What does it take to be a Neuroaffirming Psychologist?
Neuroaffirming (NA) practice is bigger than just the way a psychologist engages, supports or advocates for their clients. There’s a prior step that I would argue is essential if we’re to respect the principles of this paradigm and help achieve its intention.
On Tuesday, I had the privilege of preparing a lecture for the Educational and Developmental Psychology Masters students at Melbourne University. The responsibility to introduce NA principles to support their emerging skills led me to reflective practice, as it should. How do I provide NA practice in a discipline that far predates this paradigm?
At the crux of it, we are witnessing an incredible time in the history of psychology. Through the relentless work of adults with lived experience, neurodivergent advocates have helped us see that for decades, our research methods, reporting of evidence, and hence our evidence-based practices and tools are largely geared to teach neuronormative social-emotional skills and counsel from a neuronormative perspective. Neurotypical skills were explicitly positioned as the benchmark of competence. I should know — I wrote an entire PhD thesis about it.
Here’s a direct quote from said thesis: “Interpersonal skills that maintain and nurture relationships are referred to as social competence or prosocial skills. Examples might include noticing the facial expressions and emotions of others, sharing, and being assertive” (Buckingham, 2019). At the time, just six years ago, these two sentences were unremarkable.
The way we interpreted past studies was also biased. “Studies report that students who persistently demonstrate maladaptive social behaviours are also more likely to experience active peer rejection, lower self-esteem, poorer academic outcomes, disconnectedness from school, and are at higher risk of delinquent behaviours” (Dodge et al., 2006; Lansford et al., 2010)” (Buckingham, 2019). When we apply a neuronormative lens to these studies, the conclusion is that the student with 'maladaptive' social skills needs to learn and change for those issues to go away. And with that, the justification for decades of social-emotional programming to teach a small few to mask and fit-in followed.
If you're not familiar with past social-emotional learning for neurodivergent children, here are a few common examples: strategies to stop students from stimming in class, reward charts to motivate students to keep still while listening, learning to speak for only a few minutes at a time about their areas of interest (give the headline, not the movie) in order to make and keep friends. We inadvertently stripped a child of their right to learn in the way that is most cohesive with their neurotype, and denied social joy in an effort to safeguard their well-being at school.
However, if we examine the same data from a NA lens, the formulation changes. The well documented evidence of alienation, discrimination and disadvantage serves to highlight the need for curriculum programming that supports teachers to build awareness and understanding of social, emotional, sensory and communication differences (natural variations). Education about difference becomes the cornerstone for building respectful peer relationships.
With increasing awareness of our prior biases within psychology, I suspect we will be in a somewhat uncomfortable position for a while as NA psychologists. In a nutshell, it doesn’t seem helpful to throw out the baby with the bathwater and erase all prior research, and it will take time for academics to work through just a fraction of past research to tease apart the raw data and consider alternative formulations. Likewise, no committee or governing body can leaf through decades of prior research to rubber stamp each project, theory, tool or strategy as NA or not. It’s too big a task. So the responsibility sits, quite rightly, with us as individual, ethical NA clinicians. It’s on us to apply neuroaffirming principles and a critical lens to the research, theories, tools and programs before us.
And I would argue, we are equipped and capable. Our undergraduate and postgraduate degrees had us reading academic papers, tasked to make sense of the hypothesis, methodology, statistics, and results. We developed skills that we need now, more than ever. If you’re determined to offer NA practice to your clients, you’ll need to make time and space to independently and critically consider the research, tools and programs that you choose to utilise. Find the evidence that supports the methods you choose to apply. How did they define key terms? Read the method section. How were projects designed? Did they include a lived experience voice? What were they actually measuring? If we try to consider neurodivergent experiences, what could we extrapolate from those results now? This will not be a small task, but I doubt you can be a NA psychologist at this point in time, without a critical evaluation process at the helm of your practice.
A way forward? Create NA peer groups to share the load and hear the opinions of others, access neurodivergent clinicians to crosscheck your thinking, listen to the stories of neurodivergent people with lived experience, access old and new research and continue to ask questions. And of course, forgiveness. Forgive yourself for what you didn’t know. The best we can do for our clients is continue to listen, and continue to learn.
