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Exploring wellbeing through the grammar of being well

So often we link wellness to adjectives of positivity. The smiley-face emojis, the sun on the cloud-to-rainbow chart, the inspirational goals we are told to set ourselves, ‘don’t worry, be happy’. It’s a clear trajectory from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ and a linear pipeline to wellbeing. In emphasizing only good, as ‘good-enough’, we are already setting the bar high, as just sustaining good can be exhausting. Yet, in a neo-liberal, competitive, capitalist society, ‘good’ on its own is actually rarely enough. We are constantly looking for ‘better’ and then ‘best’.   To be ‘better’ is to compare ourselves constantly against others. This comes at a risk to wellbeing. In trying to be ‘better’ there is a suggestion that there may be something wrong within us, something that needs ‘fixing’. Yet, if we subscribe to the concept of neurodiversity, and embrace the neurodiversity paradigm, we understand that each of us navigates and interacts with the world in uniquely dynamic and fluid ways. A sing...
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Kindness: A double-empathy perspective

Kindness is one of the words that typically springs to mind when people talk about being neurodiversity-affirming or informed. What better word to offer acceptance, support and express love towards another? Yet, kindness, as with so many words involved with 'care' (Shannon, n.d.), can have a double meaning. In this sense it embodies the double empathy gap that can exist between individuals with very different experiences of the world. To really be kind, we need curiosity. We need to know how to spot the difference between 'kind' and 'unkind' actions that sit behind the same word, and in being curious, we can offer true kindness to those around us. 

I come to this topic with my own lived experiences of the word 'kindness'. As a parent to an Autistic teenager, I have experienced a lot of well-meaning 'kind' acts on my parental journey. From an early age we knew that school environments were challenging for our son. Exclusions from Year 1 and then pretty much yearly, often several per year, until finally we could take no more and gave up on physical school education at the start of Year 8. The environment had gone beyond challenging. Attending school had become impossible and we were now firmly in the territory of preservation, rather than education. There were lots of 'kind' people along the way who thought they were helping, with 'kind' offers of advice and support. But, were these acts of 'kindness' really 'kind'?

'Kindness' started with suggestions for us as parents to have training on how to be parents. On the face of it, that didn't initially sound so bad? There is training for pretty much everything in life, and training to be a parent, arguably amongst the biggest life-challenges you may ever experience, felt like a very logical thing to contemplate. Except, as with many 'off the peg' resources, it was a one-size-fits-all approach, with little tolerance for 'difference'. It was about us as parents looking at our child and trying to 'understand' them through a lens that didn't quite fit. It also turned out that the 'optimal' way to parent involved strict rules, regulations and expectations to adhere to 'expected behaviour'. It was full of developmental theory, behavioural mantras and we-know-best ideology.  There was little within the training we were offered that showed understanding of us as a family, or listened to our context. The story was fixed, and the content implied that we needed fixing. Unsurprisingly, we didn't do the course, and the failure to accept the 'kind' offer of help, meant that we were now an even bigger problem.

'Kindness' was also something we were repeatedly told was offered to our son at school. We had requested accommodations to support his wellbeing early on; spaces that were quieter, regular opportunities for movement, time to process information and demands in particular. What happened, time and time again, was isolation, seclusion and ultimately exclusion. The connections that are part of fundamental human rights were denied in so many painful ways, yet all in the name of 'kindness'. 

  • "We are 'kindly' trying our hardest to accommodate his needs." - Our son was removed to work outside the class in a quiet corridor, away from his peers. Already stigmatised for learning, and thinking differently, he craved connection, frequently pushing to go back into the classroom. This fed a cycle we became all too familiar with; that of sensory overwhelm, meltdowns and further exclusion.
  • "We are 'kindly' giving him time to build up and develop his social interaction skills." - He had to have break times that were separate to his peers. He was able to choose only one peer to play with. The stigma of playing whilst on view to others, and of dwindling peers who were happy to play with him, was crushing.
  • "We are 'kindly' sharing with him our expectations for 'kind' behaviour." He was given a written list of what not to do in the classroom. "You must not hit your friends. You must have 'kind' hands." 
  • "We are asking your son to 'kindly' write an apology to say how he will be 'kinder' from now on." He was asked to assume all the blame for moments of meltdown and shutdown, internalising that trying to cope in environments that were not set up for him and 'failing', was his fault alone.
  • "We are 'kindly' removing your son from all peer contact, so that he understands and learns to be 'kinder' going forwards." - As a result of experiencing overwhelm and meltdowns on a previous occasion, he was frequently internally excluded, only allowed to be in the school building by being with another adult. Sometimes this was the following week, as the 'next-day learning opportunity' would otherwise have fallen on a weekend.
  • "We are 'kindly' excluding your son from school, as his behaviour is 'unkind' and is putting others at risk." - On the evening of his first exclusion, age five, he asked me as he tried to go to sleep, why there were 'buzzy bees' in his tummy. The risk to his wellbeing and to us as a family was completely unseen by those who were being 'kind'.
  • "We are 'kindly' placing a cushion behind your son's head, to stop him from hurting himself, whilst we keep him and others safe." - Fast forward several years, this was his final school exclusion, where he was forcibly restrained, pinned to the floor by five adult men. 
These acts, done under the banner of 'kindness', were actually acts of cruel control, causes of 'trauma' (Quinn et al., 2025), where our son was no longer a fellow human, but an object to be suppressed and oppressed; 'beaten' emotionally into submission, and on occasion enduring actual physical interventions, so he could learn from his mistakes and be a better human. 

On no single occasion did anyone in any of these situations 'kindly' stop to see our son or us, his or our story, his unique being, our unique journey. No one 'kindly' considered his experiences of the world, and that when looking through his eyes, the world presented multiple barriers and challenges. No one 'kindly' thought deeply about how to change the environment and the context so that the gap between these different experiences could be reduced. 

'Kindness' fell down in the gap between our son's and our own experiences of the world, and those who were trying to be 'kind' to us in return. 'Kindness' was offered in the form of a path to be more like the majority. Facilitating assimilation was the pinnacle of 'kindness'. Pulling against the tide, asserting difference, being authentic to divergent experiences was 'unkind' to those who were trying to help. Worse, this ingratitude meant that we and our son were not just different, but also labelled as 'difficult'. A double problem as a result of this double empathy gap. 

A myriad of difference, the basic tenet of the neurodiversity paradigm, means there is also a myriad of different ways of experiencing the world; none best or right, just different. If we adhere to a neurodiversity-paradigm perspective, we must understand that neurodiversity covers everyone, and that everyone is unique. Always hearing, valuing and pursuing only one side in an interaction negates the possibility of difference, as one side is always stronger, better, in control. In seeing progress only in one way is best, we lose balance and the 'beauty of harmony' (Kapp, 2011). Meanwhile, our systems of care are at very real risk of 'falling over' (Gray-Hammond, 2024), if we don't give ourselves enough time to learn to walk as one. 

'Kindness' is giving ourselves that space to see, hear, feel, understand and be curious first, rather than judge against a fabricated 'bar of rightness'. 'Kindness' is valuing uniqueness and welcoming difference within a community, not objectifying 'difference', pushing it out, to one side, outside, in the hope that 'difference' will go away, or eventually learn to fit in with everyone else. Kind, neurodiversity-informed, communities don't welcome people back, they should never exclude in the first place.


References 



  • McGreevy, E. et al. (2024). An Experience Sensitive Approach to Care With and for Autistic Children and Young People in Clinical Services. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678241232442





 

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