Ep 7: Understanding AuDHD: Neurodiversity Affirming Paradigm

“The same traits that create difficulty can also be the ones that help us thrive.”

🎙️ Episode 7: Understanding The Neurodiversity Affirming Paradigm - Building Balanced Beliefs

Episode Summary

Welcome to Episode 8 of The AuDHD Psych Podcast — hosted by Aaron Howearth, a clinical psychologist and proudly AuDHD human.

In this solo episode, Aaron explores the neurodiversity-affirming paradigm and what it truly means to view autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergent experiences as differences rather than disorders. Drawing from clinical practice, lived experience, and real-world examples, Aaron unpacks how neurodivergent characteristics are not inherently strengths or weaknesses — they simply are, and their impact depends on context, environment, and support.

Through personal reflections on relationships, conflict, professional problem-solving, and past military service, Aaron illustrates how the same traits can contribute to both challenge and capability. The episode also examines the limits of deficit-based and medical models, the role of diagnosis and privilege, and how stratifying support needs can unintentionally fracture neurodivergent communities.

This episode offers a grounded, compassionate perspective on how clinical psychology and neurodiversity affirmation can sit side-by-side, helping individuals build stronger self-concepts, resilience, and community connection.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• What Is the Neurodiversity-Affirming Paradigm?
   Understanding neurodivergence as natural variation in human cognition — not inherently disordered or deficient.
• Characteristics Are Context-Dependent
   The same autistic and ADHD traits can be helpful in one environment and unhelpful in another.
• Strengths and Struggles Come From the Same Place
  Detail orientation, impulsivity, and divergent thinking can contribute to both conflict and creativity.
• Environment Shapes Support Needs
  It’s not traits alone that create impairment, but the mismatch between a person and their environment.
• The Limits of Deficit-Based Models
  How focusing only on what’s “wrong” can harm self-esteem, resilience, and community wellbeing.
• Diagnosis, Privilege, and Validity
  Why access to diagnosis requires resources — and why lack of diagnosis does not invalidate neurodivergent identity.
• Autism Levels and Gatekeeping
  Exploring how support stratification can unintentionally create hierarchies within the autistic community.
• Different, Not Less
  A reminder that neurodivergent people are not broken — just wired differently.

Support the Show

If you enjoyed this episode, please like, follow, subscribe, and share The AuDHD Psych Podcast across your platforms. Your support helps broaden neurodiversity-affirming conversations and reach those who need them.

Have questions, reflections, or topic suggestions? We’d love to hear from you — your voices help shape future episodes.

Keywords: neurodiversity affirming, AuDHD podcast, autism and ADHD, neurodivergent traits, different not less, autism support needs, ADHD lived experience, deficit vs strengths model, clinical psychology podcast, neurodivergent identity, Howearth Psychology

