of clinical experience are the main reasons why I’d be surprised if I found anything from my research for the book that still surprises me because neurodivergence research has always been quite a few steps behind what we encounter in practice (talk about being thrown in the deep end). So, in answer to your question, no, unfortunately, I didn’t, but rather, it was what I did not find that surprised me. Before writing Nurturing Neurodivergence, I had not done research to this breadth and depth since leaving the university, and I suppose I was expecting to see more new additions to the research literature on different aspects of neurodivergence, especially around alexithymia, for instance, than what I’d found. Then again, in the very beginning, I was trying to read more laypeople articles, instead of just academic journals, in hopes that it’ll help me with writing in layperson’s terms, which is what’s intended, but was rather surprised to find the amount of misinformation on neurodivergence that’s being floated around on the Internet and social media. Many seemed to quote random (legit academic journal) articles, but completely distort findings, or add in their own claims that are nowhere to be found on the cited source. I could see the potential of some of those misinformed claims doing significant harm. So, with the exception of referencing a few high-quality blog articles written by people with lived experience, I returned to scientific sources and allowed myself to write a thesis (I mean, that’s how we were trained to write) before rephrasing everything.

What is one thing you would like readers to take away from Nurturing Neurodivergence?

That a healthy relationship with ourselves as a full package, complete with parts we like and don’t like, is just as important as, if not more than, our relationships with the rest of the world around us.

What is the next book you are working, on and when will it be available?

To be honest, I don’t know what I was thinking – continuing my usual clinical and supervisory work and writing a book simultaneously. I’ve learnt my lesson that doing so doesn’t exactly leave much room for me to have a healthy relationship with myself, and did make my close circle promise to shake some sense into me, shall I ever feel tempted to do it again. So, I don’t know if there’ll be a next book for me. But IF (a big ‘if’) there should be one, I’ll probably dive into another aspect of healthy relationships with the self that I’ve only skimmed over in Nurturing Neurodivergence.

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