Ecological Approach To Experience For Neurodivergent People

This discussion invites the listener to consider their emotional experience and embodiment as a downstream effect of countless variables occurring in the world around them. Rooted in post-humanist philosophy, ethodiversity, and mindfulness; This discussion describes human experience as one taking place in a larger ecosystem.
Relevant to neurodivergent bodyminds because that ecosystem we exist within has so often been adapted into something that we find actively hostile rather than supportive.

Transcript

Welcome to this discussion of the ecology of experience as it pertains to neurodivergent people. My name is David Gray Hammond, And I have over a decade of experience working with neurodivergent people. In a peer support capacity and providing mindfulness exercises and teaching to aid in their well-being. So the first thing I want to think about is why two people in the same room have different experiences. And this is the question worth sitting with for a moment. Two people walk into the same room, Same lighting, Same noise level, Same conversation happening around them. Yet one of them feels completely at ease and the other is quietly overwhelmed, Working hard just to stay present. Same room, Same moment, Two entirely different experiences. We tend to explain this gap by looking inward, As if experience were manufactured entirely inside a person, Like it's a private, Self-contained event. Under that view, If someone's struggling, The assumption is that something inside them is wrong, Or weak, Or oversensitive, Or needs fixing. But that view doesn't hold up very well once you actually look at how experience gets made. Experience isn't manufactured in isolation, It's assembled. In real time out of dozens of interacting variables, Most of which have nothing to do with a person's character or willpower. Sensory input, Sleep the night before, Whether the room's exits are visible, Whether the people present feel safe or unpredictable, Whether the culture in that room makes space for how this particular body and mind function. Or quietly requires them to perform being someone else. None of that is really inside a person in the way we usually imagine. It's closer to weather than to personality, A live interaction between an organism and the layered environment it's sitting inside of, From the cellular level all the way out to culture and history. That's what I want to talk through today, A way of understanding experience that I come back to again and again, Because I think it explains so much of what gets misread as personal failing. It's built from two ideas working together, A nested environment framework and an ecosystemic model of experience. But together they give us a much more accurate and much kinder map of why we feel what we feel moment to moment. And I want to be upfront about why this matters so much for neurodivergent people specifically, Because the individual blame version of this story has done real damage. It's told autistic, ADHD, Dyspractic, And otherwise neurodivergent people for decades that their distress is defect to be corrected, Rather than a signal about mismatch. And I want to offer a different map. Let's start with the nested environment framework. Picture a set of nested circles, Like rings inside a target, Or the layers of an onion. Each ring is a different scale of the environment, And a person's body and mind sit right at the centre of all of them, All at once. The innermost ring is the body-mind itself, Our physiology, Our nervous system state, Our interoceptive signals, Whether you're hungry, Dehydrated, In pain, Underslept, Mid-cycle, Coming down with something, Or simply carrying tension from three hours ago that hasn't discharged yet. This ring is intimate and constant. It's running underneath everything else all the time, Whether or not it's being consciously noticed. The next ring out is the immediate relational environment. The people physically or emotionally close to you in a given moment. A partner, A colleague, A friend, A stranger on a train. This ring carries an enormous amount of weight because human nervous systems are deeply attuned to the nervous systems around them. A calm, Attuned person nearby can genuinely help regulate you. A tense, Unpredictable or dismissive person can genuinely destabilise you. And it's not a metaphor, It's measurable, Physiological, Sometimes called co-regulation or neuroception, The mostly unconscious process of continuously scanning the people and spaces around you for safety or threat. Within this ring, We have the physical environment itself. The sensory experience. The layout of a room. The way that we interact with the physical environment around us. But beyond that sits the community and institutional ring. Workplaces, Schools, Healthcare systems, Local services, Extended family and social networks. This is where policies, Cultures and structures either accommodate a person's needs or quietly demand they mask, Push through or go without. Whether a workplace allows headphones, Whether a GP appointment gives enough processing time, Whether a classroom expects stillness that a particular body-mind can't sustainably produce. This ring shapes daily experience constantly, And mostly invisibly. Because it's just how things are done here. But further out again is the cultural and systemic ring, The big, Largely unspoken assumptions a whole society carries. Which bodies and minds are treated as the default, The normal, And which are treated as deviations needing explanation? Ableism lives here. So does the cultural story that productivity equals worth, That eye contact equals honesty, That stillness equals respect, That a good life looks a particular narrow way. Almost nobody consciously chooses these beliefs. They are absorbed and then they act like gravity, Invisible and constantly exerting force. And then the outermost ring, Often the hardest to feel directly, But arguably the most powerful, Is time. Right now. A raised voice today lands differently depending on what raised voices meant in someone's past. Here's the key move this framework makes. None of these rings operate alone and none of them is optional background noise. They're all live, All the time, All interacting with each other, With the body-mind at the center. A person's nervous system isn't