I’m feeling like I want to start a new series about how to treat every brain with respect.
What does that mean?
Well, one of the core principles of the way I think about brains is that every brain is doing its best for its person. A brain isn’t “broken” because it’s not doing what we (or others) want it to do in the way we (or others) think it should be done.
Brains have lots of features (built-in options for flexible functioning) that we sometimes complain about as bugs (“it’s not working”). Instead of complaining about bugs, we just need to learn how to use the features.
Although every brain works by the same physical principles, it’s also true that every brain is different and the experiences and biology that are part of each individual brain are different. That means that — as a species — we end up with a whole beautiful diversity of human brains available to us.
Thank goodness. Diversity is magic for creating and maintaining a healthy system.
So, while I appreciate the words that try to educate about differences-as-good: differently-abled, neurotypical (meaning the big proportion in the middle of the bell curve), etc. — and I understand that sometimes having a “diagnosis” means doors of self-understanding and self-acceptance can open, I dream of a day when we won’t need to have labels — a day when we can just assume that every brain is differently-abled and we need to respect and discover how things work for each person.
Anyway, I thought it might be useful to collect examples of what this means, what brain-respect might look like in Real Life.
And today I was listening to a video about “5 Things You Should Never Say to a Child With Aspergers”. It’s from Lori Petro and is a fabulous example of what I think are “best practices” for brain respect. She does a great job of showing how not to make the other person wrong, how to connect respectfully, how to shift our own thinking and expectations to be more curious rather than judgemental about what works for another person.
Here’s the link to her blog page that also includes the video.
And a page telling more about her philosophy and her personal story of what I’d call brain-self-respect.