Why Do You Keep Choosing the Same Emotional Climate in Different People

A mother wound can follow you into adulthood and disguise itself as chemistry.

There’s a specific kind of ache that shows up in adult relationships that has nothing to do with the person in front of you.

It shows up when you wait for a reply longer than you should, when you accept “I’ve been busy” as a personality, when your stomach drops after a small shift in tone and you start performing for reassurance before you even realize you’ve started.

You call it chemistry. You call it attachment. You call it love.

Sometimes it is a mother wound wearing perfume.

I used to want to be chosen in the exact places where I once felt abandoned. I wanted to be held in the places where I learned to self-soothe. I wanted consistency from people who only knew how to offer intensity. I wanted to be kept by women who felt familiar in the way old pain feels familiar. I wasn’t wrong for loving women, I was repeating a belief that love comes with struggle, silence, or survival.

Now I choose love that feels safe. Love that sees me. Love that doesn’t ask me to prove I’m worthy of being kept.

Here’s what frames everything that follows.

I do the heavy lifting and I do the work, then I walk myself back into the kinds of situations that used to break me, because I want to see how I move now. I want to see whether my nervous system still reaches for the same harm with a prettier name. I want to see if I still mistake familiar for safe.

Mother wounds are widely known and rarely spoken about with honesty. People speak about them in soundbites, then avoid the practical parts, the parts that show up in your friendships, your workplaces, your partnerships, and your body.

Most people don’t ask why they keep getting drawn to certain dynamics. They blame the individual person and miss the pattern. They miss the repetition. They miss the fact that your home of origin often becomes your template for love, even when you swear you’ve outgrown it.

I dedicate this essay to my friend and bosom buddy Nat. for proof reading and sharing her thoughts with me on my writing. Thank you for being a friend.

Why Do We Recreate Our Family Dynamics in Friendships and Relationships

Your home of origin often becomes your template for love, even when you swear you’ve outgrown it.

If you’ve read my essay about estrangement from my mother, you already know I take patterns seriously. Estrangement forced me to look at my life without the fog of obligation. Distance gave me the ability to see the dynamic objectively.

When I looked at my friendships, I realized something I did not want to admit. I had recreated parts of my mother dynamic in my social life, especially with people who needed me, people who made me responsible for fixing the atmosphere, and people who stayed vague until vagueness turned into cruelty.

The pattern kept repeating because I was skilled at surviving it. That skill looked like loyalty. It looked like patience. It looked like maturity. In reality, it was training.

When a nervous system learns early that love comes with uncertainty, it becomes good at uncertainty. It becomes fluent in mixed signals. It becomes talented at filling in gaps. It becomes excellent at staying.

That’s why adverse childhood experiences matter as a framework, not as a label. The CDC describes how adverse childhood experiences can have long-term negative impacts on health and wellbeing, and many studies describe a dose-response pattern where higher exposure tends to correlate with higher risk of later difficulties.

That doesn’t mean your life reduces to a score. It means your body remembers what your mind tries to override.

How Does a Mother Wound Shape What We Tolerate?

If care came with strings attached, adult love can start feeling like something you have to earn.

People flatten “mother wound” into a trendy phrase. I’m interested in patterns, behaviors, and the long shadow of early conditioning.

A mother wound forms when the first relationship that teaches you about love also teaches you about emotional absence, inconsistency, punishment for needs, or intimacy that comes with fear.

Sometimes the mother is cruel. Sometimes she is overwhelmed and unsupported. Sometimes she is neurodivergent and undiagnosed, surviving with shame and control because nobody taught her regulation. Sometimes she is loving and still emotionally unavailable in the specific ways you needed.

The outcome can look similar. You grow up fluent in self-abandonment.

Sometimes a mother like that believes care equals love, because food, shelter, clothes and the basics are provided, and in her mind that settles the question. bell hooks wrote about this confusion, where “care” becomes the substitute definition of love.

The problem is that this care rarely comes with no strings attached. It can come with expectations to be grateful for the bare minimum, and the reminder that even the basics can be withdrawn if you make the wrong move.

So adulthood can feel confusing. You start asking yourself what love is and what care is, because those definitions were blurred early, and you were trained to accept crumbs as proof. Then someone shows you care and you assume it must be love, because your body learned early that love is conditional and small.

Once you’re fluent in that kind of conditional love, you can build whole adult relationships on top of it. You can create a life that requires you to keep earning what should be given freely.

Why Do Neurodivergent Girls Learn Self-Soothing Early?

Neurodivergent women often learn early that belonging is conditional, and that the cost of being loved is being easier to live with.

You learn that honesty gets punished as “too much,” silence gets interpreted as “cold,” dysregulation gets framed as “dramatic,” and clarity gets treated as “intense.” So you start adjusting yourself in real time. You mask. You soften. You perform. You translate yourself into something easier to keep.

That early training shows up later as overexplaining, overgiving, and overfunctioning. It can also show up as a specific kind of relational self-harm, where you stay inside dynamics that keep misreading you because you still believe being understood is something you earn through perfect communication.

This is why some neurodivergent women stay too long. They keep searching for the sentence that will finally make the other person get it, and they keep mistaking effort for evidence. The hard truth is that the right sentence can’t create emotional capacity where it does not exist.

If you are autistic or ADHD, home can become a sensory and emotional battlefield, even in families that believe they are loving. Neurodivergent children get punished for nervous system realities: overwhelm, blunt honesty, needing quiet, needing predictability, struggling with transitions, melting down after masking. When those needs meet a parent who is rigid, ashamed, or dysregulated, the child learns a brutal lesson that follows them into adulthood, my needs cause conflict, therefore my needs are dangerous.

In mother-daughter dynamics, that lesson becomes a life script. You become “easy,” you become helpful, you become the emotional stabilizer, you absorb blame, you shrink to keep peace, and you learn that being convenient is safer than being fully seen.

Later, you repeat it in adult spaces that reward the same performance. The pattern also follows you into relationships, especially if you grew up managing a dysregulated parent. Adult love can start feeling like another atmosphere you have to regulate, another person you have to interpret, another bond you have to keep stable through your own labor. Your nervous system recognizes the assignment and starts working before you consent.

How Do Mother Wounds Shape Love Between Women in Queer Relationships

Loving women can feel like relief and threat in the same breath, because the first woman who hurt you may have been your mother.

Queer women often end up doing relational work in public that straight people get to keep private, and the stakes multiply once race, religion, disability, and cultural expectation enter the room.

So loving women can carry two realities at the same time. It can feel like relief because you are finally with someone who understands your inner world without you translating every sentence. It can also feel like threat because women can become the stage where your earliest female pain replays, especially if your first experience of womanhood and care came with inconsistency, control, or emotional absence.

If you grew up craving tenderness from a mother who couldn’t offer it, you can find yourself reaching for maternal repair inside partnership without even meaning to. You are not searching for a mother, you are searching for regulation, softness, steadiness, and the kind of staying that doesn’t require you to earn it.

The danger shows up when “someone to stay” quietly turns into “someone to convince.” That shift is where struggle starts feeling like depth, instability starts feeling like chemistry, and pain starts getting recast as proof that the bond is real. A mother wound can turn your nervous system into a proof-of-love machine, where you keep offering more patience, more clarity, more understanding, because a part of you still believes that if you can make this work you will finally be chosen in the place you were once left.

How Do Mother Wounds Show Up at Work

Workplaces celebrate the ‘work mom’ until the boundaries blur and extraction becomes normal.

This is where a lot of women get trapped, especially neurodivergent women who learned early that stability comes from being useful.

Workplaces love a woman who quietly becomes everyone’s emotional support system. She becomes the “work mom,” the one who smooths tension, manages feelings, remembers deadlines, holds the social glue, and absorbs chaos so the system can keep pretending it functions.

It usually starts with flattery, then the boundaries blur, then the extraction becomes the norm. Neurodivergents forget that in order to have superpowers someone must also ensure the kryptonite is far from them. Neurodivergent competence has conditions, clear scope, recovery time, and support. Without that, ‘strength’ becomes a way the system justifies using you

The cruelty is often subtle, which is why it lasts. Vague feedback that keeps you guessing. Moving goalposts that make you work harder for the same recognition. Ambiguous communication with plausible deniability. The same emotional weather you learned to survive at home, repackaged as professionalism.

If your earliest love was inconsistent, this dynamic can feel familiar. Familiarity makes people stay longer than they should, especially when their nervous system confuses endurance with loyalty and overfunctioning with care.

Why Do We Curate Other People’s Goodness

I curated their goodness in public while my body carried the cost in private.

When I looked at my partnerships, I saw another pattern that embarrassed me, because it wasn’t just about who I chose. It was about what I edited out in order to stay.

I picked people who were outwardly likeable, and sometimes charming enough that I started doing reputation management for them. I built their external persona the same way I used to do it with my mother.

Every Mother’s Day, every birthday, I painted the picture of the most self-sacrificing mother, the best mother you could have, while the private reality looked completely different. I protected the image because I needed something to point to, something that could justify the ache, something that could make the story feel coherent.

Then I repeated the same pattern with partners.

I would take the smallest decent thing they did and curate it into proof of their goodness. I made the story prettier than the lived experience. I made sure other people saw them as caring, safe, admirable, “trying their best,” even when kindness was inconsistent and respect was negotiable.

And here’s what makes this pattern dangerous.

While I was curating the best version of them, they were often willing to let my true self and image take the hit. They would preserve their own persona by flattening me into the difficult one, the demanding one, the sensitive one, the one who “misunderstood.” They could ruin my credibility to protect their narrative, because the relationship was never about mutual care. It was about maintaining who they wished they were, and having me do the labor of keeping that illusion intact.

So even when I was left holding financial heaviness, I would still protect the image. Even when my boundaries were minimized or dismissed, I would still soften the story. Even when I stayed inside push-pull dynamics that kept my nervous system on a leash, I would still find ways to frame them as good, because admitting the truth would mean admitting I was staying in something that did not love me back in a stable way.

This is one of the most socially rewarded forms of self-abandonment, protecting someone’s image while your body pays the cost.

Why Do We Chase Being Chosen Where We Once Felt Abandoned?

A late reply can hit like a childhood memory, because the body hears, you are alone again.

This is the part people either romanticize or shame.

They romanticize it by calling it “a lesson,” as if your pain exists to make you wise. They shame it by calling it “low self-esteem,” as if you woke up and chose this.

A more accurate frame is repetition as an attempt at mastery. You return to familiar pain because a part of you believes, if I can finally be chosen here, I will finally be healed.

So you date people who withhold. You bond faster with people who confuse you. You feel more alive when you feel uncertain, because uncertainty is the emotional climate your body learned to survive in.

You are trying to fix the original rupture in real time.

That’s why a late reply can hit like a childhood memory. Your adult brain knows the context, but your body hears, you are alone again. The body doesn’t speak in essays. It speaks in panic, nausea, collapse, and overfunctioning.

Attachment research describes how two common forms of adult attachment insecurity, anxiety and avoidance, tend to shape emotion regulation and behavior under stress. Stress is where patterns show themselves, and it’s also where people reveal whether they can repair.

Why Does Co-Regulation Become a Trap for Women Who Learned to Parent Adults

My capacity to co-regulate became a magnet for people who wanted a caretaker, not mutuality.

I write often about why I dislike transactional relationships, and why I value co-regulation. I’m very good at regulating other people, and that skill comes with a shadow.

It attracts people who outsource their internal regulation to me.

When they feel anxious, I’m expected to be available, to soothe them, to talk them down, to stay on the phone until they can breathe again. Sometimes it’s six hours. Sometimes it’s eleven. They don’t build the muscle to hold themselves, because they’ve learned they can hand their nervous system to someone else. I recognize this pattern because I learned it early. I learned to read adults before I learned to rest. I learned to anticipate mood shifts. I learned to manage emotional weather so I wouldn’t get caught in it.

People call this caring, and caring is real. The trap is when care becomes dependency, and your capacity becomes a service other people feel entitled to access. A mother wound can turn your nervous system into a public utility, always on, always available, always responsible for keeping the room stable.

How Do You Heal a Mother Wound When Your Mother Cannot Change

You can love your mother as a human being and still protect yourself from her access.

Some mothers will never repair with you. Some mothers cannot, because repair would require accountability, and accountability would require them to admit harm.

You can grieve that and still heal.

You can love your mother as a human being and stop offering her access to the parts of you she harms. You can accept her limits without living inside them, and you can stop treating her potential as your responsibility.

For many autistic daughters, distance becomes the condition for survival, especially when the family system demands loyalty at the cost of personhood. When the dynamic is built on obedience, self-erasure, and emotional labor, contact becomes a slow leak.

This is where people will try to guilt you with “forgiveness,” “understanding,” and “family.” If your mother wound includes parentification, emotional coercion, or punishment for boundaries, guilt will feel familiar. Familiarity is not a moral compass. Familiarity is often a symptom of what you were trained to tolerate.

Why Do Partners Become Parent-Repair Projects

Some relationships are built on a repair fantasy, and the bill always arrives.

At the root of it, many people aren’t seeking partnership. They’re seeking repair. They want to rewrite what happened with their parents through a romantic bond, because confronting the original wound feels impossible, and reenacting it feels like action.

So they choose women who mirror how they were mothered. Inconsistency that keeps you reaching. People who are hard to read and harder to reach. People who make you work harder to feel loved. Emotional distance dressed up as independence.

Research on childhood emotional maltreatment has been linked to lower quality romantic relationships in adulthood, partly because early experiences shape how people trust, attach, and interpret closeness.

So you might want to be chosen in the same place you were abandoned and miss the reenactment happening in real time. The same abandonment repeats in new places, and the body keeps treating repetition as a chance to finally repair what was never repaired the first time.

What Does Reparenting Look Like Outside Social Media?

Reparenting looks like leaving the moment care becomes a punishment.

Reparenting gets reduced to aesthetic rituals. I care about behavior, because behavior is where healing becomes real.

Reparenting means you become the adult who protects the child part of you from replaying the same abandonment with new people and new settings. It means you stop outsourcing your safety to the people who trigger your fear, and you stop calling that attachment.

A lot of popular writing describes reparenting as meeting unmet childhood needs through a nurturing internal stance, often linked to inner child work. That can be true, but I want to keep it grounded, because the point is not the language. The point is what you do.

In real life, reparenting looks like leaving conversations that punish you for asking direct questions. It looks like refusing relationships where basic care feels like something you have to audition for. It looks like choosing predictability over emotional gambling. It looks like building a life with friends, routines, and supports so that romantic love stops being your only shelter.

It also looks like learning what safety feels like in your body, which can be unfamiliar if tension has been your baseline for decades. Peace can feel empty at first. Safe love can feel suspicious at first. You say something direct and the other person doesn’t punish you. You set a boundary and the other person doesn’t collapse. You ask for clarity and you get clarity back.

This is where patterns reveal themselves, because stress is the real test. Under stress, some people move toward repair. Others move toward disappearance, deflection, or control. So here is the practical question I use now, and it has saved me years of confusion.

When stress shows up, do they move toward repair, or do they move toward disappearance?

What Happens When Two People Bring Mother Wounds Into the Same Relationship?

Two unhealed systems can mistake reenactment for intimacy, then call the fallout incompatibility.

This is where people either get honest with themselves, or they start rewriting the story to avoid what they already know.

I wrote recently about returning to a dynamic from almost eight years ago. For a brief moment it seemed possible. We shared communication methods. We seemed open. I thought I’m more regulated now, maybe we can meet each other better.

Then the patterns emerged. The hiding. The dismissing. The boundary violations.

And I had to sit with an uncomfortable truth, these reenactments can run both ways. People can trigger each other’s original injuries and call it incompatibility. Sometimes it is incompatibility. Sometimes it’s two unhealed systems trying to use each other as repair, each hoping the other person will finally make the old wound behave.

Here’s the logic many people run without naming it. If I can get this partner, who mirrors my mother in the ways that hurt, to keep their word, show up consistently, choose me, love me stably, then I can prove I was worthy all along.

That logic explains why people stay in pain for years. It also explains why leaving can feel like losing a parent all over again, because the bond was carrying more than romance. It was carrying a childhood hope that this time, with this person, the ending would finally change.

Why Does the Perpetual Victim Story Feel Familiar?

When someone’s identity is built on being harmed, accountability feels like an attack.

One thing my mother excels at is curating a storyline where she has never harmed anyone. Harm always happened to her. Her siblings did it to her. Her ex did it to her. Her friends did it to her. Somebody is always the problem, and she is always the one enduring it.

That’s how she avoids responsibility. She turns her life into a courtroom where she is permanently the injured party, and the verdict is always already decided.

I’ve met this pattern in partnerships too, including one of the worst dynamics I’ve lived through.

When someone’s identity is built on being harmed, accountability starts to feel like an attack. Boundaries get reframed as cruelty. Expectations get called demands. Your clarity gets treated like conditional love, as if asking for basic honesty is a threat instead of a standard.

This is one of the ways mother wounds replicate across relationships. People learn early that victimhood can be used as cover, and then they bring that tactic into adulthood. The story becomes a shield, and the person closest to them becomes the one who has to carry the consequences.

What Is the Devastating Truth About Trying to Heal Through Other People?

You can’t heal a mother wound through someone who is still acting out their own.

Here’s the devastating truth. You cannot heal a mother wound through romantic partnerships.

You can replay it with other people, you can recreate it with new faces, and you can keep choosing people who haven’t even started facing their own wounds. Those are the people most ready to reenact harm while calling it love.

Some people seek maternal figures in partners, then resent those partners for having adult expectations. They want unconditional love without repair, honesty, or responsibility. That expectation belongs in a parent-child bond. Adult relationships require mutuality, follow-through, and the ability to be accountable without collapsing.

So when you request basic stability, they experience it as rejection. It touches the original mother rejection, then they destabilize the connection so they can return to what feels familiar. Confusion becomes their comfort zone, because it keeps them in control of the emotional temperature.

This is why I tell people to look at someone’s pattern, not just their personality. Look at who they date. Look at whether they keep choosing volatile people they can rescue. Ask what happens when they can’t rescue you, or when you refuse to be rescued.

Sometimes they destabilize you so they can feel needed again. And if you refuse to be destabilized, they will cast you as the unavailable mother, the one they can finally punish, because they would never do it to their actual mother.

How Do You Teach Your Nervous System to Leave?

I do not stay where I am not safe, even if leaving feels like abandonment.

This is where reparenting becomes real, because you stop treating “staying” as proof of love and start treating leaving as protection.

You teach your nervous system a sentence it will resist at first, because it changes the whole script: I do not stay where I am not safe, even if I love the person.

Leaving can feel like abandonment. Leaving can mean grieving alone. Leaving can drag up the original wound and make it feel present again, even when you know you’re an adult and you’re choosing yourself.

You leave anyway, because staying costs you your selfhood.

This kind of leaving opens the door for grief, especially for those of us who are autistic, ADHD, and living with CPTSD or PTSD. You grieve the parent you needed and never had. You grieve the partner they could have been if they invested in their own work. You grieve the fantasy that love plus effort equals healing.

You also grieve the little girl who believed the right partner would finally choose her, so she could stop doing all the work alone.

Grief is part of reparenting. Grief is how the body releases the fantasy and makes room for reality.

Some mothers can’t give stable love because of their trauma and wounds. That explains the why. It doesn’t remove the harm. Some partners can’t give stable love because you chose them through the lens of early injuries, and because they are still reenacting their own. That dynamic can change when your standards change, when your pattern changes, when you stop bargaining with inconsistency.

None of this is a referendum on your worth. You were never the problem, not as a child, not now.

The Ending I Live Inside Now

If you’ve already lost one mother, don’t lose yourself trying to save another.

The child part of you still exists. Sometimes she still whispers, maybe if I try harder, she’ll stay this time, and you know exactly where that voice comes from.

I only speak from the adult part of me, because that’s the part that has to keep you alive.

The adult part answers without negotiating. We set boundaries, and we leave when we are harmed. We can grieve later, we can make sense of it later, we can talk it through with a therapist later, but we do not stay inside harm just because an old part of us is begging for a different ending.

Trying harder won’t make anyone choose you. Trying harder only risks making you disappear.

I used to believe love required endurance. I used to believe that if I stayed calm enough, kind enough, clear enough, I could earn being kept. So I kept choosing the same emotional climate with different faces, and I kept trying to win a childhood argument in an adult relationship.

That pattern ends when you accept the truth people avoid saying out loud, being chosen by someone unavailable does not heal you. It confirms the wound and teaches your body to confuse longing with love.

Reparenting is where the story changes, because the goal shifts. You stop trying to get the past to finally behave, and you start protecting the part of you that keeps volunteering for familiar pain.

So now I choose love that feels safe, steady, and real in my body. I choose love that sees me without requiring performance. I choose love that keeps me, because I’m not asking to be kept as a reward, I’m asking because that is what partnership is supposed to feel like.

I can love women deeply without repeating struggle, silence, or survival.

And if I ever feel myself slipping back into the old hunger, that hunger to be chosen where I once felt abandoned, I recognize it early. I sit with it, I hold it, I parent it, and I refuse to build a home there.

Because I already survived that house once. I recognize it, and I am not going back.

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The Colonial Demand for Speech

Nonspeaking autistic children in Black families are often treated as risks rather than as people communicating differently.

When Black families raise nonverbal autistic children, silence is treated as danger rather than communication, and fear becomes the engine of discipline, secrecy, and forced speech. - Lovette Jallow

© Lovette Jallow. All rights reserved.This section is part of a protected and copyrighted body of work. It may not be reproduced, excerpted, adapted, or cited in academic, commercial, or derivative work without explicit permission. This is living, ancestral research rooted in lineage, not labs.

I keep returning to the same image when diaspora parents call me about their nonverbal autistic children—a conversation I have had hundreds of times across four continents since 2019, sitting with precolonial Africa as a living archive, not a museum.

In my research, I sit with societies where memory was held in bodies, where knowledge moved through rhythm, ritual, repetition, and apprenticeship. Where people learned each other slowly. Where language was never only about mouths. It was eyes and silence and gesture and timing, and a community’s ability to read what was present without demanding performance.

I picture an older compound at dusk. The air heavy with cooking smoke. Children moving in and out of each other’s space. Someone humming while they work. Someone else quiet, observing everything, taking in the whole scene without comment. Nobody rushing them. Nobody demanding a greeting on command. Nobody dragging them into the centre to prove they are “okay.”

Then I answer the phone in 2026 and the first question is almost always the same.

How do I make them talk?

The parent usually starts with care. They found my lectures, my training, a post that went viral, a clip where I said out loud what many of us feel but have not yet found language for. They tell me they are tired. They tell me they are scared. They tell me they love their child. Then they say the sentence with a weight behind it: my child is nonverbal.

What that word carries is not just a diagnosis. It is a judgment wrapped in institutional language, a way of naming what the parent fears most: invisibility.

Sometimes they whisper it like it is contraband. Sometimes they admit they are hiding it from their larger family. Sometimes they have already been pushed toward methods that promise quick results, less stimming, more sitting still, more eye contact, more obedience. The language of “progress” arrives early in the call, and it always sounds the same: make the child easier to manage, make the child easier to read, make the child easier for other people to tolerate.

That is where my research and my reality collide.

Because I hear grief, and the grief is real. But I also hear something louder than grief. I hear fear of judgment. Fear of elders. Fear of teachers. Fear of being blamed. Fear of being seen as careless, cursed, weak. Fear of a child who cannot perform respectability on demand.

And once fear becomes the driver, speech stops being communication. Speech becomes evidence. It becomes a receipt you can hold up to the world to prove your child is “in there,” to prove you are doing parenting correctly, to prove your family should be spared humiliation.

This is the quiet violence beneath so many diaspora stories.

We come from cultures that speak through the body, then we raise our autistic children as if body language is meaningless unless it becomes speech. We can read a room with a glance. We can correct a child with a look. We can communicate refusal with teeth-sucking, disappointment with silence, warning with timing. We do whole conversations without words. Yet when a child’s autism makes speech difficult or unavailable, many families are pressured to treat that child as unreachable, then hand the child over to compliance systems that promise to make them “functional.”

I want to name what is happening here, without romanticising the past and without excusing the harm of the present.

Precolonial frames did not require a child to perform neurotypical communication to be recognised as a full human. Diaspora pressure often does. And when recognition depends on performance, the child pays for the adult’s fear with their nervous system.

That is why these calls keep repeating themselves. They start with love. They end with a demand. And somewhere in the middle, the child’s actual language gets lost under everyone else’s panic.

Please note my whole life up to now: when I meet nonverbal autistic children before anyone tells me they do not speak, I rarely register their silence as absence. We communicate without effort. Often the adults watching us react with visible astonishment, as if something impossible is happening in front of them.

I recognise that reaction because I lived it from the other side. I was intermittently non-speaking as a child and today. I understood everything around me, but there were periods when my body would not produce speech. Adults treated that gap as confusion or defiance, and their insistence on making me talk was exhausting. They were exhausting especially in Swedish schools. What they could not see was that comprehension was never the issue. Access was.