just responding to what's in front of them right now, It's responding to all five rings simultaneously. Laying on top of one another. That's the nested environment framework. Experience isn't produced by the innermost ring in isolation. It's produced by the whole nested system, Moment to moment. Now let's bring in the second idea, Because this is where the framework becomes genuinely useful rather than just descriptive. When we talk of the Ecosystemic Model of Experience, More broadly I tend to speak of the Ecosystemic Model of Distress. The dominant cultural model of distress, The one most of us absorbed by default, Is what you would call a deficit model. Something is wrong inside the person, A chemical imbalance, A personality flaw, A skills gap, A broken part. Fix the broken part and the distress resolves. The ecosystemic model of distress starts somewhere else entirely. It says, Distress isn't generally a malfunction inside a person. It's usually a signal about the relationship between a person and their nested environment. A mismatch, A friction point, A place where the demands coming from one or more rings exceed what's currently sustainable for that particular body-mind. And so in this sense, Distress is a downstream issue being caused by ecosystemic factors further upstream. Think about what an ecosystem is in the literal sense. A coral reef isn't unhealthy because the floor of the coral is faulty. It's unhealthy because water temperature, Acidity, Light, And nutrient flow have shifted outside the range that coral can metabolize. Change the conditions and the coral's capacity changes with it. The distress signal, Bleaching, Is information about the system, Not a verdict on the coral's worth or character. Human distress works remarkably similarly. A meltdown, A shutdown, A panic response, Chronic burnout, A spiral of shame. These aren't proof that something is broken in a person. They're usually the nervous system doing exactly what the nervous system is built to do. Response. This reframe really matters because it changes where you look for the intervention. A deficit model asks what's wrong with this person and how do we correct them? An ecosystemic model asks a completely different set of questions. What conditions across which rings produce this level of load? What would need to shift in the body-mind, In relationships, In institutional structures and cultural narratives, And in how the past is being carried for this system to come back into a sustainable range. Sometimes, The answer does involve something a person can adjust internally, New regulation tools, More rest, A changed routine. But just as often, This is the part that gets skipped. The answer involves the environment changing. The workplace needs to adjust. The relationship needs to become safer. The healthcare system needs to actually listen. The culture needs to stop treating one narrow way of being human as the only acceptable one. Distress in this model isn't a personal failing to be corrected in private, It's ecosystemic feedback, Information flowing between a body and the layered world it's embedded in, Asking for a rebalancing that may need to happen at any one of those rings, Or several at once. And so now I'd like to walk through an example. Let's make this concrete because held only in the abstract it can start to feel like theory rather than something lived. Picture someone standing in a supermarket. They suddenly find themselves flooded, Overwhelmed, Close to tears, Desperate to leave, Unable to remember what they came in for. From the outside, Someone might see this and think they're overreacting to a trip to the shops. That's the deficit model read. It locates the whole event inside the person as a disproportionate reaction to a neutral situation, And it stops there. Now run the same moment back through the nested environment framework, Ring by ring. At the body-mind level, They haven't eaten since breakfast, They're dehydrated, They slept badly, And they're premenstrual, All of which lower the threshold at which the nervous system tips into overwhelm. At the relational level, Earlier that morning a message from a family member landed as subtly critical, And it's still sitting in their system, Unprocessed, Quietly raising baseline tension. There is the. . . Sensory environment itself, The supermarket has fluorescent lighting on the older, Flickering kind, A tannoy announcement every few minutes, And a checkout layout that funnels everyone through a narrow, Crowded space, None of which was designed with sensory processing differences in mind, Because it wasn't designed with this person's neurocognitive style in the room at all. And at the institutional and cultural level, There's a long-absorbed belief picked up from years of being told to just push through. The needing to leave a shop because it's too much is embarrassing, A sign of weakness, Something to hide. So on top of the sensory flood, There's now a second layer of distress. Shame about the distress itself. And at the level of personal history, This person spent years being told, As a child, That their reactions were too much, Which means the nervous system now carries a learned association between overwhelm and danger of rejection. So the flood, Once it starts, Escalates faster and lands harder than it might for someone without that history. None of that is overreacting to a trip to the shops. That framing was only ever available because it looked at one ring, The moment, In isolation, And ignored the others that were actively shaping it in real time. This is what countless variables actually means, In practice. Not countless in some vague, Unknowable sense, But countless in the very literal sense that a huge number of specific, Nameable factors, Physiological, Relational, Institutional, Cultural, Historical, Are all live and interacting in every single moment of experience. What gets felt is never the product of just one of those layers, It's always the composite. And once you can see the composite, The question stops being what's wrong with this person and becomes something much more precise. Much more answerable, Which of these layers is carrying the most load right now, And which of them could actually be adjusted. So coming back to why this matters particularly for neurodivergent body minds, Everything so far applies to every human