The Paradigm We Inherited

Welcome 8 min

Somewhere in your file, in a school report, in a clinical intake, in the language a parent used when introducing you to a relative, a sentence got written that placed the deficit inside you. That sentence has a history. It was not invented by the person who said it to you. It descends from a paradigm that pathologized variation in the nervous system before any of us were born, and tonight we are going to walk back upstream to where that water came from.

How are the vibes coming in tonight? One word, one sentence, a sound, a face. We will move from there into a frame that may rearrange how you read your own history.

The Skills 15 min

Nick Walker (2014, 2021) names two paradigms that shape how clinicians, teachers, and family members read your nervous system. The pathology paradigm treats neurodivergence as a disorder to be remediated, with the goal of producing behavior closer to a neurotypical norm. The neurodiversity paradigm treats neurological variation as a natural and valuable form of human diversity, with disability located at the meeting place between body and environment rather than inside the body alone. The first paradigm produces ABA in childhood and “you should mask better” in adulthood. The second produces accommodations, identity, and community.

Damian Milton’s 2012 paper introduced the double empathy problem and rearranged the conceptual furniture of autism research. Milton, an autistic sociologist, argued that the communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people is not a one-sided deficit located in the autistic person but a bidirectional mismatch between two cognitive styles that have not learned to read each other. The autistic person and the neurotypical person are both, in some sense, foreign to one another. The deficit was always shared.

Crompton and colleagues (2020) tested this empirically, running an information-transfer task across three group conditions: autistic-to-autistic chains, neurotypical-to-neurotypical chains, and mixed chains. Information transferred just as efficiently in autistic-to-autistic chains as in neurotypical-to-neurotypical chains. The mixed chains were where transfer dropped. Empirical confirmation of what autistic adults had been saying for decades: the gap is between, not inside.

In 2024, Botha, Chapman, Onaiwu, Kapp, Stannard Ashley, and Walker published a collective correction, naming that the neurodiversity paradigm was not coined by any single individual. It was built collaboratively across disabled and autistic communities, online and offline, over years. Crediting the paradigm to one person, even Walker, distorts the lineage. The paradigm belongs to the people who built it together.

What changes when you carry this frame: the sentence in your file is not the truth about your nervous system. It is the residue of a paradigm. You can keep reading the residue, or you can walk upstream.

Practice 12 min

Pair-and-share, breakout rooms of two for six minutes, then back to the main room. Written-only option in chat for anyone who prefers not to be in a breakout.

1. Recall one moment, recent or old, when communication felt like a deficit located in you. A look you missed, a tone you got wrong, a meeting where you said the wrong thing or said nothing at all.
2. Tell your partner the moment in two or three sentences. Then re-tell it through Milton’s frame: where was the other person also missing something? What were they not reading in you?
3. Notice what shifts in your body when you re-tell it the second way.

Discussion 18 min

Prompt 1. What is the grief of having been “the deficit” in the room for years? What does it feel like in your body to consider that the breakdown was always mutual?

This is the heavy prompt. Hold a long silence after you ask it. Do not redirect to “but it’s better now” optimism. The grief here is the work. If a participant cries, name it gently (“there’s something true happening for you”) rather than rescuing.

Prompt 2. Where do you still find yourself blaming yourself for breakdowns that were not yours alone to fix?

Listen for the relational specifics: a partner, a parent, a boss, a clinician. The pattern often clusters around one or two relationships. Don’t suggest scripts for confronting the person; this prompt is about the participant’s own internal accounting.

Prompt 3. What does it mean for an ally in this room to learn that the breakdown is also yours to work on, not just your loved one’s? (Allies in the room: speak third, after ND-identifying folks have answered. Your seat is real, and your work is real.)

This is the first ally-as-protagonist moment of the season, and it sets up Session 9. Ally answers tonight may be raw and uncertain, which is correct. Don’t let other participants reassure them out of the discomfort. The discomfort is the work.

Closing 7 min

A small move toward refusing self-blame this week.

Pick one to take with you:

1. One conversation you have been replaying as your fault, replayed once this week with the double-empathy frame loaded. Just notice what shifts.
2. One sentence you will say out loud to yourself when the old paradigm sentence shows up: “the gap was between us, not inside me.”
3. ND-affirming resource: Milton’s 2012 original paper “On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’” (free at kar.kent.ac.uk), or the Botha et al. 2024 correction in Autism in Adulthood.
4. Nothing. Showing up was the work.

Checkout: One sentence. One thing you’re taking from this hour, plus the small concrete thing you’ll do or not do because of it.