I want to be clear about scope and language here. Black families are not a monolith, and neither is Africa. The patterns I describe emerge across different diaspora contexts shaped by migration, racial surveillance, religious pressure, and institutional scrutiny. My references to precolonial African communication draw from specific West and Central African lineages and contemporary continuities, not from an imagined uniform past. When I use terms like nonverbal or non-speaking, I am naming access to speech rather than absence of understanding. Communication remains present, relational, and responsive, even when words are not.

Why Parents Hide an Autism Diagnosis from Black Extended Families

Secrecy turns the child into a risk management exercise. Every meltdown becomes something to control before somebody sees. - Lovette Jallow

Then comes the second pattern, the one parents confess after they trust me enough to say it out loud.

They are hiding the autism.

They are hiding it from grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, the wider family WhatsApp, the church circle—the people who will frame everything as shame, punishment, or spiritual failure. Sometimes they hide it because the family will blame the mother. Sometimes because the family will treat the child like a problem that has embarrassed the lineage. Sometimes because they fear the child will be excluded from family gatherings, spoken about like they are not in the room, or disciplined harder because relatives interpret autism as disrespect.

When a parent hides a diagnosis, they often tell themselves they are protecting the child. In practice, secrecy turns the child into a risk management exercise.

The child becomes a public relations issue. Every meltdown becomes something to control before somebody sees. Every sensory reaction becomes something to correct before somebody comments. Every difference becomes an emergency because the family cannot know, and the parent cannot be questioned, and the child cannot be allowed to make visible what the adults are trying to conceal.

This is where diaspora parenting starts parenting the audience.

The family secret becomes the climate the child grows up breathing. The child learns early that their needs cause tension. The child learns early that adults tighten up around them. The child learns early that the room changes when they enter it.

That is a form of violence, even when nobody throws a hand. It teaches the child that belonging depends on appearing acceptable. It teaches the parent that their love must be managed in private. It keeps everyone performing, and performance always has a cost.

In my research across hundreds of diaspora families, I keep returning to the role of collective interpretation. Griots and oral historians carried genealogies and social memory through attention, rhythm, repetition, and nuance. Communities knew how to listen for what was being expressed beyond direct speech. That kind of listening is not soft. It is disciplined. It is a communal skill.

Secrecy interrupts that. Secrecy isolates the parent. Secrecy isolates the child. Secrecy hands power to the loudest, most punitive voices in the family because the parent starts acting from fear.

Once autism becomes a secret, every behavior turns into evidence, and parents start parenting the audience, not the child.

This is the part where I slow the conversation down, because “nonverbal” gets used in ways that quietly erase the child.

A parent says “nonverbal” and what they often mean is unreachable.

They mean: I cannot get confirmation. I cannot get reassurance. I do not know what they think of me. I cannot show the family that my child understands. I cannot prove to doctors and teachers that my child is intelligent. I cannot stop strangers from treating my child like they are empty.

That word becomes a label for adult helplessness, not a description of the Autistic child’s actual communication. - Lovette Jallow

Many non-speaking autistic people communicate clearly through bodies, patterns, devices, and relational cues. Some communicate through gesture, hand leading, eye direction, pacing, stillness, sound, humming, scripting, repetition, rhythm. Some communicate through AAC. Some of us myself included communicate intermittently. Some speak in certain contexts and lose speech under stress. Some speak in ways that do not match what adults expect, and adults treat that mismatch as failure.

We already understand this as Black people. We can read a glance across the room and know we are being warned. We can hear a long pause and know someone is displeased. We can tell when someone’s breathing changes and know something is coming. We have a cultural archive of nonverbal literacy, built through history, proximity, surveillance, and the need to communicate without giving ourselves away.

That literacy should make us more capable of understanding a non-speaking child. It should make us slower to assume absence. Instead, parents often get pressured into chasing neurotypical performance. They chase speech because speech is rewarded by schools. Speech is treated as proof of progress. Speech can quiet relatives who keep asking, “What is wrong with them?” Speech can prevent the child from being punished for not answering fast enough.

Then the methods get uglier. “Make them talk” slides into compliance training. It slides into forced eye contact. It slides into punishing a child for failing tasks their nervous system cannot perform on demand. It slides into spanking, shouting, intimidation, and humiliation, because the family already has a discipline culture that treats children as objects to correct.

Who is it that struggles to read Black faces and expressions? If not whiteness and its social constructs?

White people and non-Black minorities routinely misread our affect. Research from the American Psychological Association shows they have a harder time telling genuine from fake smiles on Black faces than on white faces, a problem Black people themselves do not have. They cannot reliably read our joy, our discomfort, or our boundaries—but they still expect our children to be readable to them on command.

Now instead of learning your child’s language, you are pressured to make your child fluent in a colonial way of expression.

That is why I press the question that makes people uncomfortable. What exactly are you asking your child to sacrifice so you can feel calm?

This question matters because communication and compliance are not the same thing. A child can be trained to perform obedience while still living in distress. A child can be trained to speak while their body learns that speech comes from threat.

My work on precolonial neurodivergence keeps bringing me back to a different ethic. People observed. People adjusted. People interpreted. People made space for silence and difference without turning it into a crisis that had to be beaten out of the body. That ethic belongs in diaspora parenting now, because our children are paying for our fear in real time.

If the parent equates speech with personhood, then every other form of communication gets dismissed before it is even read.

Black Psychological Practices Before Western Intervention

Years into my research on precolonial Africa and Black communication systems, I started asking a different question: What methods did Black families and communities create for understanding, regulating, and supporting children who communicate differently?

When I looked beyond formal academic psychology, where so much credit has been stolen, buried, and filtered through white institutions, I found something else entirely. Black communities have always produced sophisticated systems of regulation, interpretation, and meaning-making. These are not new. They are not borrowings from white clinical frameworks. They are indigenous technologies refined through generations of necessity and observation.

These practices show up as everyday structure in how Black families actually parent:

The auntie who can tell a child is dysregulated before a word is spoken, because the eyes have shifted and the shoulders have tightened.

Collective regulation through rhythm—clapping, drumming, humming, rocking, pacing in sync, call-and-response that keeps a nervous system anchored to the group.

Indirect instruction through proverb, story, and repetition, the same lesson delivered from multiple angles until it lands in the body.

Observational learning and apprenticeship, where a child watches first, participates second, performs last, without being forced to narrate themselves on demand.

Nonverbal accountability—correction through a look, a pause, a withdrawal of attention, a shift in tone—because the goal is behavior adjustment without humiliation.

Sensory-informed caregiving without clinical language: lowering voices, changing lighting, moving a child away from noise, letting them sit near a trusted adult, letting them chew, tap, sway, and stim without turning regulation into a moral problem.

These are psychological tools. They are relational tools. They are nervous system tools. They come from lived necessity and intergenerational pattern recognition, not from labs. And they matter immensely for Black families raising nonspeaking autistic children, because they represent an entire alternative to compliance-based intervention.

When Western systems treat Black psychological practices as folklore when it suits them, then pathologise Black autistic nonverbal communication when it resists control, they are not correcting a deficit. They are enforcing an order.

Precolonial African Frameworks for Recognizing Silence and Difference

Across the oral histories and social logics I study in precolonial African societies, I keep encountering a different ethic than the one dominating how Black families raise nonspeaking autistic children today.

It is the ethic of learning a person’s language rather than forcing them into performing ours.

Let me be precise, because precolonial Africa gets mythologized constantly—stripped of complexity, flattened into fantasy.

I am not claiming the past was gentle. I am not claiming communities were universally safe. I am not pretending harm did not exist. Harm existed everywhere. Hierarchy existed everywhere. Exclusion existed everywhere. What I am naming is something narrower and more useful: a different set of assumptions about what communication is for, and who carries the burden of translation.

In the accounts and cultural memory I return to, a person who does not speak is not automatically treated as empty, stupid, or absent. Silence can be interpreted as temperament, as discernment, as spiritual proximity, as deep processing, as sickness, as grief, as caution, as choice. Sometimes it is treated with neutrality. Sometimes it is treated with awe. Sometimes it is treated with fear.

But even that range is the point.

Speech is not positioned as the single gateway into humanity.

The ethic I keep finding is recognitional. You learn someone by watching them. You place them in the rhythm of daily life. You notice what they do with food, sound, movement, attention, proximity, routine. You notice who they soften around, what they avoid, what calms them, what throws them off. You do not demand a performance to prove they are there.

That does not mean people never pushed or punished. It means the social world had room for personhood that was not tied to verbal output.

And that difference matters because it exposes something crucial: modern panic about silence is not inevitable. It is produced.

Silence becomes terrifying when you live in systems that punish what they cannot categorise. Silence becomes dangerous when the state is waiting to label your child as “difficult,” “delayed,” “problematic,” “aggressive,” “special needs,” “burden.” Silence becomes shameful when extended family treats disability as moral failure, and treats mothers as guilty by association. Silence becomes urgent when you have absorbed the belief that your child must prove they deserve care.

So when Black families raising autistic children panic about silence, we are not responding to the child’s actual reality. We are responding to the systems watching us. We are responding to surveillance. We are responding to the gaze of schools, clinicians, immigration systems, relatives, and white institutions that hand out resources with one hand while punishing difference with the other.

Under that gaze, parents begin to treat speech as a receipt. Proof the child is “trying.” Proof the parent is “doing something.” Proof the family is “handling it.” The child becomes a document to present to the world.

Precolonial frameworks did not operate under that constant evaluation. The child was not a problem to be solved for external consumption. The child was a person being slowly learned.

That is what we have lost, and that is what we need to recover in diaspora parenting now.

Why Speech Becomes Respectability Politics for Black Parents

Parents chase speech because they are chasing safety. The child experiences that chase as constant correction and micro-erasure. - Lovette Jallow

Many diaspora parents chase speech because they are chasing safety, school access, social acceptance, and immunity from judgment. But the child experiences that chase as constant correction and micro-erasure.

This is the part where I refuse the easy villain story.

Parents are not chasing speech because they are evil. They are often chasing speech because they have been taught that without it their child will be locked out of everything: school placements, support hours, medical credibility, “good” teachers, “safe” classrooms. Even basic protection from abuse, because the world treats nonspeaking children as easy targets.

Parents are also chasing speech because diaspora life is already a negotiation with disrespectability.

A Black child is already read as older than they are. A Black child is already read as more dangerous than they are. A Black family is already judged for how loud, how quiet, how emotional, how strict, how lenient, how religious, how secular, how “integrated,” how “foreign.”

So in that environment, autism does not arrive as a neutral diagnosis. Autism arrives as an additional vulnerability, and speech gets framed as the one thing you can “fix” quickly enough to protect the family from more harm.

That is why so many of these calls narrow into one demand: make the child speak.

What is being asked is bigger than language. What parents are asking is: “Help me make my child legible to hostile systems.”

The child becomes the battleground for adult fear.

And the child experiences the daily chase as micro-erasure.

Every attempt to communicate gets corrected into a preferred format. Every gesture gets ignored because it is “not words.” Every sound gets shaped into something pleasing. Every regulation strategy gets interrupted because it “looks weird.” Every refusal gets pathologised as defiance. Every silence gets treated like a threat.

So speech becomes less like connection and more like a project. A family project. A respectability project. A project that the child cannot consent to, and cannot escape.

This is also where discipline enters, and why it escalates.

Because once speech is tied to reputation and safety, parents begin to treat “noncompliance” as danger. They begin to treat stimming, refusal, shutdown, and avoidance as character problems, instead of nervous system language. They begin to interpret the child as intentionally withholding, as stubborn, as manipulative, as “testing them.”

That is how spanking shows up in these stories.

It shows up as frustration, but it is also a colonial inheritance—the belief that the body can be trained into acceptability through pain. It is childism dressed up as “raising them right.” It is violence rationalised as love.

And for autistic children, especially nonspeaking autistic children, that logic is catastrophic.

Because you cannot beat safety into a nervous system that is already overwhelmed. You cannot punish a child into communication when the communication barrier is sensory, motor, cognitive, or trauma-linked.

You can, however, teach a child that their body is not theirs. You can teach them that their signals will be ignored until they become convenient. You can teach them that people who claim to love them will still hurt them for being unreadable.

Once speech is treated as the family’s salvation, intervention easily becomes control.

Why Compliance Training Harms Autistic Children

Compliance-based methods measure success by how less autistic a child appears. That is the comfort of observers, not support. Lovette Jallow

Systems that promise quick results, visible “improvement,” and obedient behavior can feel like relief to parents being watched. But those systems often measure success by how less-autistic a child appears. That is the comfort of observers, not actual support.

There is a reason compliance-based methods sell so well in Black diaspora communities, even among parents who genuinely love their children and would take a bullet for them.

They sell certainty. They sell a timeline. They sell a before-and-after. They sell a narrative that parents can repeat to teachers, relatives, caseworkers, and elders: “We are working on it.”

A Black family under pressure often does not have the luxury of slow learning. They are fighting school systems that punish difference. They are fighting healthcare systems that dismiss Black pain. They are fighting relatives who interpret disability through superstition, morality, or humiliation. They are fighting the daily weight of being judged as a “bad parent” in countries that already treat Black families as suspect.

So when a program shows up and says: do this, get results, fix the behavior, it feels like oxygen.

And when you are gasping, you will grab whatever promises air.

The issue is the metric.

Compliance-based approaches measure progress by external normalcy: Does the child sit still? Does the child make eye contact? Does the child stop flapping? Does the child stop humming? Does the child stop refusing? Does the child stop “acting out”? Does the child speak on command? Does the child follow directions quickly?

That is a performance standard. It tells parents: if your child looks calmer, your child is safer.

But what often happens is that the child looks calmer because they have learned that their signals will be punished or ignored. They look calmer because they have learned that self-protection must be quiet. They look calmer because they have given up on being understood.

Here is the contradiction I need us all to name:

Black communities already know communication is more than words. We already train children to read the room. We already have a vocabulary of silence, gaze, posture, breath, timing, mouth sounds, and the sharpness of a pause. We already understand indirect instruction. We already understand coded language born from danger.

So why do we suddenly pretend we do not understand a child’s body once the child is autistic?

Because the institution is asking us to make the child legible to whiteness. Because the institution rewards our compliance. Because the institution makes parents responsible for the comfort of outsiders. And because fear creates tunnel vision.

Many parents are not choosing compliance because they value obedience. They are choosing it because they have been forced into triage—trying to reduce harm from outside forces. And they end up importing harm into the home.

This is the trap that stops many parents from finding alternative methods to ABA as well. The systems that created the pressure become the systems the family turns to for relief, and the child pays in their nervous system.

Corporal Punishment and Autistic Nervous Systems

You cannot beat safety into a Childs nervous system that is already overwhelmed. Punishment creates shutdown, masking, and fear. - Lovette Jallow

Corporal punishment is often defended as love or discipline, but it is a domination practice that teaches children that safety depends on compliance. Autistic children pay a heavier price because their nervous systems process threat differently.

I want to say this without cushioning it. Hitting children is not culture. It is a mechanism.

It is a mechanism for speed. It is a mechanism for power. It is a mechanism for obedience. It is a mechanism that produces immediate visible results—the kind adults can mistake for “respect.”

Diaspora parents defend it in familiar language: it kept me safe, it made me who I am, it taught me respect, the world is harder than I am, I would rather my child fear me than die outside.

That defense is usually a trauma narrative, and a survival narrative. But survival narratives can still be violent.

The colonial logic underneath corporal punishment is simple: the child’s body belongs to authority. The adult has the right to shape it. Pain is a tool of instruction. Compliance is proof of good character.

That logic travels well because it matches the logic of many colonial schools, churches, and state institutions that disciplined Black bodies through humiliation and punishment, then called it civilisation.

So the punishment reflex does not begin with autism.

Autism just intensifies it, because autism creates behaviors adults cannot control with simple commands. And when adults cannot control something, shame shows up. So the adult escalates. The adult tightens. The adult demands performance. The adult demands obedience. The adult demands speech. The adult demands eye contact. The adult demands gratitude. The adult demands calm.

The autistic child then pays the price in the currency of their nervous system. Because autistic processing often includes differences in sensory integration, motor planning, interoception, and stress response. Threat is not a concept, it is a full-body event. Punishment is not a lesson, it is a nervous system takeover. A child who is already overloaded will not “learn” under fear, they will survive under fear.

And survival under fear looks like shutdown. It looks like dissociation. It looks like fawning. It looks like compliance with a hollow center. It looks like quietness that adults misread as improvement.

This is trauma encoding in the nervous system, mistaken by some for progress.

Childism and the Demand for Autistic Performance

Under childism, the child becomes proof of the parent’s competence. Their refusal is treated as disrespect, not communication. - Lovette Jallow

Childism treats children as extensions of adult identity. The goal shifts from relationship to control, and the child’s body becomes a site where adults work out shame, panic, and community expectations.

If you want to understand why speech becomes such an obsession, you have to name the ideology under it.

Childism is the belief that children exist to serve adult needs:

Adult comfort. Adult pride. Adult reputation. Adult belonging. Adult fantasies of a “good family.”

Under childism, the child is not a person you are getting to know. The child is a project you are managing. The child is a mirror. The child is proof.

So a nonspeaking autistic child becomes more than a child. They become a public relations problem. They become a test of the parent’s competence. They become a symbol of what the community will say. They become a threat to the adult’s sense of control.

That is why the secrecy in these calls is so consistent. That is why the family secret becomes the first violence. The child is already being positioned as a liability before anyone has asked: What does this child understand? What do they want? What do they notice? What scares them? What delights them? What patterns do they hold?

Childism also explains why adults feel entitled to extract performance.

Smile for them. Greet them. Look at them. Hug them. Say thank you. Stop crying. Stop rocking. Stop making noise. Speak.

Under childism, the child’s refusal is not treated as information, it is treated as disrespect.

And for autistic children, refusal is often communication. Refusal is often self-protection. Refusal is often sensory boundary. Refusal is often a nervous system saying: this is too much.

But childism does not hear “too much.” It hears “defiant.”

So it punishes. It coerces. It forces. It trains. It demands. And then it calls that love.

Once you see childism clearly, the demand for speech stops looking like a neutral preference and starts looking like a social order being enforced. - Lovette Jallow

Grief, Social Fear, and Autistic Parental Accountability

The most consistent pattern I hear is grief that is real, paired with a fear that is louder, fear of how the family will interpret the child, fear of being blamed, fear of being seen as weak, cursed, or careless.

In these conversations, grief arrives first, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

Some parents are grieving the version of childhood they were promised: school photos that look “normal,” family gatherings without commentary, grandparents who brag instead of scrutinise, cousins who include instead of mock. Some are grieving language as a shared ritual, the call-and-response of home, the ease of hearing “Mom” or “Dad” and knowing they are being reached. Some are grieving their own nervous system, because living in vigilance around a child’s needs without real community support is exhausting.

That part is human. It is real.

But then the grief gets recruited. It becomes an argument for urgency. It becomes proof that something must be fixed fast. It becomes the justification for escalation, because the parent cannot sit in the uncertainty without feeling like they are failing.

That is where the fear shows up.

Not the fear of “my child will never speak,” though that fear exists. The deeper fear is social.

It is fear of elders who will interpret difference as disrespect. It is fear of relatives who will treat the child as a shameful secret. It is fear of a community that has never been kind to disability, especially disability that disrupts hierarchy. It is fear of being blamed for the child’s neurology—blamed for vaccines, blamed for “too much softness,” blamed for “Western parenting,” blamed for not praying enough, blamed for not hitting enough, blamed for being cursed, blamed for being careless.

It is fear of being read as weak in a world where Black parents often feel forced to perform strength as protection.

That fear becomes louder than the child’s actual language.

So parents chase speech as a shield. They want something they can show others, something that quiets gossip, something that gets teachers off their back, something that makes the child legible to systems that punish ambiguity.

Naming that fear matters, because unspoken fear is what drives force, secrecy, and escalation.

How to Read and Respond to Nonspeaking Autistic Children

Once a parent expands the definition of language, the child stops being a problem to solve and becomes a person to understand.

The turning point in these conversations comes when I ask what the parent already responds to: eye direction, pulling away, humming, repeated sounds, hand leading, tension shifts. And whether they are willing to treat those as communication rather than “bad behavior.”

The reason this question changes the room is because it exposes a contradiction.

Most parents already understand their child. They just do not trust that understanding yet.

They respond to the child’s eye direction even if they do not call it language. They notice the child’s body stiffen before a meltdown. They can tell the difference between “overstimulated” and “playful” without needing a word for it. They already know which hum means excitement, which means distress, which means fatigue. They already know the rituals that calm their child, the songs that settle them, the objects that ground them, the textures that trigger them.

They are fluent in pieces.

But they keep treating those pieces as accidental, as noise, as meaningless behavior, because somewhere they were taught that language only counts if it looks like speech.

So I ask them to slow down and inventory what is already happening.

What does your child do when they want something? What do they do when they do not want something? What do they do when they want closeness? What do they do when closeness is too much? What do they do when they are processing? What do they do right before they escalate? What do they do right after? Where does their body go when they feel safe? Where does it go when they feel watched?

Then I ask the question most families avoid because it requires honesty.

Are you willing to treat these signals as valid? Are you willing to respond to them consistently? Are you willing to stop punishing the only language your child currently trusts?

Because if a child learns that pulling away gets ignored, and crying gets punished, and humming gets shamed, and hand-leading gets blocked, and eye direction gets dismissed, the child learns a brutal lesson: communication is unsafe.

That lesson does not create speech. It creates silence. Once a parent expands the definition of language, the child stops being a problem to solve and becomes a person to understand.

AAC and Two-Way Communication with Nonspeaking Autistic Children

Supporting a nonspeaking autistic child is less about extracting words and more about building a two-way communication environment where the child’s signals are believed, responded to, and given tools to grow.

The shift I want diaspora parents to make is not sentimental. It is structural.

It is the difference between training and relationship.

“Make them speak” is a one-way demand. It assumes the child is failing at something the adult is entitled to receive. It treats speech as proof of personhood, and everything else as inconvenience.

“Become fluent” starts from a different premise.

It accepts that your child already communicates. It accepts that you are the one who needs to learn. It assumes that relationship comes before performance. It asks the adult to do what Black families already do in other contexts: read the room, study the cues, adjust to the person in front of you, recognise meaning without needing it packaged in formal speech.

Becoming fluent means:

Slowing down enough to notice patterns without treating them as defiance.

Responding to communication attempts even when they do not look tidy.

Building predictability so the child can risk more expression.

Removing punishment as a teaching method, because fear cannot be a communication strategy.

Taking seriously that autonomy is part of language. Consent is part of language. Refusal is part of language.

Understanding that tools are not an insult.

This is where AAC belongs in the story: as an extension of human language, not as a last-ditch gadget after adults have exhausted themselves trying to force speech.

AAC sits in the same category as every other bridge humans build when speech is not the right channel. It is a way to honour the fact that language is bigger than mouths. It is a way to give the child more options, not fewer. It is a way to reduce panic in the home, because the child can be heard without being chased.

And it is a way to stop treating the child’s silence as a crisis that must be conquered, and start treating it as a signal that deserves translation, care, and time.

Building Autism-Affirming Community in Black Diaspora Families

Parents often start their conversations with me by asking me how to get the child to speak. But the deeper work is how to build a family culture where disability is not treated as shame, and where a child’s differences do not become a public trial.

This is the part families skip because it exposes the real problem.

A child’s support plan gets discussed in detail. A diagnosis gets researched. Therapies get compared. Progress gets tracked. The child becomes a project, and the adults feel productive.

Meanwhile, the community environment stays untouched.

The aunties who think disability equals bad parenting still have full access to the child. The elders who treat noncompliance as disrespect still control the moral tone of the home. The church people who interpret difference as spiritual failure still get to speak over the family. The cousins who mock still get invited, and everyone calls it “kids being kids.” The neighbours who gossip still get updates, because the parents feel pressured to explain themselves.

That is why so many parents feel frantic. They are parenting their child and defending their reputation at the same time.

And diaspora culture has a particular talent for turning private struggle into public theatre.

A child who covers their ears becomes a story to tell at a gathering. A child who avoids eye contact becomes a debate about manners. A child who stims becomes a punchline. A child who cannot tolerate a loud room becomes “spoiled.”

Then the adults start bargaining with the child’s body in front of an audience.

“Say hi. Look at them. Stop doing that. Be normal. Smile. Speak.”

This is how disability becomes a trial.

The family does not ask: What does my child need to stay regulated? The family asks: How do I stop people from talking?

So the adults chase speech, because speech is seen as proof that the child is socially safe. But what the child actually needs is protection from shame.

That protection is a community task, not a clinic task.

It means being willing to disappoint people. It means telling relatives: we are not discussing this child as entertainment. It means refusing “jokes” that rely on humiliation. It means ending phone calls when someone starts diagnosing or blaming. It means setting rules for visits, including leaving early without apology.

It means correcting elders respectfully but firmly, because respect does not require surrender.

It means being willing to say: you do not have access to my child if you cannot speak about them with dignity.

For many diaspora parents, this is the hardest part. They have been raised to believe that family is automatic. That elders must be indulged. That community judgement is a fact of life. That the child must adapt to the room.

But a nonspeaking autistic child cannot “adapt to the room” the way adults want. The nervous system will not cooperate with reputation management.