nervous system, But it lands with particular weight for neurodivergent people, And it's worth being direct about why. Start with the innermost ring, The body. Autistic, ADHD, Dyspractic, And other neurodivergent nervous systems frequently process sensory information, Executive demands, And interoceptive signals differently from the statistical majority. That's simply a different baseline configuration, Not a deficient one. But most environments at every outer ring were designed around the majority configuration as if it were the only one that existed. That mismatch, A genuinely different nervous system meeting a world built for a different kind of nervous system, Is by itself an enormous and constant source of load, Entirely separate from anything an individual is doing wrong. Move out to the relational ring and you find something researchers now call the double empathy problem. The discovery that miscommunication between autistic and non-autistic people isn't a one-directional deficit in the autistic person's social skill, But a two-way mismatch in empathy and communication style, Where both sides struggle to read each other equally, They have no reference point in each other's experience. For decades, Only one half of that mismatch was ever treated as the problem needing fixing. At the institutional level, Think about how many workplaces, Schools and healthcare systems still run on fixed sensory environments, Rigid time structures, And communication norms that assume a particular kind of brain, While treating requests for accommodation as exceptions to be negotiated, Rather than as basic design flaws to be corrected. At the cultural level, Neurodivergent people are still, In most contexts, Measured against a narrow and largely unspoken idea of what a normal, Functional, Or appropriate person looks like. A standard built without them in the room. Masking, The exhausting, Often unconscious work of suppressing natural responses to approximate that standard, Isn't a personality quirk. It's a direct, Measurable cost of navigating an ecosystem that wasn't built with this body-mind in mind, And it produces real cumulative fatigue over years, Sometimes surfacing later in life as burnout that gets misread, Yet again as a personal failing. And at that historical ring, Many neurodivergent adults are carrying decades of being told by teachers, Clinicians, Family, By entire systems, That their natural way of being, Their natural way of processing the world, Was a problem to be corrected. That history doesn't stay in the past, It actively lowers present day thresholds, The same way it did for the person in the supermarket, Making current distress land harder and faster than it would without that history sitting underneath it. So when a neurodivergent person experiences distress, And the immediate cultural reflex is to ask what's wrong with them, That question is not just unkind, It's structurally incomplete. It isolates one ring, Usually the innermost one, And quietly ignores all the others that are doing at least as much of the work, And very often more. The ecosystemic model doesn't deny that the body is part of the picture. It obviously is. What it refuses is the idea that the body-mind is the only part of the picture, Or that responsibility for the mismatch belongs solely to the person experiencing it. Distress isn't proof of a neurodivergent person being broken, It's proof that a system built around one kind of neurocognition is now meeting a different kind of nervous system, And the friction is being felt, Honestly, Exactly where you'd expect it to be felt, At the centre of the rings. In our real body mind in real time. And so, Considering what this changes practically, First, And it doesn't need to feel like anything dramatic to count, It changes where you look the next time distress shows up in yourself or in someone else. Instead of the default question of what's wrong with me, It becomes which rings are carrying load right now. Body, Mind, Relationships, Institutions, Culture, History, Usually more than one is involved and naming which one takes real weight off the idea that the whole thing is a private personal defect. Secondly, It widens where solutions are allowed to come from. Some of what helps will be internal, Rest, Regulation tools, A changed routine, Working with your own nervous system rather than against it. It's real and valid. But this framework also gives full permission to look outward, To advocate for a quieter workspace, To ask for processing time, To choose relationships that co-regulate rather than destabilize, To question a cultural story rather than silently absorbing it as truth. None of that is making excuses. It's accurate diagnosis at the level the problem actually lives at. Thirdly, And maybe most importantly for how you treat yourself, It offers a way out of shame. If distress is ecosystemic feedback rather than a character flaw, Then a hard day, A meltdown, A shutdown, A spiral, Doesn't need to become evidence against your worth. It's information, Information about load, About mismatch, About a neurocognitive style doing exactly what neurocognitive styles have developed to do under the conditions that they're actually facing, Not proof that something is fundamentally wrong with who you are. You are not a single isolated data point malfunctioning in a vacuum. You're a body and mind embedded in a nested rings of relationships, Institutions, Culture, History, All processing in and shaping experienced together all the time. Your experience of any given moment was never yours alone to explain, It was always ecosystemic. And that doesn't mean nothing is ever within your control. Plenty is, And reclaiming that genuinely is yours to work with. Matters. But it does mean the weight of every hard moment was never meant to sit on one set of shoulders. It was always distributed across a much wider system than the one we're usually taught to look at. And so that brings us to the end of my discussion of the ecology of experience. This is rooted in a post-humanist philosophy and built on my decade of experience working with neurodivergent people in various ways and forms. And I hope that you have found this helpful and it certainly informs a large part of the mindfulness practices that I bring to my work when I'm engaging in mindfulness teaching for neurodivergent body minds.