Question from a reader: "I struggle with identifying what are my innate ND traits that I need to accept and what is a trauma response that I can heal from. If I accept certain traits or behaviors as part of my ND expression when they’re actually trauma responses that I should be trying to heal/improve then I’m doing a disservice to myself and those around me, no? Accepting things while also working on things seems contrary and I can’t make it make sense."
Part 1
To start with, I want to clear something up about the difference between neurological traits and behaviors, because I think treating them as the same thing is inherently confusing.
Neurological traits are the ways that our brain and nervous system operate. Behaviors are things we do.
Neurological traits are the particular needs of our brain and body. Behaviors are strategies that we use to meet our brain and body’s needs.
Our neurological traits aka brain/body needs are determined by genetics or trauma or both. Whether they are temporary or permanent, having these needs met is of primary importance for safety, agency, and wellbeing.
Trauma response behaviors help us to cope with unmet needs. Trauma response behaviors are subconscious attempts to meet our neurological needs in the best way our body knows how to.
We’ve been taught that we need to ask this question, how do I change my trauma response behaviors? We are essentially asking, how do I get rid of adaptive strategies that meet my brain and body’s needs?
As we heal trauma, our behavioral response will naturally change. It doesn’t work the other direction. Trying to change behavior doesn’t heal trauma and frequently causes more trauma.
Behaviorism is the idea that some mental conditions are best treated by altering behavior patterns. In modern culture, these behavior changes are pursued at any cost, including sacrificing safety, agency, and wellbeing. The capitalistic, patriarchal solution to trauma is changing unwanted behaviors. The holistic, affirming, humanist solution to trauma is meeting unmet needs.
Pressures to change for others sake and pressures to get rid of our adaptive strategies before we have a more supportive replacement strategy are frequently perceived as overwhelmingly unsafe. Our bodies will engage fight/fight/freeze/fawn responses just to cope with the threat of getting rid of adaptive strategies that meet our brain and body’s needs.
Trauma responses can be integrated gradually and with a lot of support in our own unique timing. However, trying to fix/change our trauma responses by changing our behavior is a trauma response itself. (The impulse to fix ourselves is a sympathetic fight response directed towards our flaws.)
Part 2
So here is the main point that I want y’all to understand:
We need to Accommodate Everything!
I'll say it again: We need to ACCOMMODATE EVERYTHING.
Accommodations are supportive strategies for meeting our neurological needs, whether those needs have existed from birth or whether they were caused by trauma or illness or injury. Trauma response behaviors need equivalent accommodations to other types of behavioral responses.
Accommodating everything has been widely discouraged. They say, if we accommodate our trauma responses, we will never be motivated to heal. That paternalistic myth could not be farther from the truth.
Accommodating ALL neurological needs builds safety and stability so that trauma can be integrated. When trauma is integrated, trauma behaviors naturally drop away because our neurological needs change or because we have a new and better (kinder to ourselves) strategy for meeting our needs.
Lack of accommodation is a core trauma wound for many NDs. We can start to heal this wound by accommodating ourselves whenever possible. This means shifting focus from behavioral change to developing supportive strategies for meeting our needs.
Anyone who says you need to focus on changing behaviors is not truly trauma informed. ND people will commonly repeat this idea because we have been socially conditioned to believe it's true, often with the threat of significant violence or social ostracization or loss of employment.
Trauma healing works in the opposite direction. We cannot know what traits are from trauma and what are innate before healing our trauma. WE can only learn that information AFTER healing from trauma. As we heal from trauma, our neurological needs shift. After we heal from trauma, the neurological needs that remain are the permanent ones.
And just a reminder, complex trauma is a form of neurodivergence. The universal need for accommodations is one of the reasons that the neurodiversity paradigm considers both genetic/innate and trauma-acquired traits to be neurodivergence.
We do not need to accommodate innate neurodivergence and change trauma response neurodivergence. We need to ACCOMMODATE EVERYTHING.
Part 3
ACCOMMODATE EVERYTHING means accommodate all needs/traits, not necessarily all strategies or behaviors.
Accommodate all neurological needs does not mean allow people to hurt others. No one has a neurological need to hurt others. Violence and aggression are maladaptive strategies for getting deeper needs met. Boundaries that prevent a person from hurting others are an important accommodation.
Beneath trauma response behaviors is a neurological need NOT to harm others but to connect instead. Accommodations should prevent school kids from harming others while also offering a safe alternative way to express the overwhelming emotions that would drive harming others.
When violence is a person's strategy for meeting their neurological needs, they need help developing a new strategy. Banning behaviors is not really a necessary or helpful step in this process.
Forcibly expecting a behavioral change doesn't work. Connecting with the person who has violent behaviors and helping them process their feelings in a different way does help people eventually change behavior, but the change is internally driven rather than caused by external pressure.
An aggressive person needs us to adapt their environment so that they cannot use the strategy of harming others to attempt to meet their needs. Often this looks like removing ourselves or others from the space the aggressive person is in.
A boundary that prevents harm is something like - removing other people from the room when someone gets aggressive so that they physically cannot harm anyone. The neurological need that person is trying to meet with that trauma response behavior is the need to expel stress energy.
Ideally, a supportive person can help a person find other ways to expel their stress energy that work even better for them than harming others. This learning happens at the nervous system's pace, it can't be rushed. But while this learning is happening, we can protect people and prevent harm as much as possible.
One person commented: “This reminds me of the big shift for us where instead of trying to suppress anger to protect others... we’re having a bad PMDD flare and asked that everyone leave us alone so if we get mad we can scream and be rageful to our hearts content and just get it over with. Still protecting others / respecting boundaries but also not doing behaviorism on ourselves or trying to fix it or pathologize it.”