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello moisties. Welcome to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. My name's Aaron Howard, Clinical Psychologist, and human in a pretty stripey top. Well, thank you everyone for listening to our past episodes and tuning back in. We very exciting for me. We've reached uh over 100-1100. Oh, over 100-1100. Let's try that again. We've reached over 1100 streams now, which is uh which is lovely. Thank you to everyone for all of the comments and the feedback. Um, if you haven't already, please uh like, subscribe, share all of those beautiful things that get the good word out there. Ooh, the good word. Anyway, um today I am recording by myself, so I have my timer to keep me on track. And for those of you watching on video, I have a delightful, slightly less angry version of Uma in my star here. What will we talk about today? I hear you ask. Well, today I want to talk about the neurodiversity affirming paradigm. We've started this podcast to put together the ideas or the perspectives of clinical psychology, lived experience, and neurodiversity affirmation. So I wanted to have a bit of a chat about that today. What is the neurodiversity affirming paradigm? Well, it or neurodiversity affirmation is essentially underpinned by the perspective that differences are not inherently disordered, specifically in differences in neurological function or cognitive function that we call neurodivergence or neurodiversity. It's just a conversation around the characteristics that we have. Whether I'm more impulsive than the average person or have less impulse control, whether I'm able to attend to things, to pay attention to things as well as the average person or not, whether I'm more rigid than the average person, whether my senses are stronger or weaker than the average person. The neurodiversity affirming paradigm argues that these aren't inherently disordered. In fact, they don't have any valence. They're not good or bad, they just are. And when we take that perspective, we can really change the way we view ourselves and the way we view neurodivergence. So our characteristics are like any other characteristic that we have, be it eye colour, hair, skin tone, race is the question. Um height, weight. These things are just characteristics that we have, and they can be helpful in some contexts, unhelpful in others, and have no impact on others still. Have a recent example that will kind of demonstrate this. I have somebody that I love dearly, and my relationship with information and theirs are very different. I'm someone who to feel safe in the world, I need to have information so I know what's coming, so that I know the system is working. And their relationship with information is not the same. We had some conflict recently, and what happened there was I had 10 pieces of information, but I was missing about 20. My details orientation, which is really an autistic characteristic, needs all of the details. It, you know, it uh it can't let it go if there's gaps. So what my ADHD did in this context was it jumped across and linked vaguely related pieces of information that may or may not have been a valid part of the issue at hand. And then because my autistic brain doesn't like gaps in the information, doesn't like breaks in the system, I filled in the blanks. And some were probably correct, some were probably very much not so. And that was my part of the conflict that we had. Now, the flip side of that, that details orientation and that divergent thinking that comes with ADHD and autism, that's really helpful for me in my professional work, both as a clinical psychologist, but also previously in my time in the Navy: fault finding, broken system, satellite radios, IT systems. And how that works is if I know a system, I know all of the details about it, whether I'm processing those consciously or not. And I recognize when a piece is missing. So just like I can't cope with the information being missing in my personal life or that conflict with my my loved friend. Another expression of that is I automatically clock when there's information missing in a broken system or a system that's functioning suboptimally. That's really helpful. That's an autistic characteristic. And in a system where the breakdown is not obvious, my ADHD in attention will randomly throw slightly related things that may not be obvious into the mix, into that system, into my autistic thought process. And so I'll generate ideas to fix a problem that other people might not have thought of. In both situations, it's my autistic details orientation alongside my ADHD tangential thinking that actually really helps me both contribute to conflict, but also to solve problems really well. And it was that same details orientation and that same bouncing from two unexpected ideas that have partially led me to trying to resolve that conflict with my friend and was always the pivotal factor in me being able to problem solve in systems and also my work as a clinical psychologist. So that's kind of that's you know, that's my example of how our characteristics are not inherently strengths or weaknesses. Why does it matter? It matters because when we use the deficit-based model of neurodivergence, we're only getting half the story, both as people who are neurodivergent, but also as clinicians. And I'll speak to people who are neurodivergent. So I was raised in a world where autism was the, you know, the stereotypes of autism were brain man, and the stereotypes of ADHD were naughty little boys in classrooms. So if I was a girl, there was not really any representation of either autism or ADHD growing up. But even as an internalizing biological male, there weren't any representations of ADHD and autism like me. So I learned that autism and ADHD are broken or are disordered. And I didn't know that there were positive characteristics. So when I wasn't those stereotypes, I didn't identify or didn't recognize that I was those things, that I had those characteristics. Why does that matter? Because one, it meant that people who did have those obvious characteristics, I was separating them from healthy. But also, I had those characteristics, I just internalized them. And I was beating myself up about not being good enough, not being the typical person, not being masculine enough, not being strong enough, not being able to pay attention, not being uh able to challenge my emotional impulsivity when it came up. But actually, I wasn't doing it wrong. I was doing it differently. I just didn't know that. When we only have the deficit-based model to view neurodivergence through, that's all that we see, and that's all we see about ourselves. And that's we that's all that we see about ourselves as a community