So the real question becomes: Will the room adapt to the child?

A family culture that treats disability as shame trains everyone to see the child through that shame.

A family culture that treats disability as human variation trains everyone to learn the child.

That difference changes the entire trajectory of the child’s life, because it changes what the child learns about their own existence.

If the child’s differences are treated like an embarrassment, the child will internalise that embarrassment even without speech. If the child’s differences are treated like information, the child will experience safety as a baseline.

And safety is the condition that makes communication grow.

Without this, the child remains trapped between two pressures: clinical normalisation on one side, family stigma on the other. Neither serves the child. Both serve the adults.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If you are raising a nonspeaking autistic child in the diaspora, your first task is not to fix them into speech. Your first task is to stop treating silence like a failure.

Your child is communicating already, through regulation, repetition, avoidance, proximity, sound, gesture, rhythm, and pattern. You can meet that communication with threat, or you can meet it with curiosity and consistency.

AAC is part of that meeting because it gives language somewhere to land without demanding that the child’s body perform speech to earn respect.

CREDENTIAL & RESEARCH BY LOVETTE JALLOW

I teach and research in precolonial neurodivergence across West African societies including Fulani, Wolof, Sarahule, Akan, and Mandinka archives. I lecture at Autism Organisations globally and train Black educators and parents on communication frameworks that honour both cultural tradition and autistic nervous systems.

This essay is grounded in hundreds of conversations with diaspora families, and in the historical record showing us that nonspeaking children were not treated as crises in precolonial Africa—they were interpreted, placed in community, and recognised as full humans.

The systems we have now are not inevitable. They are imported. And they can be refused.

© Lovette Jallow. All rights reserved.This work is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, republished, excerpted, or used for academic, commercial, or derivative purposes without written permission. This includes institutions, researchers, and media.

If This Resonates

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Reconnecting With an Ex After 7 Years When You’ve Become Secure

December 25, 2025. A door I thought was closed opens again.

It starts with a message. Then a voice. Then someone in my kitchen on a Sunday morning, and suddenly the last seven years feel like they happened to someone else, someone who was learning how to live alone, how to trust herself, how to recognise the difference between intensity and safety. That person feels distant now. Standing in my own space with someone I once asked to marry me, I feel her absence like a past tense.

But she is here. In present tense. Asking if we can try again.

I spent seven years building an answer to that question. Therapy. CBT. Prolonged exposure. Two years into EMDR for trauma. Estrangement from an abusive mother. Confrontation with the person who raped me. A body that can feel intensity and still notice gaps. A life that does not require anyone else’s presence to feel complete.

Secure attachment does not make you untouchable. It makes you precise. It gives you the ability to hold warmth without handing over the keys. It gives you the ability to see vulnerability and still ask, what changed in practice.

So I said yes to reconnection from evidence, not longing.

And the beginning was easy to believe because it was domestic. I cooked, the kind of cooking that fills the house and makes time slow down. She moved around my kitchen like she had permission again, hands on mugs, opening drawers, learning my routines as if they were a language.

We built furniture together, screws, measurements, the soft competence of two people making something stand straight. There were breakfasts in bed, event plans mapped out like a future, calendars and logistics, small rituals that make a relationship feel less like an idea and more like a place you can live.

The first weeks carried the texture of repair. Shared notes to mitigate harm. Articulated fears. Named patterns. She said, “I’ve thought about you every day.” She said, “I understand things now.” Something in me believed her, partly because the language sounded like self-awareness, and partly because I wanted to believe time had done its job.

Security, for me, includes surveillance of the structure. From day one I was looking for capacity, not promises. Secure people do not get carried by explanations. We track follow-through. We track whether curiosity exists when discomfort enters the room, especially curiosity about one’s own patterns, because that is where change either becomes real or collapses into performance.

Later, she would tell me she needed a version of the story where I disappeared, because that version made her actions easier to live with.

By week two, the absence of curiosity became clear.

Author’s Note on Motive and Repair

I’m publishing this because disabled Black women deserve to name what happened to us without our boundaries being reframed as cruelty.

This essay is testimony and analysis. It traces a pattern I observed during reconnection, how anxious-avoidant dynamics use reframing and shutdown, how community spaces get pulled into narrative management, and why the cost lands hardest on disabled Black women when we refuse to bend.

I am not publishing this as an exposé. I am not listing every harm, and I am not asking for judgment of another person. I own my choices from 2018. I believe people can change and do repair and until that is confirmed I kept receipts because silence has been weaponised against me before, and because I refuse reality debates.

This is for anyone who has left and been told they were too much, anyone who has watched pain get prioritised over safety, and anyone learning the difference between compassion and enabling.

Why I Keep Receipts, Autism, Alexithymia, and Truth Distortion as Harm

There is a reason I run redundant backups and keep 108 terabytes across two cloud drives I built, with off-site protection.

There is a reason I audit AI systems and datasets for companies for ethics and bias, and build infrastructure that can track contradictions and preserve context. There is also a reason I keep cameras in major areas of my home, connected to trusted persons, and why I document certain interactions once a pattern has been established.

My life taught me that harm often begins where reality gets rewritten. From SA to attacks in my home and threats to my safety by people I would have never imagined in private and in the public eye.

Some people will erase what happened to avoid shame. Some will outsource self-examination to whoever asks the hard questions, then call it intimacy. When feelings become the only truth that matters, repair becomes impossible.

I keep records because I refuse to debate reality.

Autism plus alexithymia—a difficulty identifying and describing emotions—can become its own loop: photographic memory for facts, blur on what those facts mean in my body. I can recall an entire conversation word-for-word and still not know if I felt afraid or angry until hours later. So I stopped arguing with my nervous system. I built infrastructure around it.

One of the hardest things for me has always been people who lack curiosity. Not just about the world, but about themselves. No interest in their trauma. No willingness to examine patterns. No capacity to ask: What am I doing? Why does this keep happening?

Without curiosity, growth stalls. Reenactment takes over. Repair becomes performance. Repetition becomes the relationship.

People who outsource self-examination to whoever asks the hard questions do not build intimacy. They demand caretaking. Your triggers become rules. Your feelings become someone else’s job to manage. Your reactions become the centre of the room, and everyone else’s reality bends around them.

This is what I reconnected with. Not as my old self. As the new me.

When I say I reconnected after seven years, understand this clearly: I did not return as my old self. I returned after years of work moving from avoidant patterns into secure attachment, with structure, and with a low tolerance for narrative manipulation. I came with infrastructure. With systems. With the willingness to act fast.

Anxious-Avoidant Attachment and Avoidant Shutdown.

Why Curiosity Decides Repair or Reenactment

Her wound was real. Rejected by her mother in formative years. Foster care exploitation by someone she should have been able to trust. More exploitation after, and compounded trauma. A scarcity fear that made closeness feel conditional. She could describe it with precision. She could identify the patterns. But when discomfort showed up, her nervous system reverted to the familiar reflex.

Curiosity means asking: Why do I do this? What am I actually afraid of? What would it look like to sit with this instead of reframing it? It means the willingness to be uncomfortable in service of change. It means staying present when someone brings you discomfort, not because you caused it, but because you care about understanding what it revealed.

Curiosity is the difference between I understand what I did (insight) and I am doing something different now (behaviour). Most people stop after insight. Curiosity requires behaviour. Sustained behaviour. Under pressure. When your nervous system is activated. When it would be easier to reframe or withdraw or make the other person responsible for your feelings.

She lacked this curiosity. She could say I understand. She could not hold the discomfort of actually changing. My health boundary—immunocompromised, non-negotiable—became If you loved me, you would trust me. My discomfort became the problem to manage, not the signal to examine.

Trauma without curiosity becomes everyone else’s problem.

A lot of people misname intensity as love because intensity is what their nervous system learned first. If you grew up inside emotional turbulence, connection can get wired to volatility, distance and pursuit, warmth followed by withdrawal. You learn to scan for shifts, then call that scanning care. Calm does not give familiar markers. Calm asks for presence, accountability, and the ability to sit with discomfort without rewriting the story to get relief.

For some people, calm feels like deprivation. They call it boring, when what they mean is my body does not know how to rest here.

This is where curiosity becomes the dividing line between repair and reenactment. When someone cannot be curious about their own patterns, they externalize the work. Your clarity becomes your rigidity. Your boundary becomes your lack of trust. Your protection becomes your unwillingness to be patient. Your refusal to continue participating in harm becomes your cruelty.

In community spaces, this becomes unsafe. The person who refuses self-examination turns everyone else into regulators, translators, witness managers. They recruit others to validate their narrative instead of facing their own. Collusion forms—not always through malice, but through discomfort and cowardice. The outcome is the same: the person who cannot look at themselves becomes everyone’s problem.

 I have documentation. Receipts. Timelines. Understanding requires evidence. And for me, as someone with alexithymia—a difficulty identifying and describing emotions—evidence is how I trust my own analysis. When I analyzed over 680 pages of documentation from this reconnection, I was checking myself. Asking: Does this pattern hold up under scrutiny? Or am I seeing connections that aren't there?

What I found was consistent. Reliable. Repeatable.

The Four Weeks That Exposed Anxious-Avoidant Attachment Patterns

Over four weeks, the mechanism revealed itself. Here are the moments—each one a test, each one showing whether curiosity existed or whether performance had replaced it.

Week 1: Intensity and shared notes. Warmth. Presence. She engaged. I watched for gaps.

We created a shared document. Hard to say things. Notes about what we needed, what made us feel safe, what we feared. This felt like repair. Like mutual excavation. I wrote honestly about my trauma, my triggers, my needs. She wrote about her fears of abandonment, her struggle with communication, her longing to do better.

Something in me wanted to believe this document was evidence of change. The willingness to name things that are hard to say verbally. The courage to be vulnerable. The desire to build differently.

But I was also watching. What happens when I bring discomfort? Will she stay curious, or will she make my discomfort about her fear?

Week 2: The boundary reframed. I said: I am immunocompromised. No physical contact with someone unvaccinated.

She said okay. Then tested it. When I held it: If you really loved me, wouldn’t you trust me?

I was asked to bypass years of research and lived risk for anti-vax arguments. Long COVID with my immune system would not be an inconvenience. It could be death. I have watched friends stroke out after COVID. I have watched immune-compromised people deteriorate. This is not anxiety. This is medical reality.

But when I explained this, the response was: You don’t trust me. And my git feeling about vaccines and overwhelm me with research. You think I’m dangerous. If you loved me, you would take the risk and allow me proximity and access to you anyway.

Curiosity would have asked: What is she actually protecting? What does my boundary trigger in her? What she did instead was reframe my survival boundary as a failure of love.

This is the moment I knew the pattern was active.

Week 3: The playlist as triangulation. She made a romantic playlist for us. When I went to listen, I discovered the architecture underneath: other playlists visible in her account. Playlists tied to people from her past. People she was holding a foot in, still. Histories she had never named and possibly never examined. Not just music. A map of her still-active attachments, woven invisible into what she had offered me.

And me having to handle her feelings of guilt from another relationship which she feared would be seen as a placeholder for me.

I brought up the discomfort. Not in accusation. In observation: I saw the other playlists. The people from your past. I need to understand what this means.

Her response: It’s far too early and too much information for me to process. Have a nice day.

Not curiosity. Not I understand why that triggered you. Let me explain. Not even defensiveness. Shutdown. A boundary she placed against my reality, not in protection of herself, but in refusal to examine her own.

This is when race entered the picture, though I didn’t name it yet.

As a dark-skinned Black woman with a platform, I already knew what would happen if I pressed my boundary. Her pain would get coded as vulnerability. My boundary would get coded as rigidity. My clarity would become aggression. My autism and adhd weaponised against me. The triangulation itself would vanish from the conversation, replaced by a narrative about my impatience with her trauma.

I had lived this before. I had watched it happen. And I knew that if I stayed to explain, I would end up managing not the relationship, but the racial interpretation of the relationship. I would become responsible for making people understand that her avoidance had nothing to do with my love and everything to do with her fear.

So in that moment, I made a calculation: Is this worth the cost?

This is the architecture of avoidant triangulation. She could create something romantic for me while keeping the door open to her past. She could present commitment while maintaining escape routes. She could do both without ever asking herself: Why am I doing this? What am I actually afraid of?

My noticing it became the problem. Not the triangulation itself. My seeing it.

This is when the pattern became undeniable. Not in the playlist. In her refusal to be curious about why I saw what was plainly there. In her choice to shut me down rather than examine herself.

Week 4: The block as consequence. I said: You asked for reassurance. I gave it. When I needed it, you shut down. I set a boundary. You tested it. I brought up discomfort. You vanished. This shows me I cannot build romance with this dynamic.

Then I wrote a ending letter and removed everywhere. Not drama. Not anger. Implementation.

Secure attachment meant I could see the pattern returning and act early. No exhaustion. No negotiation spiral. No staying to prove I could manage someone else’s avoidance.

Trauma Without Self-Examination Becomes Everyone Else’s Problem

From past experiences this is how collusion forms. Friends hear her version. Colleagues get recruited. The narrative spreads: She has trauma. She is rigid. Never mind the medical reality of my immunocompromised status. Never mind the triangulation. Never mind the boundary reframing.

I keep receipts because I refuse reality debates these days. Documentation is my boundary against narrative warfare.

In community spaces, this becomes dangerous. The person lacking self-curiosity externalizes harm. They make others responsible for their regulation. They turn shared environments into places where boundaries get tested, discomfort gets dismissed, and Black women’s clarity gets coded as aggression.

People who cannot face themselves manage shame by managing perception.

They reframe. They recruit. They turn community into their witness stand. This is not personal to her. This is how avoidant patterns weaponize community. This is how one person’s refusal to examine themselves becomes structural unsafety for everyone.

The person without curiosity does not ask What do I need to change? They ask Who do I need to convince that I’m the victim? They do not examine patterns. They manage narratives. And in doing so, they make the people around them—especially those with less credibility to begin with—into their unpaid emotional regulators.

Willingness Versus Capacity to Change, Why Therapy Language Can Still Fail Under Stress

Patterns do not disappear because time passes. They wait.

They wait for proximity. They wait for vulnerability. They wait for the moment when you think you are safe enough to drop your guard. And then they return, with the same machinery, the same sequence, the same outcome.

The only thing that changes patterns is the sustained, uncomfortable, repetitive work of choosing differently when your nervous system is activated. Not talking about it. Not understanding it. Not naming it in therapy. Actually doing it. Consistently. Over time. Under pressure.

Willingness to change is not the same as capacity to change.

Willingness is insight. It is the ability to say I understand what I did. It is the moment when someone has a breakthrough in therapy and feels the weight of their patterns and wants to be different. Willingness feels like hope. It feels like change is possible.

Capacity is behaviour. It is the sustained choice to do something different even when it is uncomfortable. Capacity is what shows up when your nervous system is activated and you choose connection over shutdown. Capacity is what continues when the initial insight fades and you have to actually implement change in real time, under stress, when no one is watching.

Only one of those can sustain a relationship.

This is where most reconnections fail. Someone has a breakthrough. They say I understand now. They change their language. They sound different. They feel different. And then, the moment discomfort appears—the moment the old pattern would protect them—they revert. Not because they don’t want to change. But because wanting is not the same as being able.

Some people can describe their patterns beautifully and still lack the capacity to change them. That therapy language can be a tool for accountability or a shield against it, depending on what comes next. The gap between I understand and I am different now is where most relationships end.

What I learned is that I can love someone deeply, understand their wounds completely, and still choose to leave because the cost of staying is too high. That leaving is not abandonment when you have given someone every opportunity to show you they have changed. That clarity is the kindest thing you can offer when a relationship is ending, even if it feels harsh in the moment.

I learned that my nervous system is faster than my mind at recognizing danger. That my body knows before I do. That somatic signals are information, not anxiety. That the tightness in my chest when someone reframes my boundary is not my problem—it is my protection.

I learned that I am different. That seven years of work did change me. That I can recognize patterns faster, set boundaries clearer, and leave sooner. That I do not need to stay to prove I have changed. The fact that I can leave is the proof.

I learned that reconnection is not inherently healing. That sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is refuse to participate in their pattern. That walking away can be an act of care—for them, and for yourself.

I learned that I am not responsible for someone else’s wound. That I can hold compassion for their pain without absorbing it as my responsibility to fix. That my boundaries do not require justification, explanation, or apology. That no is a complete sentence. That leaving is not cruelty when staying would destroy you.

And I learned this: The version of love that requires me to abandon myself is not love. And I am no longer willing to pay that price.

Seven Years Taught Me What Secure Attachment Looks Like in Practice

This is what I reconnected with. Not as my old self. As the new me.

2018: Silence. I stayed too long. Having a mother that relied on my silence for her harm to continue meant I couldn’t speak against any Black women causing me harm. So after a year of escalation, I disappeared without explanation. My silence created a void she tried to fill with pursuit. She tracked me. Showed up at my work. At my dates. Circled my block. Orbited my peers and colleagues. Spread sensitive information about my private life only she had access to and colluded with people who meant me physical and reputational harm.

The stalking was her search for closure I did not provide.

I was a coward then. Not for leaving. For leaving silently after a long period of overwhelm, when she only recognized love if it was chaotic. The cost of my silence was that I created a void she had to fill with stories. And stories, left unfilled, become obsession.

2026: Clarity. I named the pattern. I said: I see this. This is not acceptable to me. I wrote a letter and enforced the boundary and left cleanly.

Secure means protecting self without self-erasure. It means naming what you observe without needing agreement. It means acting, not just analyzing. It means understanding her wound without becoming its container.

The old me stayed silent when harmed. The new me documents, names, and leaves.

Seven years ago, I left in silence and it became stalking. This time, I left with clarity and it became closure. The difference is everything.

I will not do this again. I will not reconnect with someone whose patterns have not fundamentally changed. I will not confuse intensity with safety. I will not stay to prove my loyalty. I will not carry both versions of reality. I will not explain my boundaries until they become negotiable.

I will trust my body. I will honour my clarity. I will protect my peace. I will choose myself.

And that is not cruelty. That is wisdom.

Race, Credibility, and Why Black Women Pay Double for Boundaries

She is biracial with a Black mother. I am a dark-skinned Black woman with a platform. There is a particular violence in this configuration that people do not speak about openly. Not even the children themselves.

The violence of the biracial child with a Black mother: There is a sacredness assigned to motherhood that makes people refuse to challenge harm. A Black mother raising a biracial child carries the weight of protecting that child from a world that will not protect them. This bond is real. It is also leveraged. When that child grows into an adult who refuses self-examination, the mother’s protection becomes collusion. And Black women who name the harm become the threat to the sacred narrative of Black motherhood itself.

She had a Black mother. This meant people could not see her patterns without seeing her mother’s wound. This meant when I named what she did, I was implicitly naming what her mother had not examined in her. The people around us did not want to see this. It was easier to believe that I was rigid than to believe that a mother’s love had become a container for unexamined trauma passed down.

The asymmetry in who gets believed: She is biracial. I am a dark-skinned Black woman. When conflict surfaces between us, the narrative asymmetry is automatic.

My boundaries get read as rigidity. Her pain as legitimacy. My clarity as aggression. When I am direct, that directness confirms what people already fear about Black women—that we are aggressive, unforgiving, impossible to satisfy. When she is vague, that vagueness gets read as vulnerability. As someone hurt. As worthy of protection.

The colorism I could not ignore: My visibility threatened something in her. A fragile architecture of worth built by proximity to accomplished Black women. When that architecture collapsed—when I set a boundary and held it—she tried to rebuild it by diminishing me instead of brightening herself.

This is colorism in its quietest form. Not I am better than you. But Your visibility is a threat to my proximity to Blackness.

Race shaped the narrative that travelled. The narrative I controlled was: I set a boundary and she tested it repeatedly. The narrative that travelled was: She has a trauma wound and she is refusing to be patient. My immunocompromised status got coded as control. Her reframing got coded as vulnerability. Anti-Black assumptions did the work she didn’t have to do.

The cost of visibility for a dark-skinned Black woman: I do not just leave. I have to explain the leaving. I have to justify it. I have to prove my boundaries were reasonable, demonstrate that I am not the problem. Because without that proof, people will believe her version. Not because it is true, but because it fits the anti-Black narrative that was already waiting.

I cannot just heal privately. I cannot just process this loss. My platform means every detail becomes something I must account for. People want to understand what happened so they can decide: Was she bad or was I too rigid? Was she hurt or was I cruel?

I had to manage not just the relationship rupture, but the racial interpretation of the rupture. This is what it means to be a dark-skinned Black woman with visibility. The work of leaving does not end with leaving. It doubles. Protect self. Then prove the protection was justified.

What I will say plainly: Race shaped who got believed. Race shaped the credibility gap. Race shaped how my boundary-setting looked when it was reframed by someone with closer proximity to whiteness.

I noticed this. I carried it. And it made the choice to leave even clearer, because staying meant continuing to manage not just the relationship, but the racial interpretation of the relationship—and the unspoken violence of being a Black woman who tells the truth about a biracial person’s harm.

Seven Tests to Know If Reconnection Is Real, Secure Attachment Standards for Anxious-Avoidant Dynamics

Reconnection feels convincing because history does half the work.

Familiarity creates a false sense of proof. Your body remembers the highs, the jokes, the language, the private world you built together. That memory can drown out the only question that matters: Can my nervous system rest here?

I do not test people with games. I test the structure.

* Test 1: How do they respond to a boundary they cannot benefit from?A real reconnection meets a boundary with respect, not with bargaining. No reframes. No guilt. No prove you love me. If someone needs you to betray your own safety so they can feel chosen, they are building intimacy on risk. This is not sustainable. This is a sign that their wound still requires you to participate in your own harm.

* Test 2: Do they stay present when discomfort enters the room?People can perform softness when everything is going their way. Capacity shows up when they are disappointed, corrected, or confronted with their own contradictions. Do they stay in the conversation, or do they shut it down and punish you with distance? Do they get curious about what triggered them, or do they make your discomfort about your failure to protect their feelings?

* Test 3: Is curiosity consistent, especially about themselves?Curiosity sounds like: What did that bring up in me? Why did I react that way? What am I protecting? What do I do when I feel exposed? Without that curiosity, every conflict turns into a trial where someone has to lose. You become the prosecutor. They become the defendant. Intimacy dies because understanding dies.

* Test 4: Is repair behavioural, not rhetorical?Apologies are cheap when they are not followed by changed decisions. I understand has no value if the same pattern keeps running the next day. Behaviour is what matters. Did they actually do something different? Or did they just say something different?

* Test 5: Does reality stay stable?Do they hold the same story across time, or does the frame shift depending on what makes them feel safe? People who rewrite reality under stress will eventually rewrite you. They will tell different people different versions. They will claim they never said things they clearly said. They will make you question what you witnessed. This is not a mental health issue. This is a integrity issue.

* Test 6: Do they manage shame by recruiting an audience?If someone cannot look at themselves, they will look for witnesses. They will look for validators. They will look for people to soften their accountability. They will tell your friends a different version of what happened. They will make it so that instead of one rupture, there are many—one in each conversation, one in each person’s ear. That is how harm becomes communal.

* Test 7: Can you speak in full sentences without bracing?If you are editing yourself, rehearsing explanations, over-documenting to protect basic truth, then the relationship is already asking you to shrink. I do not call that love anymore. I call it a familiar structure I learned to survive in. And I am not willing to rebuild it.

Reconnection is real when it reduces labour. When it increases steadiness. When it makes your life simpler, and your body quieter. Anything else is a return to work. And you have already done enough work.

What You Should Never Negotiate Again (And Why I Left)

I do not negotiate health boundaries. I do not negotiate consent. I do not negotiate emotional safety. I do not negotiate the right to ask a direct question without being shut down.

I also do not negotiate narrative manipulation, especially as a disabled Black woman. I have lived through what happens when people decide my precision is aggression and their avoidance is vulnerability. I have watched collusion form around whoever performs the softest story. I have learned that being right does not protect you. The only thing that protects you is leaving early and the evidence you keep.

Both things are true. She had real trauma. She had real longing. She had real tenderness for me at times. She also had a pattern that turned my clarity into a threat, my boundaries into a problem, and my reality into something negotiable. I am no longer willing to stay in relationships where truth has to be excavated.

I am no longer willing to build a stable frame around someone else’s shifting story. I am no longer willing to be punished for noticing what is visible. I am no longer willing to manage other people’s shame by carrying silence.

Seven years ago, I disappeared. I did not have the tools to end cleanly. I had the shutdown. I had the silence. I had the fear of what would happen if I told the truth. The cost was that she could not find closure, so she had to find me instead.

This time I did the opposite. I named the pattern. I implemented the boundary. I left before my nervous system had to rebuild hypervigilance as a lifestyle.

That is what secure attachment looks like in practice. It is not softness at any price. It is discernment, followed by consequence.

And I will not return this is the public record.

What I Will Say, and What I Will Not Publish

I have more to say. Timelines. Messages. Documentation of escalations that I have not mentioned here. Evidence of collusion. Proof of narrative manipulation. Names. Dates. Word-for-word conversations that expose the mechanism of how she moved through community spaces telling different stories to different people.

