The language of
neurodivergent experience.

Neurodivergence is a term for brains that developed or function differently from what mainstream systems were designed to accommodate. It includes ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and related cognitive profiles — not as disorders to be eliminated, but as real variations in how people process the world. The term matters because it shifts the frame from "what's wrong with this person" to "what kind of environment is this person actually in."

The conceptual framework that treats neurological variation as a natural and expected feature of human diversity — not a collection of deficits to be corrected. Coined by Judy Singer in 1998, it draws on the social model of disability: the idea that suffering arises primarily from mismatch between how a person is built and how the environment is designed, not from the neurology itself. This reframes the question from "how do we fix this person" to "how do we design systems that work for the actual range of human variation." It's a lens, not a conclusion — and it's genuinely contested from both directions: the medical model pushes back on minimizing real impairment; disability justice advocates push back on the paradigm being used to make ND palatable while leaving structural barriers untouched.

The deficit model treats ND brains as broken versions of a neurotypical standard. The difference model holds that ND brains are differently configured — that suffering arises primarily from mismatch, not from the neurology itself. These aren't just philosophical positions; they lead to different interventions, different goals, and a fundamentally different relationship with your own mind. A person who internalized the deficit model before they had language for it will approach coaching, therapy, and self-understanding in a distinctly different way than someone who has access to the difference framing.

A spiky profile means your abilities don't cluster around a consistent average — they spike sharply in some areas and drop sharply in others. You might be genuinely exceptional at abstract reasoning and genuinely impaired at something most people do on autopilot. Standard assessments are a poor fit for this shape of a person, and "but you seem so capable" doesn't tell the full story of how you actually function day to day.

Late diagnosis is what happens when ADHD, autism, or another condition goes unidentified until adulthood — often because the person was intelligent enough to compensate, female-presenting enough to be overlooked, or masked well enough that nothing "looked like" a problem until adult-life demands exceeded the capacity to fake it. Getting a diagnosis as an adult doesn't mean the condition wasn't real before. It means the system missed it.

Masking is the ongoing effort of appearing neurotypical in environments that weren't built for you. It includes making eye contact when it's uncomfortable, suppressing stimming, forcing calm when you're not calm, and running social scripts that don't come naturally. It's invisible work — which is exactly why people who do it full-time are exhausted in ways that are hard to explain to people who've never had to do it. Masking is most extensively documented in autistic people, but it appears across ADHD and other ND profiles as well.

A state of physical and mental exhaustion that builds from the long-term effort of navigating a world designed for a different kind of brain. Not the same as regular burnout or depression — though it can look similar from the outside. It's specifically about the cost of sustained masking, sensory overload, and demand accumulation with insufficient recovery. Signs include sharp loss of skills you normally have (communication, executive function, emotional regulation), complete social withdrawal, extreme fatigue, and a deep inability to tolerate demands that were previously manageable. Recovery requires reducing demands — not just resting. Rest without demand reduction doesn't resolve autistic burnout. Autistic burnout is where sustained masking and compensation lead. The causal chain matters: masking and compensation are the mechanism; burnout is the outcome.

Executive functions are the self-directed mental actions that allow you to choose goals and organize behavior toward them across time. They include working memory, emotional regulation, task initiation, planning, and cognitive flexibility. In ADHD, executive functions don't fail because you lack knowledge or willpower in the abstract — they fail at the point of performance, in real environments, without the right external supports in place. This is a performance problem, not a knowledge problem.

William Dodson's term for the ADHD motivational architecture. Where neurotypical brains can engage with tasks because they're important or rewarded, ADHD brains require ICNU — interest, challenge, novelty, or urgency — to access full capacity. The ALWAYS/NEVER principle applies: people with ADHD have always been able to do virtually anything when genuinely engaged via ICNU, and have never been able to reliably use importance or consequences as the organizing engine.

Time blindness is the difficulty perceiving the passage of time that's common in ADHD. The future doesn't feel concrete. You can't sense the hour between now and the deadline the way other people can. This makes forward planning genuinely harder — not as a metaphor, but as a literal perceptual gap. External tools (visible timers, written schedules, point-of-performance reminders) address this where willpower cannot.

Emotional dysregulation in ADHD means emotions arrive faster and hit harder than most people experience them. The trigger is always real — it's not arbitrary; the response is proportionate to how the situation feels, which can look wildly disproportionate to an outside observer. These states are short-lived compared to mood disorders, but while they're happening they're not subtle, and they tend to leave a significant amount of residual shame in their wake.

The window of tolerance — a term developed by Daniel Siegel — is the zone of arousal within which you can think, feel, and respond effectively. Inside it, you can learn, make choices, connect with others, and manage complexity. Outside it in either direction, regulated function breaks down. Dysregulation is the state of having moved outside that window: hyperactivated (flooded, reactive, overwhelmed) or hypoactivated (collapsed, numb, shut down). For ND nervous systems, the window is often narrower by default and returns to baseline more slowly. Dysregulation is not a character flaw. It's information — it tells you that something exceeded your system's current capacity.

