Trauma and Neurodiversity

When Caitlin was originally developing her Systemic Modelling approach, she was working with teenagers who all had very different reasons for being unable to manage mainstream school. Some had undiagnosed neurodivergence and some had unprocessed trauma. The approach Caitlin developed didn’t differentiate between the causes of their processing issues, rather she and her fellow facilitators took whatever was being presented and helped the young people to:

• Develop a metaphor or model for their pattern

• Understand, acknowledge and honour their system, just as it is

• Consider what others could do to support them and what others might do that could make it worse

• Advocate for their needs

Sometimes it was clear that the processing issues were linked to specific trauma and sometimes it wasn’t. As the work progressed into business, community and educational arenas we still found that some processing issues are linked to trauma as a significant cause. At the same time, some processing issues have trauma associated with them when families, schools or workplaces shame individuals because of their neurodivergent traits.

As a result we don’t, within Inspiring Capability, make a huge differential between whether someone’s struggles are specifically trauma related or processing related. Our Clean Language approach allows individuals and teams to develop their own sense of selves and for each person to be the expert on their own system.