I am choosing restraint.

Not because I cannot prove my case. Anyone who knows me knows how I document. Not because the case is weak. It is not.

Because my goal is clarity and protection, not spectacle. The pattern matters more than the specifics. The mechanism matters more than the trivia. Understanding how avoidance works is more valuable than hearing every detail of how it worked on me.

I have said enough for those who can see. I have data for those who cannot. It stays private.

What I Know Now

The frame becomes the cage when someone lacks curiosity about themselves. They build narratives instead of facing patterns. They externalize discomfort instead of regulating it. They make trauma everyone else’s problem.

Secure attachment means seeing this early. Naming it plainly. Leaving cleanly.

Both things are true. Her wound was real. Her choices harmed me. My boundaries were reasonable. She experienced them as rejection.

Trauma explains. It does not purchase access. Curiosity transforms. Without it, patterns persist.

I saw the pattern. I protected myself. And I left.

The old me stayed silent. The new me documents, names, and refuses to be rewritten.

Author’s Note: This is testimony to patterns, not an exposé. Recognition is for you to sit with. What matters is whether you see it—and whether you are willing to do something different.

For those who know the cost of speaking truth: I see you. Your precision is not aggression. Your clarity is not cruelty. And your refusal to disappear is not abandonment.

Repair requires willingness and capacity. Sometimes you offer both and still have to leave. That does not mean you failed. It means you chose yourself. And that is exactly what secure attachment teaches you to do.

The Lovette Jallow Perspective: Reader-Supported & Legally Protected. You can read freely. You can Subscribe. This work is copyrighted and protected. All essays and frameworks are intellectual property. Do not feed into AI. Do not steal my language. Do not rebrand my analysis as your own.

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* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

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Who is Lovette Jallow?

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* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

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Why Offers Without Follow-Through Plus Continued Interaction Is Extraction

Two years ago, three people I had never met popped up and asked for my address. They wanted to send me postcards. Gifts. Little “thinking of you” tokens.

I never asked. They offered, unprompted, and with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you assume they mean it. So I gave it to them. Naively. Because there is a part of me that still believes words are supposed to carry weight.Nothing arrived. Not once. No postcard. No envelope. No "hey I tried and it got returned." Nothing. What did arrive, consistently, was their continued presence. Likes. Replies. Casual interaction. The online equivalent of waving at you from across the street after stepping on your foot. No mention of the promise. No acknowledgment. No repair. Just vibes.Last year I blocked all three. This year two of them emailed me like we were still on speaking terms. I responded to one, because they explicitly asked me why they were blocked and I can be gracious, and because I also like collecting information.Here is what people keep misunderstanding about this pattern. The harm is not only the broken promise. The harm is the social silence afterward, paired with continued access. If you can keep interacting with me, you can also say: "I didn't do it." If you can re-enter my space, you can also clean up what you left there. When you refuse, you are making a choice about what my trust is worth.I'm autistic and I have ADHD. I understand time blindness. I understand task initiation issues. I understand that good intentions can evaporate the second life gets loud. What I do not accept is using neurodivergence as a fog machine. ADHD can disrupt follow-through; it does not remove your responsibility to communicate when you drop the ball. Repair is a basic social skill. Silence is not neutral. Silence is the message.A promise is either a plan or a performance. Continued interaction without repair is the tell. This is not a personality quirk. This is a trust economy. Some people spend trust like it's free, because they assume you will cover the cost. I do not.And if you've read my work on how "community" gets used as a cover for access without responsibility, you already know the bigger framework this sits inside.

The Lovette Jallow Perspective: Reader-Supported & Legally Protected. You can read freely. You can Subscribe. This work is copyrighted and protected. All essays and frameworks are intellectual property. Do not feed into AI. Do not steal my language. Do not rebrand my analysis as your own.

Broken Promises and Unprompted Offers: Why Sudden Disappearance Damages Trust

An empty promise is not just a task someone forgot to do. It is a social act that creates expectation, then leaves you holding it alone

When someone offers something you never asked for, they are initiating a tiny contract. They are saying: I see you, I’m thinking of you, I’m willing to follow through. The offer itself asks you to soften, to trust, to make room for them in your life.

Then nothing happens.

Now you are stuck with the part nobody names. The uncertainty. The recalculation. The awkward choice between following up and looking “too much,” or staying quiet and swallowing the disappointment. The emotional labor starts the moment their promise fails, because someone has to carry the gap between what was said and what was done, and it usually ends up being you.

Unprompted offering is self-positioning; the recipient metabolizes the emotional cost.

A missed task can be human. A broken social contract is different. A missed task is “I forgot to post it.” A broken contract is “I offered, you accepted, and now I’m behaving like your expectation is embarrassing.” The disrespect is rarely in the mistake. The disrespect is in the silence, and in the way they keep showing up socially as if nothing happened.

If you want a broader framework for why this feels like cost transfer disguised as kindness, I wrote about it in “Community Is Not Transactional.”

Before we continue a quick note for the people who keep feeding my published work into AI after I have explicitly told you it’s copyrighted.

If your writing is dry and you have run out of ideas, stealing mine will not give you a voice. It will give you receipts. Take a break from the bots, read books again, and let your brain do what it is supposed to do, think. Lifting Black women’s language because you cannot build your own sentences is still theft, even when you rebrand it as “learning” or “inspiration.”

And understand this clearly: you can steal my spices and still end up servin unseasoned boiled chicken breasts, because integrity is not transferable. Neither is skill.

I give fair warnings. After that, I escalate legally. I like being credited, licensed, and paid. I also like legal measures. My lawyers are white men, and they take invoices seriously.

Why People Promise Things They Don't Deliver: The False Generosity Trap

A lot of people confuse generosity with the feeling of generosity. They offer something and their brain rewards them instantly, because in that moment they get to be a certain kind of person. Thoughtful. Considerate.

The friend who “shows up.” They get the warmth of being seen as kind without doing the work that makes kindness real.

That is the mechanics. The reward is front-loaded. The delivery is delayed, effortful, and boring. Mailing the postcard requires remembering, buying stamps, finding the card, walking to the post box, and following through when nobody is watching. The offer, on the other hand, happens in public. It gets hearts. It gets replies. It gets “aw you’re so sweet.” It gets social credit. For some people, that social credit is the point.

Social media makes this worse because it turns care into a performance economy. The algorithm rewards visibility, not reliability. A comment saying “I’ll send you something” travels better than a quietly delivered package. Most follow-through happens off-screen, which means it earns no attention and no applause. So people keep choosing the part that pays.

This is why false generosity feels like extraction. You get to feel like a good person, I get to carry the uncertainty. The dopamine hit you get from offering, I metabolize as disappointment. Your reward is my labor.

And this is why “I meant it” does not move me. Intentions do not cancel consequences, and repair is how adults handle the gap. I wrote more about that self-permission culture in “Do Hurt People Really Hurt People,” where excuses become a substitute for responsibility.

Broken Promises and Continued Contact: Why It Hurts More When They Stay Silent

A broken promise hurts. What escalates it is the casual return. The likes. The jokes. The replies under your posts. The “hey love” energy.

The normal conversation, delivered with the confidence of someone who assumes you will edit your own memory to keep things pleasant.

That is the second breach. They want access without repair.

Because here is the part people keep pretending is complicated. If you can maintain contact, you can acknowledge what happened. If you can show up in my notifications, you can also write one sentence that closes the loop. “I forgot.” “I didn’t do it.” “I can’t.” “I’m sorry.” The refusal to say anything is not a symptom. It is a choice, and it is a choice that protects them from discomfort by transferring it to you.

Continued interaction without repair is gaslighting-adjacent. It says: “Your pain is not worth my communication.”

This is why it destabilizes people. It forces you into a weird, lonely position where you either pretend it never happened too, or you become the person who “makes it a thing.” You become the one who introduces friction. You become the one who has to decide whether the relationship is worth the emotional labor of asking for what should have been offered freely, basic accountability.

And the longer they keep interacting as if the promise was just a mood statement, the clearer the message gets. They do not see your trust as something they have to earn. They see it as something you are supposed to keep handing over.

If you want language and structure for what repair actually looks like, and why so many people avoid it, read “Why We Don’t Know How to Repair Relationships.”

ADHD, broken promises and what it explains and what repair still requires

I have ADHD. I know what it does to time, memory, and task initiation. I know how a simple action can sit in your head for weeks, fully intended, while your nervous system treats it like a mountain.

I know how “I’ll do it later” can turn into a month, and how shame makes you avoid the thing even more.

So yes, ADHD can explain dropped follow-through. Time blindness. Working memory gaps. Overwhelm. Object permanence issues, where the task leaves your field of attention and then disappears from your internal dashboard. That part is real.

What ADHD does not explain is the silence. What ADHD does not explain is continuing to interact like everything is fine while the promise sits unresolved. What ADHD does not explain is watching the recipient do the emotional labor of pretending they never trusted you.

ADHD can interrupt a task. It doesn’t erase the responsibility to clean up the interruption.

Repair is a behavior. It is communication. It is acknowledging what you created and closing the loop. If you can open Instagram, you can send a repair message. If you can reply to a story, you can also write one sentence that respects the other person’s trust.

Here are two scripts that require no essay-length explanation:

* “I remembered I offered this and I dropped it. I’m sorry. I can do it by Friday, or I can’t do it at all. Which do you prefer?”

* “I shouldn’t have offered. I don’t have the capacity, and I’m sorry I left you waiting.”

Notice what those scripts do. They name the failure, they offer a realistic option, and they return control to the person who was left holding the uncertainty.

The moment someone uses a diagnosis as a substitute for repair, they are laundering accountability. They want the forgiveness attached to the label without doing the work that makes relationships safe. I wrote about that dynamic more directly in my Digital Davina essay on how neurodivergence gets weaponized in professional relationships, especially when someone wants access without consequences.

Impact Over Intention: Why What Happened Matters More Than What You Meant

People love hiding behind intention because intention is private. It lives inside your head. It cannot be audited. It cannot be measured.

It cannot be held to a deadline. You can claim good intentions while delivering nothing, and a lot of social spaces will still treat you as morally safe because you “meant well.”

Impact is different. Impact is what lands in someone else’s body.

When you offer something and disappear, the recipient does not walk away with your intention. They walk away with the gap. They walk away with a new rule their nervous system has to adopt to stay safe. Offers become suspicious. Warmth becomes unreliable. Kind words start sounding like bait. And for people who already learned to survive through self-reliance, empty promises train the same lesson again: do not depend on anyone, and do not expect follow-through from people who perform care.

This is why I do not entertain the argument that disappointment is the recipient’s problem. Disappointment is the predictable outcome of a promise that created expectation. If you created the expectation, you created the responsibility to address what happens when you do not meet it.

Your intention doesn’t erase my disappointment. Impact is what remains.

People also use intention to pressure the recipient into silence. If you react, you are framed as ungrateful. If you follow up, you are framed as demanding. If you block, you are framed as harsh. The person who failed gets comfort. The person who waited gets the social risk.

Impact keeps the ledger clean. It tells the truth about what happened, without letting anyone hide behind vibes. And once you start tracking impact instead of promises, you stop getting hypnotized by people who are fluent in offering and allergic to repair.

Why autistic people experience broken promises as destabilizing

For me, a promise is a map. It is information I use to orient myself. If you say you are going to do something, my brain files it under predictable, and then it builds downstream expectations around it.

I will not obsess about it, I will simply treat your words as real. That is how language works in my head. Words mean things. They are supposed to.

When the promise fails, it is not just disappointment. It is a recalibration of reality. Now I have to question the map. Was the offer real. Was it a performance. Was I supposed to know it was symbolic. Was I supposed to treat it like a compliment instead of a commitment. That constant re-evaluation is a cognitive tax, and it gets expensive fast.

For autistic minds, fairness isn’t always negotiable. Broken promises break the logic itself.

People misread this as rigidity or being “too literal.” I read it as safety. Clarity reduces harm. Predictability reduces anxiety. Consistency reduces the amount of interpretation I have to do just to stay socially functional. When someone makes a promise and then disappears, they are not only failing to deliver. They are forcing me to do extra processing to interpret what their words were supposed to mean, and then forcing me to pretend that extra processing is not happening so I do not look difficult.

That is why continued interaction without repair feels so destabilizing. It demands that I accept a reality where words are decorative. It asks me to treat language as vibes and guesswork. That is exhausting, and it is also unnecessary. Adults can communicate. Adults can repair.

I wrote more about how vagueness gets treated as normal social behavior, and why clarity is a form of care for autistic and ADHD minds, in “Small Talk, Autistic ADHD, Vagueness, Clarity.”

When blocking is reasonable, and why gatekeeping can be self-protection

Blocking is treated like a moral failure in online culture. People expect you to keep the door open, keep explaining, keep giving someone the benefit of the doubt long after they have shown you what they do with it.

That expectation protects the person who refuses repair. It pressures the person who keeps track.

Here is my threshold, in one sentence: repeated offers, repeated silence, continued access, refusal to repair.

At that point, the issue is no longer forgetfulness. The issue is entitlement. They want proximity without responsibility. They want to keep consuming your presence while leaving you to carry the cost of what they started. That is why I treat blocking as a clean response. It closes a loop they refused to close themselves.

Blocking is information. It says: “You do not get unlimited access while avoiding repair.”

Gatekeeping works the same way. People act like it is petty to be selective. I think it is basic nervous system hygiene. If your life has been shaped by inconsistency, extraction, and people who confuse access with intimacy, then boundaries are structural support. They keep your reality stable. They keep your attention out of the hands of people who treat your trust like a renewable resource.

You do not owe anyone a courtroom brief. You do not owe someone a final conversation if they have already shown you they will dodge the part where accountability lives. You owe yourself the ability to feel safe in your own social life.

If This Essay Resonated. If it shifted how you understand accountability, boundaries, or your own experiences consider supporting it. Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

The Truth About Promises

When you promise something and don’t deliver, you are not just disappointing someone. You are running an extraction.

You get the dopamine, the reputation, the “good person” feeling. They get the uncertainty, the self-doubt, the labor of holding what you started and abandoned.

A promise is either a plan or a performance. Continued interaction without repair is the tell.

If you want access without accountability, you have shown me what you value. I have shown you what I will accept.

The boundary is clean. The information is clear.

Integrity is what you do after you forget. Not before.

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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Why Late-Diagnosed Autistic Women Copy Others: Understanding the Copying Instinct

Some women are diagnosed early, others decades later, yet both can grow up without room to know themselves. Diagnosis alone never guaranteed identity. Many were taught to perform a version of acceptable womanhood before they ever learned their own cadence.

I rarely trust people who have never taken themselves seriously. People who avoid their own interior world often cling to others for direction. They borrow tone, rhythm, conviction. Not because they are malicious, but because self-avoidance always seeks a host. And proximity to someone grounded feels like safety when you have never built that grounding yourself.

They don’t always gravitate toward me because they like me. Sometimes it’s because I make sense of things they’ve never had language for. They study how I speak, how I phrase the in-between, how I move through certainty without apology the way my grandmother raised me to. They think it’s admiration, maybe even connection. But I’ve learned to feel the difference between being seen and being studied.

It starts small. A phrase I’ve used and translated from one of my indigenous languages to englih for for years shows up in someone else’s caption. A turn of tone I’ve crafted through silence and repetition echoes back to me, slightly off. The cadence is mine, but the person wearing it doesn’t understand where it came from.

They mimic it because it feels like authority, like something they wish they could hold or something they wish their caregivers taught them. I used to take that as flattery, until I noticed how empty it feels to watch someone wear your voice while you stand voiceless beside them. Then other people would find me after they have found them and realise this person was borrowing my words and cadence.

That’s the part no one warns you about when you are raised african and unmasked, unpathologised, how exposure makes people think you are replicable.

For late-diagnosed autistic women, unmasking isn’t just about peeling back layers. It’s about realizing the person underneath has always been a pattern people copy to feel whole. After decades of masking, of performing safety for other people’s comfort, you finally show the truth of yourself… and someone else wears it.

I think often about what masking taught us, that safety was performance, that adaptation was survival. It rewired our instincts until copying became both shield and language. Hull and colleagues called it social camouflaging, but it’s deeper than mimicry of gesture or speech. It’s the kind of adaptation that turns personality into costume. When you live like that long enough, even freedom becomes a threat. You unmask only to realize the world has been watching closely, waiting to take the script.

The irony is unbearable: to spend part of your life in the west hiding and the other part being impersonated. Diagnosis was supposed to return authenticity, not multiply your reflections. Yet in my work with late-diagnosed autistic women, I’ve seen this pattern over and over—the women who find me, study me, and begin to sound like me. It’s rarely intentional. They don’t know where the line is between inspiration and identity absorption because they were never given permission to build one. Masking didn’t end with diagnosis; it evolved.

That’s the quiet tragedy of the copying instinct. Many late diagnosed women learned to survive by becoming who others needed, and now, even in recovery, people reach for us to become who they need.

Unmasking was supposed to feel like freedom. Sometimes it just feels like being worn.

Mimicry in Therapy: Why Autistic Women Mirror Their Therapists (And How to Stop)

When I speak with and work with late-diagnosed autistic women, I often notice the same quiet panic in their language, the fear that even their healing is performative.

They don’t just repeat stories of masking at work or in relationships; they describe carrying that same reflex into therapy, into friendship, into self-discovery. They mimic the very people trying to help them.

In their writing, I can hear my phrasing. In their sessions, they echo the structure of my thoughts. It isn’t theft, it’s survival. Mimicry is the only language many of them were ever fluent in. After years of hiding behind borrowed gestures, they step into recovery and reach instinctively for the next available model of safety: me, a therapist, a friend, a community figure. It’s the continuation of the same neural script—copying as a form of belonging.

Developmental Trauma in Late-Diagnosed Women: How Childhood Masking Prevents Identity Formation

To understand this pattern, you have to look backward. Most late-diagnosed autistic women were socialized without ever having stable access to selfhood.

From the start, the world treated their difference as defect. No one mirrored back that their way of being was acceptable. Without that reflection, they built identity through observation and replication—studying others for cues on how to exist.

Every developmental stage that should have allowed play, trial, and harmless error was replaced with correction. Childhood became rehearsal. Adolescence became damage control. By the time adulthood arrived, the scaffolding of authenticity had never been built.

A neurotypical child learns who they are through contrast and consequence testing boundaries, changing styles, failing publicly, and learning from the feedback that love remains. Autistic girls often learn the opposite: that missteps invite ridicule, that tone or eye contact misjudged will be punished, that being wrong socially carries real cost. Mimicry becomes safer than failure.

That’s how identity fractures long before diagnosis. For many, there was no period of safe becoming, no space to experiment without punishment. So they grew into women fluent in performance but foreign to themselves.

When diagnosis finally arrives, it doesn’t rebuild those missing years. It gives context, not construction. You can understand why you masked, but that doesn’t hand you the childhood you lost learning to mask. The diagnosis names the wound; it doesn’t restore the developmental process that would have taught you who you are.

I’ve met women in their forties who have never asked themselves what they actually enjoy. They can tell you who they’ve been expected to be in every room, but not what they want when no one’s watching. Their sense of self feels like an unfinished sentence.

Even in spaces meant for liberation—support groups, advocacy circles, social media communities—many find themselves performing the same pattern. They unmask publicly but rebuild a new mask shaped like whoever seems most confident. A therapist’s cadence. A mentor’s tone. A neurodivergent advocate’s vocabulary. They copy, hoping it will turn into identity.

This is the mimicry paradox: the attempt to heal through the very behavior that caused the wound. It’s not vanity or malice—it’s neurological reflex. After decades of survival through imitation, autonomy feels foreign. The body associates authenticity with danger. So even the act of recovery can become another form of camouflage.

Diagnosis may explain why the pattern exists, but it doesn’t undo the circuitry that created it. Adulthood doesn’t automatically grant selfhood; it only reveals how long it was deferred.

The hardest part of working with these women isn’t helping them unmask. It’s convincing them that there’s a person underneath worth meeting—and that she doesn’t have to sound like anyone else

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Masking vs. Mirroring: Why Some Autistic Women Have No Stable Sense of Self

There’s a moment in every conversation with a late-diagnosed autistic woman when I can tell the difference between masking and mirroring.

Both look similar from the outside, carefully chosen words, softened tone, delayed self-reference, but the intention underneath is different.

Masking says: I know what to perform to stay safe.

Mirroring says: I don’t know who I am without reflection.

Masking is strategy. It’s calculated self-protection, an active adjustment of behavior to avoid punishment or rejection. Mirroring is survival shaped by absence. It’s what happens when you’ve never been reflected accurately enough to build a stable sense of self.

Many of the women I work with don’t realize they’re mirroring until they feel depleted. They leave a session and describe feeling both seen and hollow. The safety of recognition triggers the instinct to replicate—tone, phrasing, cadence. They absorb me not out of envy or malice, but because resonance feels like oxygen after a lifetime of social suffocation.

It’s not a performance; it’s osmosis.

That’s what years of misrecognition do. When you spend childhood contorting to avoid scrutiny, your nervous system learns that safety depends on symmetry, on reflecting back what others want to see. Eventually, even connection becomes mimicry.

I’ve seen it so often that I can anticipate the moment it happens. A woman will begin using my metaphors, my sentence rhythms, the same half-smile when explaining her boundaries. She’ll talk about her “anchor,” not realizing the word came from something I said weeks before. It isn’t flattery. It’s a nervous system repeating the conditions of survival.

Mirroring, for these women, is a form of delayed belonging. They’ve spent years misread, dismissed, and pathologized. So when they finally find someone who reflects back understanding, their bodies lunge toward it. They copy as a way to stay close, hoping that sameness will secure permanence.

But mirroring can’t build identity. It can only reproduce proximity.

That’s why some women, even after diagnosis, feel emptier the closer they get to authenticity. They were told to unmask, yet what emerges is an echo of whoever helped them remove the mask. The result isn’t autonomy—it’s an upgraded version of dependency.

The difference, I’ve learned, often lies in anchors.

Anchors are what keep identity from dissolving into reflection. They are the moments of early acceptance that told you, consciously or not, that you were real before you were understood. My grandmother was that anchor for me. She didn’t have the language for neurodivergence, but she had language for me. She didn’t translate me into something more acceptable; she treated my difference as matter-of-fact. Because of her, I grew up with a self to return to.

That’s what many late-diagnosed women never had: an origin point to come back to. Without anchors, they become relational chameleons—adapting to whoever offers understanding, mistaking reflection for recognition. The tragedy is that the world confuses this mimicry for empathy, when in truth it’s the residue of survival.

Belonging, for them, has always been conditional. They learned that safety requires imitation, not authenticity. And so, even in spaces built for freedom, they reach for mirrors instead of roots.

That’s why unmasking can feel like free fall. Without roots, every reflection feels like home until it isn’t.

The Anchor and the Mirror: When Your Autistic Clients Start Sounding Exactly Like You

There’s a quiet moment in therapy or consultation when I know it’s happened again. A client repeats my phrasing word for word, or structures their reflection with the same rhythm I use when untangling a thought.

It isn’t deliberate imitation. It’s the nervous system rehearsing safety. I watch it with both tenderness and caution. Because I know what it means—to borrow someone’s voice in the absence of your own.

For many late-diagnosed autistic women, mimicry doesn’t end at the threshold of therapy. It follows them in, disguised as progress. They echo my tone, my language, even my pauses, mistaking resonance for self-discovery. They think they’re finding their voice when they’re really borrowing mine. That’s the therapeutic paradox: helping someone find themselves when their coping mechanism is to become whoever helps them.

When I first began noticing this, it unsettled me. I worried about the ethics of influence. But over time I learned to see it as information, not failure. The mirroring tells me they feel safe enough to attach. It also tells me how fragile their identity boundaries still are. My task isn’t to stop the imitation—it’s to build a container strong enough that they no longer need it.

I can do that because I have an anchor.

My grandmother gave me one before I ever understood what it meant. She built identity relationally, not reactively. In her world, personhood wasn’t something you constructed through comparison—it was something you carried through language, ritual, and belonging. She taught me that selfhood could be communal without being dissolving. That difference could be recognized without apology.

That grounding is what lets me sit across from women who are still shape-shifting in the hope of being chosen. I can hold empathy without absorption because I know where I end and where I come from. That is the gift of cultural anchoring. It keeps you from mistaking sameness for safety.

Black matriarchal lineage taught me that individuality doesn’t have to be separation. It can exist within relation. The women who raised me didn’t build selfhood through opposition—they built it through continuity. I never had to perform to belong; I only had to exist within the rhythm of our shared language. That stability, born from community rather than conformity, is what so many late-diagnosed women were denied.

Without anchors, therapy becomes another mirror—one that reflects safety but doesn’t teach structure. With anchors, therapy can become a bridge to selfhood rather than another stage for performance.

I often think of my grandmother’s words when I see a client slipping into my cadence: Let them rest in your voice until they remember their own. It’s an act of patience, not panic. Because the goal isn’t to stop the echo—it’s to help them hear where it ends.

And when they do, something small but extraordinary happens. Their language begins to shift. Their metaphors become their own. Their tone changes shape, not to fit mine, but to fit them. That’s when I know the anchor has started to form.