The through-line of the entire glossary, named here because shame is felt before it's understood. Chronic shame is the accumulated product of being repeatedly evaluated against a standard your nervous system wasn't built for. Distinct from guilt (I did something wrong) and embarrassment (a momentary social exposure): shame is the identity-level conclusion that you are wrong. In ND people it often develops early, runs silently, and resists correction because it predates the language to question it. It shapes how a person approaches every tool, every system, every coaching relationship — before it ever gets named in a room.

Demand avoidance is a pattern in which external demands — even from people you trust, even for things you actually want to do — trigger a strong resistance response. The reasonableness of the demand doesn't change the nervous system's reaction to it. It appears prominently in PDA profiles and is connected to the way that autonomy feels necessary for the nervous system to access genuine willingness at all.

The general principle underlying body doubling, visible timers, checklists, point-of-performance reminders, and environmental design. Accommodation isn't cheating — it's how ND brains access their own capacity. The scaffolding doesn't do the work; it makes the work accessible. Analogy: reading glasses don't read for you, they make reading possible. ND people who use external scaffolding aren't compensating for weakness; they're providing their nervous system with what neurotypical environments assume everyone already has internally.

Sensory processing sensitivity describes a nervous system that takes in and processes environmental information more deeply than most. This isn't fragility — it's heightened attunement that makes you notice things others filter out, but also means stimulation lands harder and cumulative overload is real. It's distinct from sensory processing disorder, though there's significant overlap across ND presentations.

Interoception is the sense of what's happening inside your own body — hunger, thirst, fatigue, temperature, pain, and the physical texture of emotional states. ND people don't simply have "less" interoception — they have a different pattern of it. Some experience reduced or delayed access to internal signals: you don't know you're hungry until you're ravenous, or anxious until you're already flooded. Others experience amplified or inconsistent signals: the body's internal noise is louder and harder to interpret. In IFS and somatic work, invitations to "notice what you're feeling in your body" may land as a genuine failure of access rather than avoidance — because the signal isn't reliably there. Building interoceptive capacity is foundational regulation work.

The absence or near-absence of voluntary mental imagery — the inability to visualize in the mind's eye when deliberately trying to. Most people who have aphantasia were unaware it wasn't universal until they encountered someone describing mental imagery as a concrete visual experience, at which point the discovery tends to be significant. Coined by Adam Zeman and colleagues in 2015. Rates are significantly elevated in autistic people. In IFS and somatic work, autistic clients who report being unable to visualize during a guided exercise aren't resisting or avoiding — they may literally not have access to the imagery.

A theory proposed by autistic researcher Damian Milton (2012) that fundamentally reframes how we understand autistic social difficulty. The standard model locates the problem inside the autistic brain: insufficient theory of mind, reduced empathy, impaired social cognition. The Double Empathy Problem argues this framing is structurally wrong. When autistic and non-autistic people interact, both parties experience difficulty understanding and predicting each other. The non-autistic person struggles to read the autistic person just as genuinely as the reverse — but because the majority group has been designated as the standard, only one party's difficulty gets named as a deficit. Research throughout the 2010s and 2020s has increasingly supported this: autistic people communicate effectively with each other; the breakdown happens specifically across neurotypes. This reframes autism-specific social differences as a mismatch phenomenon rather than a one-sided autistic deficit.

An autism-specific theory describing how autistic attention tends to flow deeply into a small number of channels rather than distributing evenly across many. The autistic nervous system works in a single tunnel of focus — highly engaged in one channel, less available to others simultaneously. This explains: difficulty task-switching, the pull of special interests, why unexpected transitions feel so disruptive, and why autistic people may seem "elsewhere" even when physically present. Monotropism isn't the same as ADHD hyperfocus — ADHD hyperfocus is pulled by novelty and urgency; monotropism is the default attentional architecture, present whether or not a hyperfocus trigger is active.

Difficulty shifting from one cognitive frame, expectation, or plan to another — especially when the shift is sudden or externally imposed. In autistic neural processing, cognitive flexibility is genuinely compromised: releasing one organizing framework and adopting a new one under pressure is not simply effortful, it may be temporarily neurologically unavailable. This is not unwillingness. The distress produced is proportionate to the difficulty of the shift, not the objective importance of the original plan.

Systemizing is the drive to analyze, build, and understand rule-based systems — mechanisms, patterns, categories, and how things actually work underneath. It shows up prominently in autistic cognition. Baron-Cohen's empathizing-systemizing theory positions high systemizing as a defining feature of autistic cognitive style — and as a genuine strength when the domain rewards it. At its most challenging, it can collide with the parts of social life that don't follow rules and actively resist being systematized.