as well. But when we share our strengths, you know, those, when we can express our characteristics in contexts that make them strengths, then we actually start to see a truer version of what neurodiversity and neurodivergence are. When we share those strengths, when we share when we're able to apply those things in a really positive way, other people within community can look at our example and go, ah, I hadn't thought about that. I could do that too. I could leave this uh non-ADHD friendly environment where I'm expected to sit down for eight hours a day and focus on the one tedious thing. And I could go into this other environment where my details orientation gives me all the information and my ADHD gives me random influences, and I can apply those in this professional setting and enjoy my work and earn a living, for example. However, when we only have the deficit-based model, that leads to impaired self-concept, our self-esteem becomes lower. We as a community tend to take that more negatively biased view towards ourselves, towards the constructs of neurodivergent, and towards one another. And we tend to have less resilience as a community, less resilience as individuals. If I only see myself through a deficit lens, then I start to see myself as broken. When I see myself as broken, that negatively impacts my mood. When my mood is impacted, I'm anxious or depressed, perhaps, that negatively impacts the way I take care of my physical health. My exercise may slip off. My diet will slip. Maybe I can't get out of bed to cook myself meals, so I'm having bread. And then when my diet is poorer and not balanced, and I'm not getting the exercise that we know improves cognitive function, my neurodivergent characteristics are more likely to be expressed in unhelpful ways rather than helpful ways. And if my diet and exercise are down, my cognitive functioning is impaired. So my unhelpful neurodivergence is amplified. But also if I'm depressed or anxious, that impacts my cognitive functioning as well. So I've got multiple paths to reinforcing the unhelpful expression of our characteristics rather than the helpful expressions. Then I have more of an impaired self-concept. I have lower self-esteem. I have more self-criticism, and that cycle continues. But when we break it and when we see people doing the autistic things and doing the ADHD things and doing the learning difference things, and it is learning differences, not inherently disordered, we start to see that actually I'm not broken. Maybe, maybe there is something good in me. There is something whole. And that spreads through community. We model it for one another, and community as a whole becomes stronger. Now, I want to quickly touch on the notion of my timer not being on. So I'm going to pretend that I know how long I've been chatting for, and I will just keep on talking. So I want to touch on the idea of the deficit-based model or the medical model. Obviously, I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm not anti-diagnosis. I am not against the medical system. I think the underpinning principles of medicine were to help people. And so that is that is true of diagnosis. What we have though, when we're looking to help people who need help, is we have a bias towards seeing the negative. And that's how we've ended up in the spot that we are now, I would argue, is that we have systems filled with people who want to help other people. It's pro-sociality. But we also have a system that is focused on what needs help, what needs fixed things, fixing. So it's inherently deficit-based. When we diagnose, we are looking for how is this not working for a person? And we're trying to remove that unhelpful expression. But it's not the whole story. And unfortunately, when we think it is the whole story, we then start to get into the medical medical conservatism uh perspectives where we stratify support needs. And that's a pragmatic thing. We literally have systems that are funded by governments that have limited buckets of money and lots of buckets to put that money into. So they have a job to do, not my job to do, not here to criticize it. I don't know what it entails. But I need to be pragmatic. There's only so much money to go around. And so within that medical model that's getting a certain amount of government funds, they need to say we have to set a level at which we can support or we can fund supports. Do I love that? Absolutely not. I wish we had infinite money, but I respect that it is a pragmatic thing. What I don't love about that is that that filters into our communities. We see the stratification of the validity of autism based on support needs, and it's just not helpful. What we have here is people saying if you don't have a diagnosis, your autism is not valid. And that's just not true. The diagnosis of autism necessarily requires privilege. I need the privilege of access to somebody who can diagnose. I need the privilege of the funds to afford the diagnosis. I need the privilege of the knowledge of what autism is to seek a diagnosis. So I do not share the point of view that just because somebody doesn't have a diagnosis, that they are not autistic. I think that is it's ill-informed and it's also harmful. Many, many people are autistic without autism spectrum disorder because they're in environments where their characteristics are expressed in helpful ways. And many people likely have the unhelpful expressions that justify a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but do not have access to the privilege and resources to get that diagnosis to facilitate the supports that would help them express their characteristics in more helpful ways. Why do I care about that? Why am I prattling on so much? Because it fractures us as a community. And when we have a medical and a financial funding model that can only fund supports for a certain group of people or a certain level of impairment, then if we are fractured, we can't support ourselves as well. However, if we're open and a single community and we respect that our characteristics don't lead to the impairment, it's the contrast between our characteristics and environmental demands that lead to deficit and disorder, then we can actually feel included. We can feel whole as a group and we can support one another through modeling examples of how I use that same disordered air quotes characteristic in a really ordered way, a really helpful way. And I can also see when you share your experience with me, I can also see how this thing that I see as a great strength might be misapplied and actually be harmful to me, as it was with my friend and my and and our relationship. So what am I what's my main point there? My main point is different, not less. When we look at