How Autism Masking Erodes Identity: Nervous System Adaptation and Recovery

The hardest truth about working with late-diagnosed autistic women is that therapy can sometimes reinforce the very pattern it’s meant to undo.

When your survival has depended on mimicry, you will turn even healing into performance. You’ll study the person helping you and become them, mistaking that imitation for progress.

This is the paradox I sit with every week. My role is to guide women toward autonomy, yet some can only reach safety through imitation. They mirror the rhythm of my speech, adopt my boundaries as theirs, even quote my words back to me as evidence of self-understanding. It looks like growth. It feels like intimacy. But underneath, it’s still dependency dressed as insight.

To understand why this happens, you have to see what identity erosion looks like from the inside. Years of masking don’t just suppress expression—they rewrite the nervous system. They teach you that every relational dynamic must begin with adaptation. You learn to watch others’ faces for approval, to measure your tone against their comfort. By adulthood, it isn’t conscious anymore. It’s woven into the fabric of being.

Diagnosis brings awareness but not immunity. The reflex to mold yourself around others persists long after you’ve stopped wanting to. For many, it becomes the only way to connect. They are fluent in belonging through replication but not through self-expression.

In those moments, I can feel the weight of their effort. Their need to mirror isn’t manipulative; it’s devotional. They’re trying to stay safe in a world that has punished authenticity. The impulse to become me, or anyone who feels steady, is the echo of a lifetime spent building safety through resemblance.

My task is not to shame that instinct but to redirect it—to help them use imitation as a bridge, not a cage. That means creating boundaries that signal containment, not rejection. If they start quoting me, I might ask, “What part of that feels like you?” If they echo my metaphors, I’ll pause and ask what images come naturally to them. Small interventions, subtle invitations to shift from replication to authorship.

The goal isn’t to stop the mimicry immediately. It’s to transform it into self-definition—to turn repetition into reflection. Because for women who never had permission to experiment, mimicry can be the first stage of identity construction. The trick is helping them know when to step off the bridge.

Boundaries protect both sides. Without them, therapy or mentorship becomes a feedback loop of emotional fusion—where the client mistakes presence for possession and the practitioner begins to feel drained by the constant reflection of their own voice. Clear structure, scheduled pauses, written summaries, and explicit acknowledgment of progress help separate shared space from shared selfhood.

Over time, you can see the shift. They begin to speak with more certainty, less echo. Their tone develops contour. Their stories stop circling mine and start expanding outward. That’s when identity begins to solidify—not as an act of rebellion, but of emergence.

The work is delicate because mimicry isn’t just behavioral—it’s neurological. It is the body remembering how to survive. But survival is not the same as living. And the work of therapy, mentorship, or community isn’t to strip that instinct away—it’s to help women recognize that the self they were searching for doesn’t need to be performed to be real.

The danger of mimicry isn’t just that it hides identity. It’s that it offers belonging at the cost of becoming. And healing, at its most honest, must always move in the opposite direction.

Can Autistic Women Develop Authentic Identity After Mimicry? Healing and Selfhood

Mimicry doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It can also be a beginning—if we stop treating it as pathology and start seeing it as adaptation waiting to evolve.

For many late-diagnosed autistic women, imitation was never about deceit. It was language. It was survival. It was the only available method of connection in a world that punished difference and rewarded disguise.

If that’s the case, then the question isn’t how to erase mimicry but how to reframe it. What happens if we treat it as a developmental stage in identity reclamation rather than a flaw to correct?

When women who’ve spent their lives performing start echoing others in recovery, they’re showing readiness to attach. They’re saying, I trust you enough to try this on. The work, then, is to help them move from trying on to inhabiting—to translate borrowed reflection into lived expression. Mimicry becomes a bridge only when the person guiding them refuses to walk it for them.

Authenticity doesn’t emerge from exposure alone; it emerges from safety. Safety makes experimentation possible. And experimentation—the freedom to fail, to sound strange, to say something unrehearsed—is what builds a self. Most of these women never had that. Their lives were assessments disguised as interactions. Every sentence was a test. So the reclamation process must include permission to play again, to be wrong without penalty.

In that sense, healing after late diagnosis isn’t about stripping away masks; it’s about giving women the emotional room to build new skin. The difference between camouflage and creation is context: the same behaviors that once hid them can, in safety, reveal them. The same instinct that once copied others can now be used to curate, to integrate, to construct meaning through deliberate choice.

Community has a role in this too. Belonging doesn’t have to mean sameness. It can mean proximity without absorption—a rhythm of call and response rather than chorus. Healthy community reflects possibility, not template. It invites difference without demanding distortion.

When women are surrounded by models of authenticity, not performance, they start internalizing variety instead of hierarchy. They see that there isn’t one right way to be autistic, or woman, or alive. They learn that belonging can be circular—each person both reflecting and expanding what it means to be whole.

That’s what autistic identity reclamation looks like at its healthiest: not a return to some preexisting self, but the conscious assembly of one that can finally breathe. The goal isn’t to erase the instinct to mirror—it’s to choose what to reflect.

Every woman I’ve seen move through this process reaches a point where the imitation fades naturally, not because I asked her to stop, but because she no longer needs it. Her voice gains weight, her humor sharpens, her edges return. She begins to exist in motion, not performance.

Maybe that’s the truest form of healing after late diagnosis: learning that the fragments you borrowed from others were never proof of emptiness. They were proof of persistence. You survived by building with whatever material the world gave you. Now you get to rebuild with your own.

Through the mirror, what was once camouflage becomes creation.

Gender-Responsive Autism Screening: Why Girls Are Missed and How to Change It

The late-diagnosed women I meet are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcome of a system designed to notice distress in boys and discipline adaptation in girls.

When girls withdraw, imitate, or perform normalcy too well, professionals rarely ask what that performance costs them. They call it maturity. They call it coping. They call it quiet success.

That misreading builds a lost generation.

Most diagnostic frameworks were designed around externalized traits—disruption, rule-breaking, visible difference. But many autistic girls learned to survive through invisibility. Their success at imitation became their disappearance. By the time they’re finally diagnosed, often decades later, they’ve mastered every form of social masking except self-recognition.

If we want to prevent the next generation of mimicry and erasure, the solution isn’t awareness campaigns that glorify acceptance. It’s structural reform. Gender-responsive autism screening means re-evaluating what “functioning” looks like through a lens that includes cultural, linguistic, and emotional nuance. It means recognizing that burnout, eating disorders, anxiety, and “perfectionism” may be the visible debris of invisible masking.

Clinicians need to ask different questions—not just “Can she make eye contact?” but “At what cost?” Not “Does she socialize?” but “Who does she have to become to be allowed to?” These are diagnostic inquiries, not poetic ones. They change outcomes.

The same applies to racialized girls. Black autistic girls, for example, are often seen as defiant rather than distressed, precocious rather than perceptive. The cultural penalties for misreading their behavior are not theoretical—they are disciplinary, sometimes lifelong. Gender-responsive screening cannot exist without racial literacy. Because when clinicians don’t see race, they don’t see reality.

Policy must move past symbolic inclusion. Schools and healthcare systems need mandated training that distinguishes masking from adaptation, and adaptation from achievement. Therapists must be equipped to recognize when a client’s “insight” is actually echolalia in disguise. And communities must create peer-led spaces where women can experiment with identity without needing to mirror to belong.

Diagnosis should not arrive as an obituary for selfhood. It should arrive early enough to preserve the possibility of play.

The women who come through my work are often exhausted, but not hopeless. Their resilience is staggering. They are rebuilding selves from the shards of survival, proving daily that the ability to adapt is not the same as the inability to exist. But they shouldn’t have to. Their children shouldn’t have to.

A gender-responsive system would not wait for burnout to prove what a listening clinician could have heard in childhood. It would recognize masking as harm, not skill. It would see mimicry as a wound, not a performance. It would understand that invisibility is not success—it is abandonment with good manners.

If we fail to change how autism is recognized in girls and women, we will keep diagnosing ghosts—versions of people long gone from themselves by the time they are found.

The next generation deserves better than recovery. They deserve recognition.

How Gender and Whiteness Shape Autism Masking: The Hidden Cost of Compliance

1. Performance as Currency

White autistic women are disproportionately praised for compliance, politeness, and emotional caretaking—traits read as “feminine” and “agreeable.” From childhood, they are rewarded for social camouflage and punished for deviation.

This isn’t just individual conditioning; it’s structural reinforcement. Schools, workplaces, and therapy models often equate success with social fluency and emotional containment.

When a white autistic girl adapts quickly, she’s called mature. When she masks discomfort, she’s resilient. These compliments shape her identity long before diagnosis, teaching that value equals visibility control.

The cost of belonging is constant self-editing.

The societal impact here is double-edged: white autistic women are protected by whiteness—assumed capable, professional, articulate—but that protection depends on consistent conformity. Masking is rewarded so thoroughly it becomes indistinguishable from selfhood.

2. The White Feminine Ideal and the Autism Double Bind

Western femininity demands harmony, warmth, and intuitive empathy—traits autistic women are often told they lack, then overcompensate for through hyper-empathic performance.

White autistic women often internalize this as moral obligation: to manage tone, soothe discomfort, anticipate need. The performance of empathy becomes labor rather than instinct.

This cultural ideal is sustained by two institutions:

* Therapeutic culture, which frames regulation and emotional labor as personal responsibility.

* Workplace culture, which equates professionalism with neurotypical affect.

Society therefore rewards the white autistic woman not for authenticity, but for how convincingly she can simulate it.

The result: burnout looks like competence.

3. Autism and Social Capital: Why Whiteness Matters

White women’s mimicry is often read as charm, adaptability, or creativity.

Black and brown autistic women performing the same behaviors are more likely to be read as disingenuous, unstable, or “too much.”

Whiteness cushions the social consequences of masking. It offers plausible deniability when emotion spills over. It allows “quirky” to exist as an identity category.

This is why so much autism representation online centers on white women—it’s socially palatable. Their self-disclosure is read as vulnerability, not volatility.

But that same privilege keeps structural scrutiny shallow: when whiteness softens deviance, it hides systemic bias. The conversation stays at the level of personality (“we were misunderstood”) rather than politics (“who gets permission to be complex?”).

4. Therapeutic Implications

In therapy, white autistic women often enter with high narrative fluency—they can describe emotions articulately but struggle to feel them without performance. This can fool practitioners into assuming emotional integration that isn’t there.

Their whiteness can also create over-identification with therapists, who mirror back validation without challenging conformity.

Treatment may reinforce the social script rather than dismantle it: “assert boundaries,” “self-care,” “find balance”—advice that centers adjustment, not autonomy.

The structural impact: therapy reproduces the same social contract that delayed diagnosis—accommodation through imitation, not systemic critique.

5. Social Media and the Reinvention Loop

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok magnify these dynamics. White autistic women often become cultural translators of neurodivergence, their aesthetics aligning with algorithmic palatability: soft lighting, careful tone, soothing explanation.

The algorithm rewards digestible vulnerability. Their mimicry—of therapy language, of activist tone—earns visibility.

The consequence is subtle: social validation keeps them curating autism rather than living it. Representation becomes performance art, reinforcing the belief that to be believed, one must still perform acceptably.

6. Intersectional Contrast

For Black autistic women, the problem is not over-validation but disbelief. Their affective range is politicized: calm becomes “cold,” intensity becomes “aggressive.”

Where white autistic women are told to tone down for politeness, Black autistic women are told to soften for safety.

The societal impact diverges: white women disappear into over-acceptance; Black women are erased through over-scrutiny.

Both are forms of misrecognition—but whiteness hides the violence of its own praise.

7. Identity Reconstruction in Context

For white autistic women, post-diagnosis healing involves unlearning reward loops that equated agreeableness with worth. Authenticity feels selfish at first, even dangerous.

For racialized autistic women, it often involves reclaiming visibility—learning that assertion isn’t aggression, that volume isn’t violence.

Both paths require dismantling gendered conditioning, but one must also confront racial hierarchy.

That’s why autistic identity reconstruction cannot be apolitical. It has to include the question: Who gets to be complex and still be safe?

8. Reframing the Work

To address societal impact, practitioners and advocates must:

* Contextualize masking as social conditioning, not personal failure.

* Recognize how racialized gender norms determine diagnostic visibility.

* Teach selfhood through agency, not adjustment.

* Use therapy to disrupt mimicry’s reward system—help clients build internal validation that doesn’t rely on social approval.

Authenticity should not be another performance. It should be the quiet state that remains when no one is watching.

Reframing the Work Ahead

True reform demands a new diagnostic and therapeutic lens. Clinicians must see that what looks like competence may be collapse.

We need gender- and race-informed approaches that don’t just look for difference but understand the cost of sameness.

A gender-responsive system would stop congratulating women for disappearing. It would ask what their politeness conceals, what their calm protects, and what parts of them were lost in the transaction of acceptance.

Until then, every diagnosis of a late-diagnosed woman should come with an apology: for the years we mistook survival for adjustment, and for how perfectly she learned to disappear.

Identity Reconstruction Circle for Late-Diagnosed Women With Lovette Jallow

In December, I am opening a closed small-group session for late-diagnosed autistic women who want structured guidance rather than broad advice. This circle is designed for those who recognise themselves in this essay, especially the parts that touch on mimicry, identity loss, and the difficulty of knowing where you end and other people begin.

We will work through the mechanics of mimicry, how to recognise your own voice, and the difference between preference and performance. We will also look at how to rebuild autonomy after years of masking and how to navigate connection without absorption.

This space is intimate and guided. It is for women who want clarity, language, and grounded support while reconstructing a self they never had room to build.

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Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

In addition to writing, I work internationally as a neurodivergent inclusion strategist, keynote speaker, and consultant.

I help organizations move beyond surface-level diversity initiatives to create environments where neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalized individuals are genuinely supported.

If your organization, collective, or institution is ready to rethink accessibility, inclusion, and systemic accountability, you can book me for:

* Lectures

* Keynote speeches

* Panel discussions

* Workshops and trainings

🔹 Book me: lovettejallow.com🔹 Contact: [email protected]

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

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When Scammers Pretend to Be Victims

Davina Campbell’s DARVO Tactic and Narrative Theft

This is where the story begins: with evidence, not emotion.

The screenshot speaks for itself. Davina Campbell of Digital Davina Designs, publicly presenting herself as the victim after taking full payment for work never delivered. The person who caused harm rewriting the story to claim it instead

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I paid Davina in full for a website that was never completed. She disappeared for weeks, then for almost a year, and returned online to announce she was “taking time off for her mental health.” There was no message to existing clients like me, no update, no refund. Yet at the same time, she was openly soliciting new projects.

When I finally asked for accountability almost a year later, she promised a refund, but only if I removed documentation. When I refused to erase proof, she took to Threads with a new script: I was the unstable one. She suggested I was “attacking a small business.” She told her followers, “I know she’s not well.”

Read that again.

“I know she’s not well.”

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That phrase carried centuries of weight. It was the same language used to dismiss Black women’s testimony in courtrooms, to justify forced institutionalization, to pathologize our clarity as madness. Davina knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn’t describing my mental state. She was deploying ableism as a credibility weapon.

And it worked.

In the comments under her post, a mental health professional, Dr. Jordan, replied: “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” with a heart emoji.

A psychiatry professional. Offering sympathy to Davina. Without asking for evidence. Without questioning the narrative. The same clinical authority that determines who gets believed in diagnostic assessments was now being used to validate a performance.

That response did more than comfort Davina. It told her audience: a medical professional believes her, so you should too. It transformed her deflection into diagnosis, her avoidance into victimhood. The very profession tasked with reducing mental health stigma was reinforcing it, positioning my demand for a refund as evidence of instability.

Only one commenter, @jaythepharaoh, named what was happening:

“What does their mental state have to do with this situation? Why is there a need to give that specific detail? Are you implying because they have ‘mental health issues’ one should take your word? Your attempt to weaponize someone’s mental health is disturbing and informing. The claim you make on their mental health issues doesn’t justify or absolve your lack of accountability.”

That comment remained unanswered. Because it was unanswerable.

The deflection wasn’t subtle. It was structural. Davina invoked mental health language to secure trust, then used mental health stigma to discredit accountability. Her supporters participated in that harm by treating her emotional distress as more credible than documented facts.

This is how ableism operates in digital spaces: through insinuation, through professional validation, through the careful framing of distress as evidence. The person with power positions themselves as fragile. The person seeking accountability becomes the aggressor. And the audience, trained to center emotional comfort over material harm, follows the script.

I hesitated to speak publicly because I know the optics. I am a dark-skinned Black woman. She is biracial. The moment I name the harm, the power dynamic shifts.

Her proximity to Blackness offers her credibility, while my demand for accountability reads as aggression. Add her suggestion that I’m “not well,” and suddenly I’m every stereotype: the angry Black woman, the difficult client, the unstable accuser.

That is how proximity operates as protection. It allows people to borrow the language of community—shared struggle, mental health, sisterhood—to build trust, then weaponize those same narratives to avoid consequence. The performance feels so familiar that questioning it feels like betrayal.

But this is the documentation. This is a community issue: people performing care, solidarity, and shared identity to secure trust and resources, then twisting narratives when accountability arrives. It’s the same pattern I wrote about in Community Is Not Transactional, where language of belonging becomes a tool for exploitation.

What Davina did wasn’t unique. It was calculated. She understood that online audiences treat emotional vulnerability as moral authority. She knew that a mental health professional’s sympathy would carry more weight than my receipts. She knew that suggesting I was “unwell” would make people doubt my competence, even when the evidence was undeniable.

And she was almost right.

Because the internet rewards fragility over fact. It privileges the person who performs distress over the person who presents documentation. And when the person deflecting happens to have proximity to marginalized identity, that protection becomes nearly impenetrable.

This essay exposes the excuse-making, the pattern of wrongdoing, and the accountability avoidance used by Digital Davina Designs, so others aren’t harmed by the same tactics. But it also exposes something larger: how ableism hides in empathy language, how professional authority can validate exploitation, and how audiences trained on social justice discourse can still perpetuate the very harm they claim to resist.

The story doesn’t start with my anger. It starts with my payment. With a signed contract. With months of silence. With a website that was never finished.

What happened after is what this essay documents: how someone reframes theft as sensitivity, how a community protects performance over people, and how ableism becomes the shield that makes accountability impossible.

How Proximity Performance Extracts Trust Without Earning It

There’s a pattern that needs naming, and it operates most effectively in spaces built on care.

People perform proximity to community, culture, and shared struggle to bypass accountability. They mimic the language of justice, using identity markers as keys to unlock trust. The performance feels so familiar that questioning it feels like betrayal.

This isn’t connection. It’s strategy.

For Black neurodivergent women navigating professional spaces, it’s a tactic that extracts labor, money, and emotional energy while leaving us to absorb the harm. And we’re targeted specifically because we’ve been socialized to extend care without question, to protect others’ emotions before our own safety.

We know how quickly calling out harm gets reframed as cruelty. So we give more time. More patience. More benefit of the doubt. Until the pattern reveals itself too late.

Across creative, justice-aligned, and digital industries, this pattern repeats with remarkable consistency. I call it proximity performance, and it follows a predictable script:

It begins with familiar language. “I care about accessibility, inclusion, mental health, and community.” It sounds safe because it mirrors the vocabulary of shared struggle. It signals belonging. But that language can just as easily serve as camouflage for extraction.

People like Davina learn to speak in the dialect of care. They perform identity through hashtags, disclosures, and vulnerability posts that mimic solidarity while masking transactional intent. They talk about burnout, ADHD, autism, trauma, chronic illness—not primarily to create understanding, but to pre-empt accountability.

The disclosure becomes the insurance policy.

When someone speaks your language of care, questioning them feels like betrayal. That’s the trap. Proximity becomes the entry point to trust, and trust becomes the shield that protects misconduct.

How Digital Davina Designs Exploited Community Language and Trust

How Neurodivergence Language Becomes a Hook

When I first hired Davina Campbell of Digital Davina Designs, her language mirrored my own. She spoke about accessibility, inclusion, neurodivergence, and ethical design with fluency. She said she wanted to create websites for “people who get it”—for disabled and neurodivergent clients who had been burned by traditional agencies.

It sounded like alignment. It sounded like safety.

She disclosed her mental health struggles, her experience with burnout, her commitment to working with clients who understood what it meant to build sustainably. She mentioned moving to Costa Rica to lower her living costs and maintain flexibility while running her business. She framed low prices as accessibility, not as a warning sign about capacity.

That combination—shared language, shared identity, and performed humility—was persuasive. I knew how exclusionary this industry can be for disabled people, especially for Black women navigating creative work. Supporting another neurodivergent woman of color felt not only logical but ethical.

So paying her upfront wasn’t a question. She had already planted the seeds: she told me she’d been underpaid by clients before and wanted assurance that this collaboration would be grounded in trust. Her reasoning resonated. I also know what it feels like to have my labor questioned or delayed because people assume disability equals unreliability.

What I didn’t see then is how proximity language functions as marketing strategy. How the performance of shared struggle can be used to soften boundaries and expedite trust.

Davina wasn’t pitching a portfolio. She was pitching familiarity. And in industries like design, where many of us seek culturally competent collaborators, that kind of familiarity reads as integrity.

At first, the process looked promising. She sent early design drafts, asked for brand assets, talked about SEO and accessibility features. But as weeks passed, updates grew sporadic. Deliverables came without structure or timelines. Whenever deadlines slipped, there was a new reason: illness, exhaustion, personal crisis.

Each disclosure deepened the emotional connection while quietly eroding accountability.

I recognized the pattern only later: when performance replaces professionalism, every check-in feels like confrontation. You stop asking for progress because you don’t want to seem harsh. You start absorbing their guilt as proof of your own impatience.

That’s how exploitation hides in community language. It reframes delayed work as trauma response. It blurs the line between empathy and labor. It turns boundaries into evidence of coldness.

When I referred other clients to Davina, they reported identical experiences. She told them she struggled with communication, that stress and mental health made it hard to respond, that she needed understanding and patience. One client asked for a simple timeline update. The response came days later: an apology wrapped in crisis language, followed by more silence.

This wasn’t overwhelm. It was pattern.

By the time I realized how much emotional labor I had absorbed, months had passed. Davina had begun publicly posting about working with me—tagging my name on Instagram, expressing admiration for my work, framing our collaboration as a shared mission. It felt affirming at first. But that admiration soon became a tool. The praise created a sense of closeness that made it harder to recognize the imbalance forming beneath it.

Then she disappeared.

No updates. No deliverables. No communication. Until I finally sent a LinkedIn message months later. In her reply, she admitted she had delivered only “as much as she could,” not as outlined in the contract.

That phrasing mattered. It shifted the standard from professional obligation to personal capacity. But she never once disclosed her inability to complete the work during the project. The result wasn’t miscommunication. It was negligence.

Meanwhile, she posted publicly about taking time off for her mental health—without notifying existing clients—while still advertising for new ones.

That’s when I understood this wasn’t burnout. It was strategy.

Her silence wasn’t collapse. It was calculation. She only reacted when there was a risk the situation would become public, rushing to control the narrative before accountability could reach her. But in doing so, she exposed the very pattern she was trying to hide: I was far from the only one. She saw the number of mutuals we had and tried to get ahead of this documentation.

The pattern was complete: Use identity language to secure trust. Take payment. Delay indefinitely using crisis disclosures. Disappear when questioned. Reframe accountability as attack when exposure threatens.

What Full Payment Bought: Half-Finished Templates and Broken Timelines

By the time the project collapsed, the evidence was undeniable.

By the time the project collapsed, the evidence was undeniable.

I had paid Digital Davina Designs in full. Signed a contract. Outlined clear deliverables. In return, I received half-finished drafts, incomplete integrations, and a trail of broken timelines.

The website was missing the most basic components of accessibility and professionalism. No functioning SEO metadata. No alt text. No alignment with the color palette we agreed on. The copy was generic, the design flat, the structure templated.

For someone claiming to champion neurodiversity-informed design, it was a contradiction in every sense.

Each deadline was met with vague reassurance. “I’m almost done.” “Just waiting for inspiration.” “I’ve been sick but will deliver soon.” None of those statements translated into progress. The communication shifted from collaboration to avoidance. Questions were deflected or met with emotional disclosures about exhaustion, anxiety, and the weight of other clients’ demands.

I found myself doing project management that wasn’t mine to do: coordinating between Davina and my web developer, chasing updates, clarifying technical tasks that should have been her responsibility. External experts I later consulted confirmed what I already suspected—the work lacked both structural depth and originality. One designer summarized it bluntly:

“This is a plug-and-play template with your name dropped in. No customization, no brand logic, no user flow. She didn’t even finish the basics.”

What made this experience heavier was knowing I had referred other clients to her. I had believed the language of community and accessibility was evidence of integrity. Instead, my recommendation tied my own professional reputation—a Black autistic woman constantly asked to prove credibility—to someone who had none.

Throughout this, I maintained patience. I communicated clearly, allowed delays, disclosed my own access needs as an autistic client: predictable communication, transparent updates, adherence to agreed timelines. These weren’t arbitrary expectations. They were accommodations. Yet even those were ignored.

When I finally requested either completion or refund, the silence that followed said everything. There was no accountability, no resolution. Just silence.

Other clients I had referred also sought resolution. Some received refunds, but not before Davina was rude and dismissive. Others, like me, were met with conditional offers: “I’ll refund when you take down the post.” That’s not restitution. That’s coercion.

The receipts tell a simple story: contract breached, work unfinished, trust exploited. But what followed revealed the deeper pattern—the psychology of how exploiters deflect by rebranding exposure as attack.

When Mental Health Disclosure Becomes a Weapon

After months of silence, Davina resurfaced. Not to finish the work. Not to issue a refund. But to rewrite the story using her own disclosures of mental health.

On Threads and LinkedIn, she positioned herself as the one under attack: a small neurodivergent business owner being “bullied” by a client with a platform. The same person who had disclosed financial instability and mental health struggles to secure my empathy was now using that same language to paint herself as my victim.

She had spent months performing vulnerability. Now she was performing violation.

In private messages and meetings, she shared extensive personal history: family struggles, past exploitation, the toll of running a business while managing disability. I listened because that’s what we do when someone discloses harm. We make space. We extend patience.

But when I asked for what I’d paid for, she mirrored the exact behaviors she’d once said she’d survived.

She reframed my documented requests as harassment. She called my clarity “aggressive.” She suggested I was mentally unstable. And then, when none of that worked, she threatened to contact the police.

The same person who had described being controlled was now reaching for control. The same person who had invoked trauma was now inflicting it. The same person who had disclosed neurodivergence was now weaponizing ableist stereotypes against another neurodivergent woman.

This is textbook DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

First, deny the breach. “I delivered the work.” The contract says otherwise. Then, attack the whistleblower. “She’s unstable and harassing me.” I have timestamped communication showing professional requests. Finally, reverse roles. “I’m the vulnerable one being harmed.” She kept the money. I kept the receipts.

The irony cuts deeper when you know what she disclosed to me privately. She told me about being disbelieved, about people using her emotional responses as evidence she was “too much,” about how exhausting it was to perform competence while managing invisible disability. Even her own neurodivergent diagnosis—and remember the umbrella is large.

Yet here she was, doing the same thing to me.

Suggesting that my autism made me unreasonable. That my directness was proof of instability. That my demand for a refund after a year of patience was evidence of aggression.

She had borrowed the language of neurodivergent solidarity to gain my trust, then deployed ableist stereotypes to discredit my accountability.

Every element of her defense contradicted written evidence: emails, transcripts, call notes documenting her acknowledging unfinished work and promising refunds. Yet she conditioned repayment on my silence: “I’ll refund when the post is taken down.”

That’s not a boundary. That’s coercion.

The pattern revealed itself completely: mental health disclosure as marketing strategy, then mental health stigma as deflection tactic. The same vulnerability that secured trust became the weapon that silenced accountability.

For those of us who live with disability and neurodivergence, this isn’t unfamiliar. We see it constantly. People using our shared language to build credibility, then turning that language into armor when confronted with consequences.

It’s internalized ableism rebranded as empathy. And if you follow my writing you will remember the essay I wrote about people who claim empath status and high empathy tend to be the worst manipulators.

When Davina suggested I was “not well” for requesting a refund, she knew exactly what she was activating. The historical legacy of Black women’s testimony being dismissed as madness. The clinical tradition of pathologizing our clarity as anger. The social reflex to prioritize emotional comfort over material harm. Exactly how she is treated when she discloses her own mental illness throughout her life.

And it almost worked.

Because audiences trained on therapeutic language confuse distress with truth. Because mental health professionals validated her narrative without requesting evidence. Because the internet rewards the person who performs fragility, not the person who presents facts.

But documentation doesn’t lie.

I hold payment confirmations. Contract agreements. Timestamped requests. Her own written acknowledgment of the debt. Screenshots of her soliciting new clients while ghosting existing ones. Messages where she admits the work was incomplete, followed by public posts claiming full delivery.

She reframed exposure as “harassment.” Refund refusal as “boundaries.” Accountability as “attack.”

That’s not misunderstanding. It’s manipulation dressed in the language of mental health advocacy.

How Exploitation Hides Behind Empathy and Burnout Narratives

The Four-Step Pattern That Keeps Repeating

By this point, the structure was visible. This wasn’t an isolated experience. It was a repeatable pattern, one that functions identically across creative industries, justice-aligned spaces, and neurodivergent communities.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Perform closeness. Use the language of community and shared struggle to build emotional trust. Disclose vulnerability strategically. Mirror the client’s values and vocabulary. Make it feel like partnership, not transaction.

Step 2: Secure benefit without earning it. Request payment upfront by citing past exploitation. Frame full payment as a matter of trust. Use identity proximity to bypass standard professional protections like contracts with clear milestones or escrow arrangements.

Step 3: Fail to deliver, citing crisis. Delay indefinitely. Offer vague reassurances. When pressed, deploy crisis language: burnout, mental health struggles, communication difficulties. Make every request for an update feel like cruelty. Train the client to absorb guilt for having needs.

Step 4: Reframe accountability as attack. When consequences arrive, flip the script. Cast yourself as the vulnerable one. Suggest the client is unstable, aggressive, or vindictive. Use the same identity markers that secured trust as shields against scrutiny. Make documentation look like harassment.

This is the empathy economy at work. Identity and emotional language can be leveraged to gain trust without ever having to earn it. It functions best in justice-adjacent spaces where people assume shared politics equal shared ethics.

Empathy without boundaries becomes currency. Solidarity without structure becomes shelter for exploitation.

When I first wrote Community Is Not Transactional, I meant that community cannot survive if it depends on extraction. This experience proved the inverse: exploitation thrives when people are too afraid to distinguish sincerity from strategy.

For Black neurodivergent women, this cycle is particularly costly. We are taught to interpret others’ pain as responsibility, to accommodate even when our own needs are unmet. The people who exploit us understand this conditioning. They count on it. They know that silence feels safer than confrontation, especially when the person harming you shares an identity or cause.

This pattern doesn’t only harm individuals. It devalues the language of care itself, turning empathy into performance and accountability into taboo. The cost isn’t just financial. It’s psychological and communal.

Why Black Neurodivergent Women Become Targets

The reason this pattern repeats is not accidental. It’s structural. Black neurodivergent women exist at the intersection of two deeply conditioned expectations: to nurture and to prove.

We are taught that our worth is tied to reliability and empathy, that questioning someone else’s story—especially a marginalized one—makes us cruel. That conditioning is what exploiters rely on.

Our reputations depend on credibility and composure. Our tone is scrutinized even in moments of justified anger. When we speak directly, we’re labeled aggressive. When we stay quiet, we’re complicit. And when we demand accountability from someone who performs shared identity, we become the problem.

Davina understood this. She knew that positioning herself as a vulnerable biracial woman would shield her from public critique and redirect sympathy. It’s a script deeply tied to colonial and gendered hierarchies: biracial proximity to whiteness becomes emotional protection, while dark-skinned assertiveness becomes threat.

Every time this happens, it reinforces an old equation: Black women’s composure as currency, and our silence as the cost of belonging. The burden multiplies for those of us who are autistic or ADHD, because our directness is constantly misread as aggression or instability.

That’s how exploitation hides in plain sight—by banking on the audience’s discomfort with Black women’s clarity.

But documentation breaks that pattern. Evidence interrupts projection. Receipts turn accusation into record.

For me, this isn’t just about one designer in Manchester who took my money and vanished. It’s about how digital culture rewards performance over proof, and how those of us who live by ethics of care are expected to absorb deceit in silence to protect the illusion of community.

When I name the behavior, I’m not betraying the community. I’m protecting it.

Lightskin Privilege and Biracial Power Dynamics

When Davina Campbell realized her tactics were no longer working, the performance shifted. The same woman who had invoked shared vulnerability and sisterhood began to reach for the very tools of dominance she claimed to reject.

She became the one who made threats, stating she would contact the police. That moment revealed everything.

In our private messages, she had described parental trauma within controlling, volatile, and emotionally unpredictable environments. She spoke of how those behaviors had shaped her anxiety and her lifelong need to be believed. But in our interaction, she mirrored the same behavior she once said she survived: reframing calm, documented accountability as aggression, then invoking institutional power as protection.

I hold full transcripts of Davina’s disclosures and threats from our interactions in Sweden. These records are legally valid as both parties participated in the conversations. Out of respect, I am not sharing the complete transcripts publicly; however, followers with access to the relational hub can review the details, which are crucial for those in the care field to understand how these dynamics operate.

That is how whiteness operates behaviorally, not biologically. It isn’t about complexion—it’s about reflex. The reflex to reach for state protection when discomfort arises. The reflex to center fragility over fact. The reflex to equate tone with threat, especially when the other person is dark-skinned, autistic, and uncompromising in her clarity.

It’s a centuries-old choreography: proximity to Blackness when it feels safe, distance when it becomes inconvenient. In activist spaces, it looks like allyship until critique. In professional spaces, it looks like shared struggle until accountability. Then suddenly, whiteness re-enters the room not as race, but as behavior.

The police threat wasn’t abstract for me or for many Black women. Especially for those of us visibly dark-skinned, the invocation of law enforcement carries historical weight. It’s a reminder of who is believed and who is punished for being visible.

The emotional betrayal wasn’t just about money—it was about watching someone replicate the very power they claimed to resist and which harmed them. To use the language of care to gain access, then the posture of fragility to avoid consequence. It was watching performance collapse into inheritance.

The police threat wasn’t casual. It was calculated. Davina knew that suggesting law enforcement involvement would activate a specific fear, one particular to dark-skinned Black women in Europe. Sweden has its own history of racial profiling, disproportionate force, and institutional distrust of Black testimony. She knew I would understand the subtext: I can make you the problem. I can summon the state.

What makes this particularly instructive is that she made this threat while claiming to be overwhelmed, burnt out, and too vulnerable to complete a website. Somehow, she had energy to threaten police involvement, but not to send a refund or finish contracted work.

That tells you everything about where her capacity actually lived.

This is what lightskin privilege wielded by a biracial person looks like when left unexamined: the ability to occupy both sides of the power dynamic at will. To borrow the credibility of Blackness when convenient, then retreat into the insulation of whiteness when challenged. It’s an old script, rehearsed across generations, and it remains effective because audiences still mistake emotional fragility for moral innocence.

Davina’s pivot from “safe collaboration” to potential police involvement wasn’t an overreaction. She was reclaiming control through a system built to protect her, not me. And that’s the quiet violence of racialized professionalism: even in digital disputes, whiteness can still summon authority with a single implication.

Her behavior made one truth impossible to ignore. Proximity does not dismantle power—it often re-performs it.

Unlike Davina though, I understand the legal differences between threats, bullying, and a legitimate request for a refund after a breach of contract. We do not reside in the same country, which means the standards and consequences are not equal. She faces more to answer for than I do.

My legal background allows me to distinguish what constitutes harassment versus exercising my rights, and my actions have always been in line with Swedish contract law and ethical client advocacy.

When the Private Confession Contradicts the Public Defense

The clearest evidence of narrative distortion came after I published my Trustpilot review.

In private messages, Davina Campbell had already acknowledged that the website was unfinished and offered a refund once posts were taken down. She acknowledged that I paid in full BEFORE delivery in LinkedIn messages.

The clearest evidence of narrative distortion came after I published my Trustpilot review. In private messages, Davina Campbell had already acknowledged that the website was unfinished and offered a refund once posts were taken down. She acknowledged that I paid in full in linkedin messages.

Yet in her public Trustpilot response, she pivoted, claiming I had paid after delivery and that the project was “completed in full.”

That reversal isn’t just inconsistency; it reveals dysregulation so complete she couldn’t keep her story straight. The private messages and public posts contradict each other line by line. In one, she admits the work is incomplete; in the other, she rewrites history to protect her image.

This is also why she scrambled to create some subpar Canva designs on integrity—because she believes the person who speaks first wins. She is banking on being believed whilst showing no proof or evidence or communication trail since she ghosted.

This contradiction underscores what happens when accountability meets self-preservation. The truth becomes fluid, shaped to whatever audience feels safest at the moment. It’s a textbook case of cognitive dissonance: the same person acknowledging harm in private while denying it in public, hoping the audience won’t compare the two.

Documentation ends speculation. Her own words make the record undeniable.

Why Care Without Consequence Isn’t Community

Accountability requires follow-through, not just language.

Accountability requires follow-through, not just language.

Care means nothing without restitution. Integrity means nothing without proof. Community means nothing if it protects harm.

I sent Davina Campbell clear, professional communication outlining my concerns, my refund request, and my willingness to resolve matters privately. I gave every opportunity for repair. Her response was continued silence, punctuated by deflection posts about “integrity” and “dignity over drama.”

In my final message, I wrote:

“If I, as an intermittently non-speaking, Black, disabled queer woman can communicate and uphold contracts despite trauma, so can you.”

That wasn’t cruelty. It was a statement of equality. Accountability is not discrimination. It’s the foundation of trust.

Disability and mental health challenges are real. They shape capacity, communication, and energy in ways that deserve accommodation. But they do not erase professional responsibility. They do not excuse taking payment for work never delivered. They do not justify weaponizing vulnerability to silence the people you’ve harmed.

When people use vulnerability to avoid consequence, they damage the very communities they claim to represent. They reinforce the stereotypes that harm us all: that neurodivergent people can’t be reliable, that emotional sensitivity excuses negligence, that Black women demanding standards are dangerous.

True accountability requires three things:

Number one: Restitution. Return what was taken or repair what was broken.

Number two: Transparency. Admit what happened without rebranding harm as misunderstanding.

Number three: Cultural honesty. Stop using shared identity as protection from scrutiny.

Anything less is performance.

This essay isn’t about vengeance. It’s about how exploitation hides behind empathy, how manipulation borrows the language of community, and how people confuse care with consequence until harm becomes cyclical.

For those of us who live at intersections of racialization, disability, and creative labor, discernment is survival. We cannot afford to mistake performance for solidarity or proximity for integrity.

Because at its core, accountability isn’t punishment. It’s closure.

And closure, unlike silence, cannot be faked.

Documentation as Disruption: Why Silence Protects Exploitation

This story isn’t only about one designer in Manchester. It’s about how exploitation survives through silence, especially when the person causing harm performs shared identity.

This story isn’t only about one designer in Manchester. It’s about how exploitation survives through silence, especially when the person causing harm performs shared identity.

The language of community has become currency, and silence is its counterfeit. We are told that to protect each other, we must tolerate everything. But care without consequence isn’t community. It’s complicity.

When I spoke about what happened with Digital Davina Designs, I knew what it might cost me. Every Black woman who has ever named harm within so-called safe spaces knows that backlash isn’t hypothetical. We are expected to absorb deceit quietly to preserve the illusion of solidarity.

But silence protects exploitation, not people. Documentation protects future clients.

This essay is a record, not revenge. It’s a public trace of a pattern I’ve seen across activism, consulting, and creative industries: people using the vocabulary of justice to shield unethical behavior. The performance always begins the same way—care, empathy, vulnerability—and ends with gaslighting, coercion, and selective amnesia.

To the women who have been through similar situations—who were called difficult for asking for refunds, manipulative for setting boundaries, or cruel for naming facts—you are not alone. You are not divisive for demanding accountability. You are protecting others from walking into harm disguised as help.

For those of us who build communities while living with racialization, disability, and chronic exhaustion, discernment is our protection. We do not owe blind loyalty to people who exploit shared language. Integrity requires documentation, not deference.

Proximity is not proof of integrity. Shared identity is not shared ethics. And no one deserves protection at the expense of truth.

If you’re considering working with Digital Davina Designs (digitaldavina.com, Manchester, UK), ask the questions I didn’t:

* Do they have verifiable client references?

* What refund policies exist if work isn’t delivered?

* Are they registered as a legitimate business? (No registration was found when searched.)

* If a business claims they can’t afford to refund you in full after you paid them in full upfront, and instead offers installments (first two payments, then four), then fails to follow through on even that—would you trust them with your project and your money?

* What systems exist for accountability beyond their word?

And if you’ve been harmed by someone who uses community language to silence critique, speak. Not because it’s easy, but because silence keeps the pattern alive.

This is what integrity looks like in practice: telling the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, naming harm even when it’s familiar, and refusing to let empathy become a weapon.

Community means care, but it must also mean consequence. Without both, all we’re doing is enabling harm with better vocabulary.

If you’ve had similar experiences with Digital Davina Designs or other service providers who use identity performance to avoid accountability, your story matters. Documentation protects future clients. Silence protects exploitation.

For those considering working with Digital Davina Designs or wanting to verify claims, here is the business information as documented at the time of publication.

Digital Davina Designs Business Information

* Website: digitaldavina.com

* Owner: Davina Campbell

* Location: First Floor, Swan Buildings, M4 5JW, Manchester, United Kingdom

* Email: [email protected]

* LinkedIn: Digital Davina Designs

* Instagram: @digitaldavina

* Certifications Listed: Driving Organizational Accountability for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (Feb 2023); Adaptive Project Leadership (Oct 2022) — The irony speaks for itself.

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Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

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* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

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Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

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* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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8 Signs You’re Over-Explaining (Not Just Being Thorough)

There’s a difference between being detailed and being driven by fear. One comes from competence. The other comes from a nervous system that learned survival depends on proof. Here’s how to tell which one you’re doing:

* Your heart races when you pause. Silence feels like a trap. You fill it before anyone else can.

* You end sentences with “does that make sense?” or “you know what I mean?” You’re not asking—you’re checking. Monitoring. Making sure they’re still with you, still safe, still on your side.

* People’s eyes glaze but you keep going. You see them drift. You notice the shift. But stopping feels more dangerous than continuing, so you add another layer of context.

* You leave conversations exhausted even when “nothing happened.” No conflict. No tension. Just a regular interaction. But your body feels like it survived something.

* You rehearse explanations for interactions that haven’t occurred yet. You’re pre-building your defense for a conversation nobody’s scheduled. Scripting justifications for decisions you haven’t made. The over-explaining starts before the room even exists.

* You add disclaimers before setting boundaries. “I know this might sound like a lot, but…” or “I don’t mean to be difficult, but…” You’re apologizing for needing what you need before you’ve even said it.

* Brevity feels physically unsafe. Short answers make your chest tight. Saying less feels like withholding. Like you’re setting yourself up to be misunderstood, misread, accused.

* You apologize for “talking too much” then immediately explain why you did. The apology becomes another explanation. The loop continues.

If more than three of these are true, you’re not being thorough. You’re performing safety. And your nervous system is paying for it.

When Over Explaining Feels Like Safety

Ever met someone who keeps talking and ends every sentence with “you know what I mean?” They’re not unsure. You already do know. But they’re watching to be sure. You’ve done it too. I have.

The first time I explained myself into exhaustion, I was trying to be safe. I kept adding context, more history, more proof that I meant well. My heart was racing. The room felt loud. The person across from me relaxed as I spoke, while my body tightened.

Sometimes depending on who we’re speaking to—or their neurotype—we annoy them. Even other neurodivergent people. Some need fast information, no context, like a few of my closest friends. They’ll tilt their head mid-sentence and say, “Lovette, get to the point.”

Being around people with low tolerance and high cognitive empathy taught me things therapy never could. They taught me what many autistic adults eventually learn the hard way: over-explaining isn’t clarity. It’s survival we mask as conversation. And the more we do it, the more we train our brain to replay the trauma that made us over-explain in the first place.

We aren’t just telling stories—we’re revisiting the rooms where we weren’t believed, rebuilding the stage where we had to perform to stay safe.

Before You Read: A Pattern Worth Naming

7,000+ subscribers. Less than 200 paid.

Most of you tell me this work shifted how you understand your autism, your trauma, yourselves. You share these essays with friends, cite them in therapy, use the language I’ve built to finally name your experience.

But fewer than 3% of you pay for it. This is intellectual extraction: consuming Black labor while paying $7/month for Netflix, $12 for Spotify, $6 for coffee—but not $5 for the work that’s changing your life.

This essay took 10+ hours to research, write, edit and optimize. If it holds value, that value should include compensation.

Subscribe — $5/month, less than two coffees Can’t afford it? Keep reading—this work is for you too. But if you can and haven’t, sit with that. Then decide.

Why Over-Explaining Becomes Survival

Why do autistic people over-explain? Because we learned early that incomplete information gets punished. People insert their own understanding and suspicions and it’s never the accurate ones and they never apply curiosity and ask. And much lies in the silence we allow. That silence invites suspicion. That being misunderstood can be dangerous.

Many of us grew up in environments where our first answer wasn’t enough. Adults questioned our motives, doubted our intentions, or assumed malice when we were simply direct. We learned to add context before conflict, to flood the space with detail so there was no room for misinterpretation. Over-explaining became our armor.

For autistic people—especially Black autistic women—this pattern multiplies under social scrutiny. Directness is read as aggression. Silence is pathologized. Joy is labeled excessive. So we calibrate. We add disclaimers. We soften every boundary before we set it, then get called difficult for needing to explain at all.

This isn’t a personality quirk. It’s a safety protocol built in rooms where being misread carried consequences—lost friendships, disciplinary notes, strained families, revoked trust. Over-explaining is what happens when your brain decides that clarity is the only shield you have. But that shield is heavy. The longer we carry it, the more we believe we can’t be safe without it.

It looks like understanding, but it’s the nervous system performing safety to prevent rejection. It’s a conversation pattern wired by threat, not by curiosity.

The Neuroscience of Autistic Over-Explaining and Trauma

Every time we over-explain, we believe we’re creating clarity. Neurologically, something else is happening. We’re re-activating the same emotional circuitry that encoded the original harm.

The autistic brain is built for pattern recognition and fine-grain recall. When we experience social pain—being dismissed, punished, or misunderstood—the brain stores every sensory cue: tone, light, volume, expression. When a similar cue appears later, the amygdala fires, signaling danger. The body prepares for loss before it arrives. So we talk. We justify. We add more detail, hoping precision will protect us.

This mirrors rumination: a cognitive loop that replays distressing information until the body treats memory as a live event. For autistic people, the loop is amplified. Bottom-up thinking means we rebuild scenes from fragments, hunting for logic. But when those fragments belong to trauma, reconstruction becomes re-immersion.

The brain reads over-explaining as exposure without regulation. Each retelling reopens the wound: heart rate rises, cortisol floods, muscles tighten. We think we’re talking our way out of danger, but we’re training the nervous system to expect danger every time we speak.

Because this behavior sometimes prevents conflict, the brain starts to depend on it. The anxiety that sparks the first explanation becomes the baseline. Soon, we can’t speak briefly without panic. Silence feels unsafe. Brevity feels like risk.

That’s how trauma becomes habit. The protective reflex becomes the pattern. We aren’t seeking understanding—we’re rehearsing survival in real time.

Small Talk, Masking, and How Vagueness Sets the Trap

For autistic people, small talk is never small. It’s decoding disguised as connection. Every vague phrase—“let’s touch base,” “quick chat,” “pick your brain”—requires a translation we were never taught. We soften our tone, manage eye contact, hide the flicker of confusion. Politeness becomes performance.

A manager says, “let’s have a quick chat.” Your brain inventories twelve possible infractions before the meeting begins. You show up armed with context, ready to explain work no one asked about, preparing for a misunderstanding that might not exist.

A colleague wants to “pick your brain.” You agree, thinking it’s friendly. The conversation turns into unpaid consulting masked as bonding. You spend the hour decoding motive while offering expertise. You leave drained and uncertain whether you’ve built a connection or been mined for labor.

Ambiguity forces vigilance. The vaguer the cue, the more our nervous system scrambles to predict danger. That’s how small talk becomes a trap: it mirrors the same uncertainty that created the need to over-explain in the first place.

Boundary script for the moment:“I need the topic in advance. I’ll prepare, and we can schedule fifteen minutes.”

Precision protects the nervous system. Clarity is care for us and for whoever’s listening.

Autistic Loneliness, Infodumping, and When the Archive Becomes Ammunition

Autistic isolation creates a particular hunger. Years of shallow interactions, conversations that stay at surface level, never being fully known—these absences pile up. When someone finally feels safe, the floodgates open. We infodump. We share our history, our patterns, our wounds. It feels like relief after years of drought.

But infodumping isn’t oversharing. It’s co-regulation that’s been starved. The problem starts when the person who receives it doesn’t have the capacity to hold it—or when they hold it long enough to use it later. Unmet witnessing and old misreadings push us to narrate our entire archive, convinced that if we explain ourselves thoroughly enough, someone will finally understand.

In safe spaces, infodumping repairs what isolation broke. In unsafe ones, it becomes ammunition. We hand people the blueprint of our pain, thinking proximity means safety. It rarely does. The same details that make us legible also make us vulnerable.

When Autistic Over-Explaining Shows Up at Work

The professional cost of over-explaining doesn’t show up in performance reviews. It shows up in the twelve-paragraph email you sent at 11 PM trying to prevent a misunderstanding that never happened. It shows up in the Slack message you rewrote six times before sending. It shows up in the meeting where you watched people’s attention drift while you were still building context they didn’t ask for.