ourselves as different and not disordered, we actually start to see how many strengths we have. We can build stronger community, pardon me, and we can support one another in an in ways that the medical model that can only support those who most need it aren't. We can model, we can support, we as a community can build resilience. So now I went on a bit of a tangent there, and I'm just gonna look at my notes. What else was I going to prattle on about? I guess what I didn't want to touch on uh is clinical psychology, and I've touched on this a little bit. Uh, clinical psychology, the third tenet of this podcast, in the context of neurodiversity affirmation. It might seem counterintuitive that uh saying you're not inherently broken doesn't align at all with a system that looks for all of the disorder and deficit. But, and I think I said this in an earlier podcast, I'd argue that they're actually really complementary. Both seek to help people. One seeks to help people by saying, You're not broken here. Let me help you see all of your strengths and all of the beauty in your characteristics and lift you up and help improve your self-concept and your self-esteem. The other works to do the same job, but on the other side of the spectrum. The other looks for where your characteristics are actually unhelpful to you and tries to inform interventions, strategies, ways that we can manage that. Sometimes it's, oh, I can, instead of responding to the thing that you say to me, I can count to 10, take a walk out of the room, come back, and then reply so that my emotional ability or my emotional impulsivity doesn't impair our relationship. Sometimes I can choose environments that are a good fit for me. You know, I spent a long time in the Navy. It was an environment that was very good for a lot of people. It was not an environment that was super healthy for me. I joined in a culture of way back in the day where drinking was very normalized and that became a really central part of my life. Um it was an expression of my ADHD impulsivity. Uh, my autism and my rules-boundedness and my love of structure and explicit detail really liked the military routines in many ways. My ADHD got me charged a few times under the Defense Force Discipline Act, but that's a whole other story. On the flip side, and I'm terribly sorry, I just realized I'm not medicated and I've lost my train of thought. Uh, I was talking about clinical psychology and the neurodiversity affirming paradigm. So those characteristics were helpful and unhelpful in that context. With looking for disorder, we're looking for the unhelpful expression of characteristics so that we can manage them. Um, that's right. I was talking about changing the environment. So the being in defense, being in the Navy was it was really helpful in many ways. It was really unhelpful in many ways. I started to understand myself better even before I knew myself through the lens of neurodivergence. And I recognized that the some of the structures didn't work for me. I I don't appreciate being expected to do things that make no sense without all of the details, without all the holes being filled in to understand that. And unfortunately, in an authoritarian environment, you don't get that. It wasn't a great environment for me, and it contributed to my stress, which contributed to other unhealthy practices. So I chose a different environment. I had a friend. They are a wonderful friend, they are neurodivergent, and I owe them a lot just for being alive. Uh, just for them being alive and modeling amazing things for me, is what I meant there. So they suggested to me to start studying psychology because it was something that interested me. I was 40 or something. Um and I said to them, oh no, I couldn't do that. I'm academically stupid. And they laughed at me and told me not to be silly. And I started studying, and that facilitated me being able to change my environment to go from a arguably an acceptable fit environment that came with a lot of stress to an environment that I still have stress now. Uh, my ADHD takes on all the jobs, but I'm choosing that stress, and changing the relationship with that stress changes the impact that it has on my health and my mental health. So now I've chosen a good fit environment. So I can challenge the characteristic internally, I can choose a good fit environment, or I can have have environmental accommodations. I can engage with the environment to change it to better meet the characteristics that I bring in a collaborative way so that the environment, my workplace, for example, or my school get the results they need out of me. But I'm also able to bring my characteristics to the party and apply them in a way that doesn't cause me stress by having to fit into a nine to five, for example, or doesn't cause me stress by having to pay attention for three hours to a really boring thing that just doesn't tickle my interests at all. Excuse me. And so neurodiversity affirmation and clinical psychology. And diagnostic systems, I would argue, actually sit side by side in creating better experiences for us. They just do it through different ways. Neurodiversity affirmation acknowledges the difficulties, acknowledges the neutral, but also honors the strengths and the benefits that come with our characteristics. Whereas clinical psychology and diagnostic systems look for how can we help you express your characteristics in ways that are helpful, that become, and I don't love the language, but that become superpowers that are no longer deficit and disorder. Well, I have no idea how long I've been monologuing for today, uh, but I think I've covered all the points that I did want to. I guess in closing, I just want to point out that the premise that I work from, the premise that I live from, and the the premise that I take into all of the interactions that I do is, uh, and there's a lovely book out there, I've mentioned it before, and I'm sorry, I still can't remember the author's name. It's called Different Not Less, and I love that particular catch-cry. We are different, we are no less than anybody else. We are stronger in some ways, we are not as strong in others, and that doesn't make us better or worse. It just makes us different. The Neurodiversity Affirming Paradigm honors that. Not that superpowers, not that we're disordered, but that we're this beautiful mix of all of those things, as is every other human. Well, thank you very much, friends. I appreciate you listening to my almost single breath monologue there. Um please send us through any questions, queries, comments that you have, and I'll plug it again. Please like, follow, and subscribe on our Insta, Facebook, YouTube, etc. And I look forward to chatting to you next time for episode eight.