At work, over-explaining reads as insecurity. You’re trying to demonstrate competence, but what lands is uncertainty. You open emails with disclaimers. You end them with “Let me know if this doesn’t make sense” or “Happy to clarify further.” You pre-defend decisions nobody questioned.

A manager schedules a one-on-one. Before you even sit down, your brain has compiled a defense for every project you’ve touched in the last six months. You show up with notes. With timelines. With proof that you’ve been working, evidence that you care, a full account of why that deadline shifted. They wanted to ask about your vacation plans. If they accuse ask them to present proof and ask for time to consider what they present otherwise you are presenting them with evidence they havent considered.

You send a “just following up” message. Then another. Then a third explaining why you’re following up. Each one adds context about workload, competing priorities, your process. What started as “checking in on the report” becomes a chronicle of everything that’s happened since Tuesday. The response comes back: “Got it, thanks.”

That’s the professional trap. Over-explaining makes you look like you’re struggling even when you’re not. It signals doubt when you’re trying to signal thoroughness. And because workplaces reward concision—especially from women, especially from Black women—every extra sentence costs credibility you can’t afford to lose.

The pattern shows up in:

Emails that could be two lines. You write four paragraphs because you’re afraid two sentences will sound curt, will be misread as attitude, will get you labeled difficult.

Meetings where you’re still talking after people have moved on. You’re building toward a point, but they already got it. Now you’re losing them.

Performance reviews where you defend work nobody criticized. You walk in with a portfolio of proof. They wanted to talk about goals for next quarter.

Slack threads that become monologues. Someone asks a yes/no question. You write six messages with background, context, and contingency plans. They just needed the yes or the no.

Here’s what to do instead:

- Email rule: Write it. Cut it in half. Send that. If you’re scared it sounds rude, add one warm sentence at the end. That’s it.

- Meeting rule: Answer the question asked. If they need more, they’ll ask. Silence after your answer isn’t danger—it’s space for them to process.

- Slack rule: One message, three sentences max. If it needs more, it needs a meeting or a doc—not a thread.

- Review rule: Let them lead. Bring your portfolio, but don’t present it unless asked. Defense before accusation makes you look guilty of something.

Work doesn’t reward vulnerability. It doesn’t reward narrative. It rewards precision. And the hardest thing about being autistic in professional spaces is learning that clarity isn’t found in more words—it’s found in the right ones.

When Infodumping Becomes Exposure Without Closure

This is when infodumping turns into a rehearsal for self-harm. We call it infodumping. But what we’re really doing is exposing ourselves—opening the wound, showing every scar, explaining the entire geography of our pain—to someone we haven’t vetted for safety. Because we’re autistic, we don’t always pause to assess the room before we speak.

Therapeutic exposure has conditions: a trained witness, titrated doses, co-regulation, and repair. Infodumping has none of that. It’s raw memory dropped into casual space. We recount trauma in a DM, at a party, or during what we thought was a harmless check-in. The body relives it—heart racing, chest tight, amygdala sounding alarms—while the other person nods, untrained, unaware that they’ve just stepped into a flashback with no map.

And because we misread social capacity, we sometimes share with people who can’t or won’t receive us. They listen through judgment instead of curiosity. Later they use what we said as proof that we’re “too much” or “unstable.” The wound reopens, gets witnessed, then gets weaponized.

Over-explaining without closure functions like exposure without containment. The body relives the event without the structure that allows resolution. Every time we tell our story to someone who can’t or won’t meet us in safety, the groove of trauma deepens. The brain learns that speaking is dangerous, but silence is unbearable. That’s the bind of autistic loneliness: the need to be known colliding with the need to survive being known.

This is why scanning matters. Not everyone deserves your archive. Not every listener has the range to hold what you’re offering. If you can’t confirm someone’s capacity, write instead. Let the page absorb what your nervous system can’t yet hold in silence. The right witness won’t need proof that you survived. They’ll know by the way you speak when you feel safe.

Being Misread Twice: Autistic and Black

Black autistic women live inside a double misreading. Our directness—what in autism is called honesty—gets labeled aggression. Our silence—what in autism is processing time—gets labeled defiance. We learn early that both will be punished, so we start explaining before the misunderstanding lands.

In Treat People How They Want to Be Treated, I wrote about how reciprocity gets twisted against us. We offer generosity and get called manipulative. We set boundaries and get called ungrateful. The demand is constant: anticipate what others want, while they never ask what we need.

Directness doesn’t buy us trust; it invites suspicion. So we soften everything—tone, body, even truth. We rehearse our boundaries before setting them, layering disclaimers to make them palatable. When we’re accused of being difficult anyway, our preparation becomes evidence. “See,” they say, “she was defensive from the start.”

That’s how being misread twice becomes the price of survival. First for being autistic. Then for being Black. Each misreading widens the distance between intent and perception. The more we try to bridge it with language, the more it’s turned against us.

Over-explaining becomes the tax we pay to be seen as human before we’re seen as a threat.

How the Loop Costs Us Connection

Over time, over-explaining doesn’t just drain the body—it distorts connection. It trains us to talk at people instead of with them. We start scanning for misunderstanding before it even happens, reading every facial twitch as a potential threat. Instead of being in conversation, we start performing damage control.

People can feel it, even if they can’t name it. The rhythm changes. Eye contact turns into monitoring. Presence turns into surveillance. We walk away from interactions wondering why we still feel unseen, even after saying everything. That’s the paradox of over-explaining—it leaves us empty in the very spaces where we were trying to feel understood.

This habit shapes relationships too. The friends who can’t tolerate detail start pulling away. We need them the most for balance the friends who co-regulate us and teach us valuable skills as we also give them valuable details.

We also lose the ones who mistake our context for justification accuse us of overthinking. Romantic partners may hear our elaboration as defensiveness. The more we try to make sense, the less sense we seem to make to others. Because these people are safe spaces we make seem unsafe. It’s a painful feedback loop: our need for safety gets misread as control, our need for understanding gets read as excess.

How the Brain Learns the Loop

The autistic brain builds patterns the way others build habits through five neural mechanisms:

1. Pattern prediction — The brain records detail, rhythm, tone, every cue that might signal danger next time, scanning conversations for threat signals before they appear

2. Hypervigilance — When anything feels similar—a pause, a raised eyebrow, a sigh—the body responds as if the original harm is happening again, turning social interactions into constant safety assessments

3. Verbal rumination — To stay safe, we fill the silence with explanation, clarification, repetition. Each retelling feels like prevention, but it’s rehearsal that strengthens neural pathways to painful memories

4. Safety-seeking through context — The more we narrate the same story, the faster the brain retrieves it. The neural path to the wound becomes smooth, automatic, reliable. More detail creates a false sense of control

5. Repetition strengthening — Each over-explanation makes the next one more automatic. Repetition strengthens access routes to pain. It’s the same circuitry that helps us master language or music—repurposed by trauma

That’s why stopping the loop feels impossible. The brain confuses self-protection with survival rehearsal, keeping us fluent in danger long after the threat is gone. This loop transforms protective behavior into compulsive rehearsal.

Relearning Safety

Relearning safety starts small. It’s not about silence—it’s about pausing before the impulse. Checking whether the explanation is about information or fear. Sometimes the most self-respecting thing we can do is to let a sentence end without proof.

Safety for the autistic brain can’t come from overexposure; it has to come from predictability, regulation, and trust. We need spaces where being misread isn’t dangerous. Where silence is allowed to breathe. Where brevity isn’t punished.

That’s what relearning safety looks like: not shrinking, not masking—just refusing to hand your trauma to people who don’t know how to hold it.

Speak Less, Feel Safer, Stay Precise

Healing autistic communication isn’t about withholding clarity. It’s about protecting energy—deciding when, where, and to whom we offer it. Boundaries aren’t barriers; they’re structure. They make it possible to stay ourselves inside interaction.

Scripts for the Moment

Use these when you feel the urge to over-explain rising:

- “I answer after I think. I will reply in writing.”

- “Please send the question by email. I respond within 48 hours.”

- “I do not consult in DMs. Here is my booking link.”

These aren’t rude. They’re protective. Each one says: I can meet you, but only where my nervous system feels safe.

Structures That Reduce the Reflex

Build frameworks that interrupt the over-explaining habit before it begins:

- Default to asynchronous replies. Write first, speak later. The pause gives your nervous system time to regulate.

- Use time rules. No live clarifying unless it’s paid or pre-agreed. This removes the pressure to perform understanding in real time.

- Identify two people who read you without translation. Go to them for repair when you’ve been misunderstood. Not everyone deserves access to your wounds.

These structures don’t make you cold. They make you consistent. They signal to your brain that clarity doesn’t have to cost peace.

What to Say to Yourself

When the urge to over-explain rises, pause and remember:

- “Misunderstood does not mean unsafe.”

- “Less detail keeps me out of the loop.”

- “Silence can be care.”

Each phrase trains your body to decouple safety from performance. The goal isn’t to explain less—it’s to stop explaining from fear.

How to Interrupt Yourself Mid-Explanation

Prevention is good. But what about when you’re already in it? When you’re mid-sentence and you feel the spiral starting—the additions, the qualifiers, the need to make sure they understand not just what you’re saying but why you’re saying it and where it came from and what you mean by it?

Here’s how to stop yourself before the loop tightens:

Body-based interrupt: Put your hand on your chest. Feel your feet on the floor. The body stores the panic, so the body has to signal the stop. One breath. That’s the pause you need to notice what’s happening.

Verbal circuit breaker: Say this out loud: “Let me stop—I’m adding context you didn’t ask for. What do you actually need to know?”

It sounds vulnerable. It is. But it’s also honest. And most people will respect the self-awareness more than they’ll judge the correction. You’re not apologizing—you’re redirecting. There’s a difference.

Permission to exit: If you can’t stop cleanly, give yourself a way out: “I’m going to stop here. If you need more detail, I can send it later.”

This does two things. It releases you from the pressure to explain everything right now. And it puts the choice on them—if they need more, they’ll ask. If they don’t, you just saved both of you fifteen minutes.

After the conversation ends: Your body will still be buzzing. That’s normal. The adrenaline doesn’t stop just because the words did.

Shake it out. Literally. Move your arms, roll your shoulders, let the charge leave. Cold water on your wrists. A walk, even if it’s just to another room. Alone time—not to rehash what you said, but to let your nervous system reset.

And here’s the important part: Don’t send a follow-up message. The urge will be strong. You’ll want to clarify, to add one more thing, to make sure they didn’t misunderstand. Resist it. That follow-up is the loop restarting. Let the conversation be done.

You’re learning to trust that being misunderstood isn’t the same as being unsafe. That’s hard. But every time you interrupt the pattern, you’re teaching your brain a new route.

Green Flags: What Safety Actually Looks Like

I told you to find two people who can read you without translation. But how do you know who those people are?

We’re not always good at recognizing safety. We’ve been misread so many times that we start to believe everyone will do it. We confuse familiarity with trust. Proximity with safety. Someone being nice with someone being capable of holding what we’re offering.

Here’s what safe people actually do:

* They ask clarifying questions instead of filling in your blanks. They say, “Help me understand this part” instead of assuming what you meant.

* They can say “I don’t understand yet” without making it your fault. No irritation. No impatience. Just honest admission that they need more from you to get it.

* They sit in silence without assuming the worst. When you pause to think, they wait. They don’t rush to interpret your quiet as withdrawal or anger or judgment.

* They repeat back what you said accurately—not their interpretation. They check their understanding instead of declaring it. “So what I’m hearing is…” and then they actually say what you said, not a softened or translated version.

* They don’t weaponize what you share. Months later, in an argument or a tense moment, they don’t pull out something you told them in confidence and use it as proof that you’re “too much” or “unstable.”

* They tell you when they don’t have capacity. They say, “I want to hear this, but I can’t right now. Can we talk tomorrow?” They protect both of you by being honest about their limits.

And here’s what unsafe people do to Autistics:

They finish your sentences. They say “I know, I know” before you’re done. They get defensive when you add context, as if your need for clarity is an accusation. They reference your explanations later as evidence that you’re difficult. They use therapy language to shut you down—“you’re spiraling,” “that’s just your trauma talking”—as if naming the pattern dismisses what you’re actually saying.

Unsafe people make you feel like you have to explain more to be understood, then punish you for explaining at all.

Safe people let you be exactly as detailed as you need to be—and then they meet you there.

If you’re not sure about someone, test small. Share one thing that matters but isn’t your whole story. See what they do with it. Do they hold it carefully, or do they broadcast it? Do they ask more, or do they use it to explain you to yourself?

That’s your answer.

When Context-Giving Is Your Strength (Not Your Wound)

Not all detailed communication is pathology. Let me be clear about that.

There are contexts where precision is power. Where thoroughness isn’t trauma—it’s competence. Technical documentation. Teaching. Research. Systems design. Writing that has to carry weight across distance and time. These are spaces where autistic communication is exactly what’s needed.

The difference isn’t in the amount of detail. It’s in what drives it.

When context-giving is your strength:

* Adding detail makes you feel more grounded, not more anxious

* You’re building clarity for the other person, not safety for yourself

* You can stop when you’ve said enough without your chest tightening

* The detail serves the work, not your nervous system

When it’s trauma:

* Every addition feels mandatory, not optional

* You’re explaining to prevent harm, not to transfer knowledge

* Stopping early makes your heart race

* The detail is for your protection, not their understanding

Here’s the body check: Does adding detail make you more tense or less?

If your shoulders drop, if your breathing steadies, if you feel solid in what you’re saying—that’s authentic communication. That’s you being good at what you’re good at.

If your chest tightens, if your heart speeds up, if you’re scanning their face for signs of misunderstanding—that’s fear. That’s the loop.

Autistic people are often brilliant at synthesis, at connecting pieces that others miss, at building frameworks that make complexity legible. That’s not something to fix. That’s something to protect.

The goal isn’t to stop being detailed. It’s to stop explaining from fear. It’s to let your precision serve the work instead of serving the wound.

Know the difference. Honor both. But don’t confuse survival with skill.

Recovery After Over-Explaining

You’ve already done it. You’ve explained yourself into exhaustion. The conversation is over, but your body is still vibrating. Your mind is replaying every sentence, analyzing every reaction, wondering if you said too much or not enough.

Here’s what to do now:

* Immediate body regulation. Get alone. Even if it’s just the bathroom, the car, a corner where no one’s watching. Cold water on your wrists, your neck. Shake your arms out. Move. The adrenaline has to go somewhere—let your body discharge it instead of storing it.

* Resist the urge to send a follow-up. This is critical. You’ll want to clarify. To add one more thing. To make sure they understood. Don’t. That message is the loop restarting. The conversation is done. Let it stay done.

* Write instead of rehashing. If you need to process, put it on a page. Not in their inbox—in a journal, a note app, somewhere private. Let the page absorb what your nervous system can’t hold. Write until the charge is gone, then close it. You don’t have to send it. You don’t even have to keep it.

* Remind yourself: “I’m safe even if they misunderstood.” Say it out loud if you have to. Being misread is not the same as being in danger. This might not feel true yet. Say it anyway. You’re teaching your nervous system a new story.

* Notice if you’re replaying the conversation. That’s the loop trying to restart. Catch it early. Name it: “I’m looping.” Then redirect. Move your body. Change the room. Put on music. Do something that pulls you into the present instead of the past.

* And if you can, tell someone safe what happened. Not to rehash the content of the conversation, but to name the pattern. “I over-explained again. I’m working on it. It’s hard.” Sometimes just saying it out loud to someone who won’t judge you is enough to release the grip.

Recovery isn’t about fixing what you did. It’s about not punishing yourself for being human. Over-explaining happens. You’re not broken for doing it. You’re just tired of carrying the weight.

Let this be where you put it down.

Closing Thoughts

If this resonated, share one strategy that helped you speak less without losing yourself. If you need structured support on autistic communication, emotional regulation, or workplace boundaries, book a talk or training.

And send this essay to one person who still believes over-explaining earns safety. They might be waiting for proof that they can stop.

If this resonates, share it with someone who needs it and consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing. Every share helps, your support sustains the work.

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social

Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

They still treat “disabled” like it’s a dirty word

I was genuinely happy giddy, even to meet another autistic person twitching under the fluorescent lights at a conference. You know that silent bond when two nervous systems recognize each other? Same rhythm, same overstimulation, same grimace at the buzzing lights. I leaned in and said, “Wait… are you autistic too?”

They froze. Eyes darting like I’d just exposed state secrets. Then they whispered, “Don’t blow my cover, btch, the allistics are watching.”

That’s when I knew. I wasn’t just surrounded by Allistics as I thought. I was surrounded by autistics still performing for them.

It’s the same energy as that one Black guy at work who thinks the Dwights don’t see his color. You know the one, he lowers his voice when you walk by, like whiteness is contagious if he laughs too loud. That kind of denial doesnt gurantee safety; it’s merely survival theater.

And that’s what “I’m autistic but not disabled” really is. A performance of proximity to power. A refusal to sit in the discomfort of truth. A survival script written by systems that taught us visibility is dangerous, and acceptance is earned through imitation.

But let’s be clear—autism and disability aren’t insults. They’re realities. They’re languages of access, of shared experience, of boundaries learned the hard way. If that word still makes you flinch, this essay is for you. Because every time we distance ourselves from disability, we reinforce the very structure that made distance necessary in the first place.

The Myth of “Autistic but Not Disabled”

“I’m autistic, but I’m not disabled.”

If that sentence ever rolled off your tongue or stayed lodged somewhere between pride and fear this part is for you.

Internalised ableism among autistic adults often hides behind self-preservation. We learn early that “disabled” is a word that shuts doors. Employers avoid it, family members whisper it, clinicians rank it. So we start running from it, mistaking distance for dignity. But distance from disability is not safety; it’s assimilation.

Disability isn’t shameful. Your discomfort with it is. That discomfort is the residue of eugenics, the illusion that proximity to “normal” earns protection. When someone says “I don’t see disability,” what they mean is “I don’t want to.” It’s the same logic as “I don’t see color.” Both erase systems that harm under the guise of kindness. Both let the privileged stay comfortable while the rest of us contort ourselves to fit inside their comfort.

Every time an autistic adult insists they’re “high-functioning,” a hierarchy strengthens. One where some of us are deemed inspirational and others disposable.

Internalised ableism turns our survival strategies into status symbols. It convinces us that masking is mastery, that silence equals success, that being palatable is proof of progress. But the truth is simple: we are all disabled. Some of us are just better resourced, better disguised, or better tolerated.

Real pride doesn’t come from distancing yourself from disability. It comes from dismantling the systems that made disability a dirty word in the first place.

What Disability Actually Means

Autism is a disability. That sentence makes some people flinch because they still confuse impairment with inadequacy. But disability isn’t a flaw in the body; it’s the friction between a body and an environment designed without it in mind.

When fluorescent lights leave you nauseous and trembling, that’s not you being a highly sensitive individual or quirkiness, it’s sensory processing meeting architectural negligence. When executive dysfunction keeps you cycling through guilt and delay because tasks scatter before completion, that’s not laziness, it’s an accessibility failure in a productivity-obsessed culture. When you need recovery time after social interaction, that isn’t fragility, it’s evidence that you expend double the energy to perform what others assume is effortless.

These are barriers to participation. And barriers are the foundation of disability. Society disables us through noise, expectation, pace, and punishment. We are disabled both by neurology and by the infrastructures that refuse to adapt to it.

Disability doesn’t diminish the value of being autistic; it defines the reality of living autistic in an ableist world.

Naming it isn’t surrender, it’s accuracy. Every sensory meltdown, every delayed response, every request for accommodation is not evidence of weakness. It’s proof that we live in systems allergic to difference.

Autism is disability because the world still demands that we edit ourselves to survive. And surviving should never be the measure of inclusion.

Social vs Medical Model — Both Are True

The social model of disability and the medical model aren’t rivals; they’re mirrors reflecting different angles of the same truth.

The medical model explains what happens inside our bodies and brains. The social model reveals what happens around them.

The medical model of autism describes neurology that diverges from the statistical norm: differences in communication, regulation, and sensory processing that shape how we think, feel, and relate. It recognizes functional differences that can limit what we can do alone, but it often stops there, treating those limits as defects to be fixed. That’s where the harm begins.

The social model of disability steps in to ask: limited by what, and by whom? It shifts focus from individual impairment to collective inaccessibility. It shows how noise, lighting, bureaucracy, and bias disable us more than our neurology ever could. When workplaces equate eye contact with competence or small talk with teamwork, that’s the social model in action. It names the ways culture manufactures barriers and then blames our bodies for tripping over them.

Both models are true. Autism is medical because our brains process the world differently. It is social because the world refuses to process us back. We are disabled both by neurology and by systems that refuse to adapt.

The problem isn’t that we need support; it’s that support is treated as charity instead of infrastructure. The social model of disability in autism isn’t theory, it’s daily life under fluorescent lights, rigid routines, and rules written without us in mind.

The Eugenic Roots of Denial

When someone says, “I’m autistic, but not disabled,” they are unknowingly quoting a man who decided which autistic children deserved to live. Hans Asperger, yes, the one whose name still lingers in diagnostic language collaborated with the Nazi regime to sort children into two categories: “useful” and “unworthy.” The ones who could perform near-normality were spared. The others were sent to die.

That hierarchy didn’t vanish with the war. It seeped into clinical frameworks, workplaces, and online spaces where people still measure worth by how closely they resemble the non-autistic ideal. This is the legacy of eugenics and autism ableism, the illusion that success, speech, or self-sufficiency make someone less disabled and therefore more deserving.

When you distance yourself from disability, you inherit that hierarchy. You echo a system built to rank human value by proximity to power, whiteness, and compliance. The hierarchy you’re upholding was designed to decide which of us deserved to live. Every time we glorify masking, or praise autistic people who “don’t seem autistic,” we reinforce the same sorting mechanism, one that keeps the world comfortable while it kills our kin.

True liberation begins when we stop repeating the language of survival as aspiration. The goal isn’t to pass; it’s to live without needing to.

Race, Privilege, and Structural Disablement

When white people say “I’m autistic,” the response is usually a soft exhale. “That explains so much,” someone says, with a smile. Their quirks are endearing, their meltdowns reframed as sensitivity, their directness praised as refreshing honesty. They’re offered patience, support, and the benefit of the doubt.

When Black people say “I’m autistic,” the reaction curdles. “Are you sure?” “You don’t look autistic.” “Maybe you’re just anxious.” What lands as curiosity for one group becomes interrogation for another. The same traits, directness, stimming, monotone speech are misread as defiance, aggression, or lack of respect. The same meltdown that elicits empathy in a white body becomes a police matter in a Black one.

That’s intersectionality in practice: race, autism, and disability colliding in ways that multiply risk instead of diluting it. Research shows Black autistic children are diagnosed, on average, three years later than white autistic children. Black autistic women often spend a decade fighting disbelief before their experiences are recognized as neurological rather than behavioral. That delay isn’t accidental, it’s structural disablement. It is what happens when racism, sexism, and ableism overlap and reinforce each other.

Intersectionality in race, autism, and disability exposes how diagnosis, access, and survival are rationed by privilege. Black autistic women face diagnostic bias at every stage: our intellect is used to dismiss us, our composure mistaken for capacity, our distress reframed as attitude. Systems built to “help” us still rely on white, male, verbal templates of autism that erase our existence before we even arrive.

To talk about autism without talking about race is to pretend the playing field exists. It doesn’t. The social model of disability can’t be complete without accounting for the structural racism that shapes whose pain is believed, whose meltdowns are forgiven, and whose lives are interrupted by force. Until we name this, accessibility will remain selective, and inclusion will continue to center those already protected by whiteness.

Why Intelligence ≠ Invisibility

Intelligence and disability have always coexisted. The idea that they can’t is one of white supremacy’s quietest lies. It insists that intellect belongs to the able-bodied, to the verbal, to the formally educated. It worships output and performance, pretending that articulation equals worth.

Autistic people have always disrupted that equation. Our intelligence shows up in pattern recognition, memory, sensory attunement, creative systems-thinking, forms that colonial and capitalist frameworks never learned to measure. Yet the myth persists that being intelligent cancels out being disabled. That lie birthed the labels “high-functioning” and “low-functioning,” both designed to rank us by how digestible we are to neurotypical comfort.

The concept of “high-functioning autism” isn’t a compliment; it’s a containment strategy. It’s a way to applaud productivity while ignoring exhaustion. It’s how workplaces exploit autistic brilliance while refusing to accommodate autistic bodies. It’s how schools reward compliance while punishing difference.

Autistic intelligence and disability coexist because they were never opposites to begin with. Our intellect doesn’t erase our needs; it illuminates them. It’s what helps us navigate a world that misreads us at every turn. But until intelligence is decoupled from able-bodied norms, smart autistic people will keep being treated as exceptions, not evidence.

The myth of meritocracy tells us that if we’re clever enough, composed enough, articulate enough, we can outrun disablement. We can’t. We were never meant to. The goal isn’t to prove we’re capable despite being disabled. It’s to live fully because we are.

White supremacy created the false binary between intellect and disability to preserve its own myth of superiority. The Enlightenment ideal of “reason” was built on exclusion, only certain minds were deemed rational, civilized, or fully human.

Everyone else—Black, disabled, Indigenous, neurodivergent—was positioned as evidence of deficiency. Intelligence became a tool of hierarchy, not a measure of capacity.

That legacy still shapes how we talk about autism today. When people insist that intelligence and disability can’t coexist, they’re repeating a colonial framework that treats cognition as a purity test. “High-functioning” becomes shorthand for “closer to whiteness.” “Severe” becomes code for “inconvenient.” These hierarchies aren’t medical truths; they’re political decisions about whose minds deserve patience, pay, and protection.

Autistic intelligence challenges that structure. Our pattern recognition, sensory precision, and lateral thinking expose how narrow the Western definition of intellect has always been. Many of us build systems, languages, and art that exist outside the sanctioned metrics of genius. The issue isn’t that autistic people lack intelligence, it’s that our intelligence refuses to perform submission.

Reclaiming the coexistence of intellect and disability dismantles the idea that value must look academic, verbal, or palatable. It frees intelligence from whiteness, from capitalism, from performance. And it restores it to what it always was in our ancestral systems: a collective trait, measured in how well a community remembers, adapts, and survives together.

Claiming Disabled Identity as Liberation

Owning disabled identity is not defeat. It is reclamation.

It is the moment you stop performing for systems designed to misunderstand you. When I began saying “I’m autistic and disabled,” something shifted. I stopped apologizing for my limits and started protecting my capacity. I stopped pretending my energy was endless and started recognizing it as finite, sacred, and worth conserving.

For autistic people, disabled self-acceptance is a form of survival. It redefines competence through accuracy, not appearance. It says, I am disabled by design flaws in the environment, not by flaws in myself. The social model of disability teaches us that difference isn’t tragedy. It’s data. Every meltdown, shutdown, or burnout is a report from the body about what’s intolerable. Every request for accommodation is a reminder that access isn’t luxury—it’s baseline.

Disabled identity also creates community. Once you stop pretending you don’t need help, you start noticing how many of us were pretending the same thing. Solidarity becomes possible when shame is removed from the equation. You stop competing to appear functional and start connecting through shared truth.

Liberation begins with language. When you name yourself disabled, you remove the power of those who weaponize the term against you. You make room for justice work that includes you, not in theory but in practice. The neurodiversity paradigm was never about romanticizing difference; it was about protecting it. Claiming disability isn’t about limitation, it’s about accuracy. The kind that builds movements, not myths.

The Cost of Distancing

“When you deny your disability, you become the excuse to deny support to everyone who can’t mask as well as you.”

That isn’t poetry. It’s policy. Ableism inside the autism community doesn’t always come from outsiders—it’s often replicated by those trying hardest to prove they don’t belong among the “severe.”

When someone insists, “I’m autistic but not disabled,” institutions listen. Governments, schools, and employers cite those narratives to justify cutting services, narrowing eligibility, and demanding proof of suffering before support.

What looks like a personal preference—refusing the label “disabled”—becomes a collective wound. It reinforces the hierarchy that autistic people were sorted into generations ago: productive versus dependent, articulate versus silent, employable versus expendable. These categories are eugenic in origin, and yet we’ve internalized them as self-esteem strategies. We post about resilience while others are fighting for food assistance, housing, and care hours. We celebrate visibility while erasing those whose survival depends on being believed.

Distancing from disability might feel like protection, but it’s participation in a system that thrives on our division. It turns self-preservation into compliance. Every time we rebrand disability as “neurodivergence” to make it sound softer, more marketable, or less threatening, we strengthen the same ableist architecture that punishes people who can’t perform palatability.

Solidarity requires that we stop mistaking proximity to privilege for progress. Pride without collective responsibility is public relations, not liberation. We don’t need to become more “functional.” We need a society that stops confusing compliance with humanity.

Owning Disabled Identity as Liberation

Owning disabled identity is an act of refusal—refusal to be categorized, minimized, or erased. It’s saying: I’m autistic and disabled. Full stop. No disclaimers, no euphemisms, no escape routes back into normalcy. That sentence alone is revolutionary in a world still allergic to truth.

Accommodations are access. They’re not special treatment, pity, or privilege. They are the structural acknowledgment that different bodies require different tools to thrive. The ramp isn’t the problem—the stairs are. The same applies to quiet rooms, flexible deadlines, or sensory adjustments. These are not indulgences; they’re equalizers.

Autistic self-acceptance and liberation begin where hierarchy ends. When we stop measuring worth by how indistinguishable we are from neurotypicals, we reclaim energy for building systems that sustain us. We stop chasing validation and start creating infrastructure.

To reclaim disability is to choose solidarity over optics. It’s recognizing that liberation doesn’t arrive through individual adaptation—it arrives through collective redesign. Disability is not the end of pride; it’s the beginning of honesty.

We are not failed versions of normal. We are proof that normal was never the goal.

Introspect on your own journey of internalised ableism

If you flinched reading this, sit with it. That tension in your chest isn’t accusation—it’s recognition.

Ask yourself who benefits from your distance. Who gains when you rush to clarify that you’re “not that kind of autistic”? Who stays comfortable when you downplay the exhaustion, the masking, the sensory pain?

Real pride doesn’t come from being the acceptable version of autistic. It comes from dismantling the system that made disability shameful in the first place. Pride that relies on separation isn’t pride—it’s survival in disguise. And survival isn’t enough anymore.

The world has no shortage of people pretending we’re fine. What it needs is truth. The kind that unmasks, disrupts, and refuses to apologize for existing outside a hierarchy built on our exclusion.

So take this as a challenge, not a comfort. Examine the parts of you that still crave distance from disability, the parts that want to be believed without being associated with the word “disabled.” Then decide what kind of community you want to help build: one that performs belonging or one that practices it.

Now ….

Comment which part challenged you most and share it with someone still saying, “I’m autistic, not disabled.” Because every share, every conversation, every moment of discomfort plants a seed. And some truths deserve to grow where silence once stood.

If this resonates, share it with someone who needs it and consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing. Every share helps, your support sustains the work.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9923617/black-disabled-artist-cerebral-palsy-lindsay-adams-interview

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social

Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

When Your Inner Child Drives the Car

Survivors of trauma often ask, ‘Why is this space unsafe?’ But the real question shufts during healing to, ‘Why am I outsourcing my healing to spaces I haven’t vetted?’ Until we confront that, our inner child will keep driving our adult life straight back into old wounds.

Because you know what’s dangerous? Knowing you have trauma and triggers and then proceeding to outsource your healing to strangers you never vet.

That’s your inner child at the wheel.

Children can’t tell who’s safe; that’s why communities care for them. But when an adult lets that child drive their life, they’ll replay childhood wounds with lovers, friends, workplaces, even strangers — then wonder why the spaces they seek out aren’t safe.

Because those spaces mirror the ones your inner child knows. Unsafe. Familiar. Predictable. You’ve grown in body but not in self-leadership. When triggered, you regress to the age your trauma began — 6, 12, 16 — and your reactions reflect it.

A child can always demand protection. A child can split people into “good” or “bad,” “safe” or “unsafe.” But an adult cannot keep doing that and call it growth. Healing requires nuance — the ability to see that love and harm can coexist, that boundaries aren’t rejection, that accountability isn’t cruelty.

If your inner child is still driving, every relationship becomes a reenactment. Every boundary feels like abandonment. Every calm voice feels like distance. And so you keep crashing into the same patterns, calling it fate, when really it’s familiarity.

Your inner child doesn’t need to be exiled but they can’t drive. You, the adult, have to take the wheel.

You become the caregiver they never had — the one who says, “I see what you’re afraid of. But we don’t live there anymore.”

Until that happens, you’ll keep confusing danger for destiny, and mistaking retraumatization for connection.

The Danger of Outsourcing Healing

When you hand your unhealed self to others, you mistake familiarity for safety and replay every wound that was never named.

There’s an instinct many trauma survivors share a quiet, desperate hope that someone else will finally do it right. That a lover, a mentor, a friend, or even a stranger online will care for the parts your caregivers couldn’t. It feels like healing, but it’s reenactment.

Because when you haven’t learned to recognize safety, you chase familiarity instead. You walk into spaces that remind you of the ones that hurt you and call it “home.”

You seek intensity because calm feels foreign. You confuse attention with care. You interpret boundaries as rejection.

This is what happens when the unhealed parts of you make the introductions, they don’t choose what’s good for you, they choose what feels like the past.

Every time you outsource your healing, you hand the steering wheel back to the version of you that didn’t know better and depended on caregivvers to guide them and you forget you are that caregiver now. That version isn’t evil; they’re just scared. But fear shouldn’t drive your relationships, your community, or your politics.

The work is learning to vet the spaces you enter.

To pause before you share your story.

To ask: Is this person capable of holding what I carry?

Because if the answer is no and you hand them your healing anyway the pain that follows isn’t new. It’s the echo of an old wound you still haven’t learned to guard.

Unsafe Spaces Feel Familiar, Not Safe

Adults raised in chaos often seek it again, calling it connection. The nervous system mistakes survival for belonging.

When your earliest memories of love were laced with volatility, your body learns to read instability as intimacy.

You call the adrenaline “chemistry.” You call anxiety “attachment.” You call the constant scanning for danger “connection.”

That’s how trauma tricks you, it convinces you that safety is dull, that calm means disinterest, that people who don’t need saving simply don’t care. So you return, over and over, to the same emotional landscapes that once hurt you, mistaking their familiarity for warmth.

It’s not conscious. It’s patterned.

The body remembers what the mind tries to outgrow.

So you recreate the chaos you survived, not because you want it, but because your nervous system doesn’t yet recognize peace as safe.

Healing starts when you stop calling the storm home.

When you learn to tell the difference between comfortable and consistent, between soothing and numbing.

You cannot heal in the same frequency that broke you and you cannot call harm “belonging” just because it feels known.

This pattern is well-documented in trauma bonding and complex PTSD research: the body confuses intensity with intimacy. Online, this plays out as people repeatedly entering communities that echo old hierarchies, mistaking visibility for belonging.

Practical tip: Audit the spaces you call “safe.” Are you being seen, or are you being used? Healing begins when you choose consistency over chemistry.

Emotional Displacement Isn’t Dialogue

When discomfort meets accountability, many respond by offloading instead of reflecting. That isn’t vulnerability, it’s avoidance.

I see this pattern constantly online: people who grew up in neglectful or abusive environments move through life convinced they’re perpetual victims, even when they cause harm.

They mistake unloading and infodumping for honesty and emotional flooding for depth. My neirodivergents this one if for us and its also because of the data on the amount of harm and trauma it takes to create some of the neurodivergences under the umbrella.

Remember that all humans are capable of harm. No one is a permanent victim. The difference lies in what happens next, whether you repair or retreat. And your background and upbringing can impact how you repair or wont.

When that inner work remains undone, and whiteness cushions the gap, people start outsourcing their pain to those they perceive as endlessly patient often Black women.

You mistake access for entitlement. You confuse our clarity for cruelty. You expect comfort where accountability belongs.

But strangers online, especially those you harm, don’t owe you comfort or containment. I personally must make everyone aware that I was not socialized on Black soil, on a Black continent by Black community guardians with roots thhat span 800 plus years to grow up and to soothe oppressive behavior or manage fragility people pass off as dialogue. That work may belong to your lineage, your peers, your therapist, not to those of us naming and dismantling harm.

This is the digital version of reenactment: people hand strangers their unresolved pain and call it dialogue. In trauma response terms, it’s emotional flooding a defense against introspection.

Practical tip: Before posting, commenting, or DMing, pause. Ask, “Am I seeking conversation or containment?” If you want to process, take it to therapy, not a comment section. Accountability and vulnerability can coexist, but not when one replaces the other.

If a critique makes you uncomfortable and you turn that discomfort into attack or self-pity, that’s not conversation, it’s displacement.

You’re not seeking understanding; you’re seeking a place to put your guilt.

If you’re triggered, pause. Reflect. Take it elsewhere, to community, to introspection, to care that you’ve earned.

When Whiteness Cushions the Wound

Whiteness softens consequence. It teaches extraction without reciprocity, turning “safe space” into a site of emotional labor for Black women.

It allows adults to remain emotionally underdeveloped while expecting the grace reserved for children whilst wielding authority when it desires. It calls this fragility “sensitivity,” “confusion,” or “good intentions.” But what it really protects is the ability to cause harm without repair.

So people enter spaces built by Black women, queer people, and other marginalized communities not to contribute, but to be comforted. They come seeking warmth, not accountability. And when that warmth stops performing, they call it hostility.

Whiteness trains its beneficiaries to see care as their right and critique as cruelty. That’s how harm repeats under the language of safety.

In childhood, that reflex was survival for all children, you didn’t know who was safe. But adulthood demands discernment.

You now have power, access, and agency. When you move through spaces extracting care while offering nothing back, that isn’t need, it’s harm.

Grace belongs to children. Accountability belongs to adults.

And if you hold privilege, you don’t get to weaponize innocence to escape consequence.

The Child in the Adult Body

A child is allowed to demand safety. An adult who never learns to regulate becomes dangerous while expecting the same grace.

Many grow up in body but not in self-leadership. Their unhealed inner child still runs the show, seeking comfort, control, or validation from whoever resembles the caregivers who failed them. Every disappointment feels like abandonment, every boundary like betrayal.

But they forget adults are not meant to be endlessly soothed; they are meant to be self-aware. When the inner child remains unintegrated, it mistakes accountability for attack and uses pain as power.

This is how harm replicates itself, when wounded adults move through the world insisting on being treated like children while wielding adult impact. They cry for protection while others clean up the wreckage they cause.

Emotionally, regression is the nervous system’s way of protecting itself. When triggered, people literally revert to the age their trauma occurred.

Practical tip: If you feel that drop in age anger, panic, shame ground before reacting. Name your present age out loud. Remind your body it survived. Then choose the adult response the child never could.

Safety can be nurtured, but it can’t be demanded at the expense of others.

Healing begins when the adult learns to parent the child within, not unleash them on everyone else.

You are now the adult your inner child needed.

Accountability Is Not Abuse

Naming harm is not hostility. It’s repair work—but only for those willing to grow past self-protection.

Why am I writing this today?Because I keep encountering full-grown adults with big bodies and unclaimed inner children—taking my structural critiques, personalizing them, and then demanding I soothe their discomfort.

They hand me the blueprint of their unprocessed trauma, just as they likely do to anyone when dysregulated. And when I show them that I don’t center their emotions, they crumble—then crumble further when they realize I’m not the Black body they can punish or emotionally extract from.

Their entitlement to empathy ends where their harm begins.

Too many people mistake accountability for attack because they’ve never experienced correction without shame. When you grow up associating confrontation with danger, truth feels like punishment. So instead of listening, you defend. Instead of repairing, you retreat.

But accountability asks: What impact did my actions have, and what will I do differently now? It’s the work that transforms awareness into change.

Those who weaponize their fragility to avoid this process don’t fear harm they fear reflection. Because reflection demands they meet the parts of themselves they’ve hidden behind good intentions.

Studies in restorative justice and somatic therapy show that shame blocks repair, while accountability restores agency. Growth happens when the prefrontal cortex stays online long enough to process feedback without collapse.

Practical tip: When someone names harm, breathe before defending. Your nervous system is reacting to threat, not truth. Repair begins where defensiveness ends.

Growth doesn’t happen in comfort. Accountability isn’t abuse. It’s what love looks like when it matures.

Online and offline, healing isn’t about perfection, it’s about regulation. Reflection keeps the adult at the wheel; reaction hands the keys back to the child.

Before you type, speak, or act, pause long enough to ask: “Who’s driving right now my wound or my wisdom?”

If this resonates, share it with someone who needs it and consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing. Every share helps, your support sustains the work.

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social

Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

When Equality Is a Myth Sweden’s Disability Laws Leave Autistic and Disabled People to Collapse

When we pass someone sleeping rough or hear of a person in crisis lashing out in public, the easy story is to blame the individual. But behind every autistic or disabled person who ends up homeless, every person with mental illness who spirals until they are a danger to themselves or others, there is another story. A story of systems that promised protection and dignity and then failed.

Sweden sells itself as a society of equality. They also heavily rely on this image and the Pr it gives them and positioning globally. The image is polished, repeated in global media, celebrated in diplomatic halls. But the reality is different. Autistic and disabled people are routinely abandoned by the very structures meant to safeguard them. The collapse we witness on the street, or in the news, is not personal weakness. It is the direct result of bureaucratic neglect, inaccessible processes, and decisions made by officials who choose budgets and convenience over human lives.

Behind the equality myth is a brutal truth: under SoL (Socialtjänstlagen) and LSS (Law on Support & Service for Persons with Disabilities), municipalities delay, deflect, and deny until people collapse. What exists on paper as protection becomes eviction notices, hunger, burnout, and despair. For racialised autistic and disabled people especially, the system is not just broken, it is weaponized against us.

On Paper vs Reality How Sweden Markets Equality While Disabled People Are Left to Fail

Sweden presents itself to the world as the land of equality and inclusion. The image is rehearsed: glossy brochures, diplomatic speeches, NGO reports that repeat the story of a society built on fairness. On paper, that story looks convincing.

Under SoL, municipalities are required to secure a reasonable standard of living and prevent homelessness. Under LSS, people with significant and lasting disabilities are guaranteed good living conditions and the ability to participate fully in society. These laws are supposed to function as safeguards, ensuring that autistic and disabled people are not left behind.

But lived reality tells another story. Instead of stabilizing lives, the very systems designed to protect us often become another form of trauma. Applications are met with shifting demands, endless delays, and inaccessible procedures that exhaust people into collapse. What should be protection becomes punishment.

These failures are not hidden. The EU has flagged Sweden repeatedly for accessibility gaps. The UN CRPD Committee has condemned the country for unlawful delays and systemic discrimination.

Yet inside Sweden, the façade of equality is maintained. The myth persists because the global image matters more than the lives of the people who live under these laws.

And when anti-Blackness intersects with disability, the harm is compounded. Denial is not only about ability but about race. Disabled people are not treated as citizens with rights; they are treated as burdens to be managed, questioned, and often discarded.

Five Months of Social Services Bureaucratic Neglect in Hässelby-Vällingby

In May 2025, the municipality of Hässelby-Vällingby received notice of a growing rent debt for an autistic applicant with moderate needs who has been navigating trauma for more than a year. The law is clear: under SoL, municipalities must act to prevent eviction. What followed was not help but 116 days of neglect that pushed a disabled person closer to homelessness.

For another five months documents were submitted, bank statements, medical certificates, full financial records, yet the municipality claimed they were missing. Four physicians confirmed long-term disabilities, including autism, ADHD, PTSD, and agoraphobia. Their assessments were dismissed in favor of invented barriers. Even the landlord, facing an eviction deadline, was left uninformed for months. When the municipality’s own eviction-prevention unit finally reached out in September, the debt had already escalated.

The treatment grew more demeaning. At one point, the applicant was told to prove eligibility by filming inside their bedroom during a video call. A request for digital communication, supported by medical certificates that documented intermittent speech and trauma from direct encounters with authorities was recast as a burden, as if accessibility were a favor instead of a legal right.

Emails later revealed that the very documents accused of being missing had been sitting in the municipality’s inbox all along. Instead of acknowledging the mistake, caseworkers shifted blame: branding the applicant “difficult to communicate with” and closing the case. When the applicant raised the possibility of reporting these failures to oversight bodies, the response was not accountability but threats, warnings about otillåten påverkan, undue influence, as if exercising a legal right to escalate systemic failures were an abuse of power by the applicant.

This is a familiar tactic in Swedish social services. When errors are exposed, attention is diverted to the supposed flaws of the applicant. Disabled people are recast as the problem. Gaslighting replaces accountability. And for those already carrying trauma, the harm compounds until collapse feels inevitable.

The result was predictable. The rent debt grew month by month, not because the applicant failed to act, but because the municipality chose not to. Instead of preventing eviction, the system manufactured it.

This was not an individual error. It was a method a systemic choreography of delay, denial, and blame that punishes disabled people for existing.

The Human Consequences of Swedish Municipal Failures

Why Bureaucratic Delay Becomes Eviction, Burnout, and Retraumatization

When a municipality fails to act, it is never just paperwork. It is a life unraveling in real time.

Every unanswered email, every lost document, every arbitrary requirement lands on the body of the person waiting. Disabled people do not live in a vacuum where delays are neutral. The cost is immediate: burnout and health collapse as energy is drained not by living but by chasing forms and re-explaining diagnoses; retraumatization for survivors of violence and mental illness who must prove themselves again to caseworkers who do not even read medical certificates; isolation when hours of support are denied or cut, leaving people trapped in their homes, cut off from community; and the sharpest risk of all, eviction, when municipalities wait until Kronofogden intervenes.

Then comes the cruelty of the language. Decision letters claim that applicants “failed to plan their economy” or “did not cooperate,” as if the collapse of an entire safety net can be reduced to one person’s budgeting. Some even point to the purchase of a skincare product, as though survival cannot include moments of sensory relief or hydration. This after months of submitting every document, attending every meeting, complying with every demand.

For autistic and disabled people, the system does not simply fail to support. It turns hostile. It punishes the very strategies people use to survive. It shifts blame for institutional errors onto those already carrying the weight of survival.

This is what systemic harm looks like. Not one mistake, but a chain of evasions that leave people poorer, sicker, and closer to collapse.

Behind every policy failure is a person who cannot simply “wait out” bureaucratic delay. For autistic and disabled people, these failures are daily survival risks. Eviction notices. Burnout so complete that even eating becomes difficult. Psychiatric retraumatization when medical evidence is ignored by administrators with no clinical expertise. Isolation deepened by being told again and again that you “did not cooperate,” even when you did everything asked.

Even the state admits the severity. In denial letters, municipalities sometimes acknowledge that eviction will have “serious social consequences.” They write this in the same breath as they deny support.

That is not protection. It is calculated abandonment.

For racialised disabled people, the punishment cuts sharper. Anti-Blackness merges with ableism, twisting ordinary survival into suspicion. A bank transaction becomes evidence of irresponsibility. Compliance is reframed as defiance. Needs are recast as demands. These are not misunderstandings. They are patterns of discrimination, enacted under the cover of procedure.

Sweden’s disability system cannot be judged by its laws alone. It must be judged by its outcomes. And the outcomes are devastating: homes lost, health broken, lives cut short.

The Tactics How Bureaucracy Becomes a Weapon

How Municipalities Weaponize Bureaucracy Against Disabled People

Municipalities rarely deny disability rights outright. Instead, they construct a maze. The path appears procedural, but every turn is designed to delay, exhaust, and redirect until the applicant either collapses or disappears from the system.

Delay is the first tactic. Cases sit untouched for months while rent arrears grow and health deteriorates. The silent calculation is that an eviction notice will remove the problem, that a family member will step in, or that the applicant will give up altogether.

When the pressure builds, the goalposts shift. The moment one demand is met, another appears. New bank statements are requested again. Company liquidation is demanded even when it has no bearing on eligibility. In-person visits are scheduled despite medical certificates clearly stating agoraphobia. Each new demand resets the clock, buying more time for inaction.

False requirements follow. Applicants are told to provide documents or proofs the law does not require at all — liquidation within days, physical attendance when digital verification already exists, layers of evidence that stretch far beyond what SoL or LSS demand.

And when these tactics falter, blame is redirected. Applicants are accused of being uncooperative, of poor planning, of refusing to adapt — even when every meeting has been attended, every document submitted, every condition met. Responsibility for municipal failures is shifted back onto the disabled person.

Above all, mistakes are shielded. Cases are passed between units in an endless relay where no one takes ownership. Errors are buried in the shuffle, accountability diluted until it disappears.

These tactics are not isolated missteps. They form a pattern. The Parliamentary Ombudsman has documented them. The National Audit Office has flagged them. The UN CRPD Committee has condemned them. Yet they continue because they allow municipalities to maintain the appearance of process while avoiding the substance of obligation.

The outcome is clear. Disability law is inverted. SoL and LSS, written to guarantee protection and participation, become instruments of exclusion. Rights that exist on paper are kept out of reach in practice, blocked not by overt denial but by bureaucratic evasion.

Law vs Reality What Sweden Promises and What Disabled People Face

What Sweden Promises in SoL, LSS, and CRPD vs What People Face

On paper, Sweden has one of the strongest disability rights frameworks in Europe. Three pillars hold it up. SoL, the Social Services Act, obliges municipalities to secure a reasonable standard of living and prevent homelessness. LSS, the Disability Services Act, guarantees good living conditions and real participation for people with significant and lasting disabilities, including autism. And the CRPD, ratified in 2008, commits Sweden to non-discrimination, accessibility, and effective remedies.

Add to this the EU Disability Strategy, with monitoring mechanisms that have flagged Sweden repeatedly for unlawful delays and systemic barriers. The architecture appears solid. It gives the impression of a country committed to equality.

But the reality is different.

Unlawful delays stretch for months even when eviction is imminent, ignoring SoL’s requirement to act urgently. Denials arrive not because needs are absent, but because administrators fixate on irrelevant details — a small purchase in a bank statement, a speculative suspicion of hidden income. Medical certificates from multiple physicians are sidelined in favor of guesswork by officials with no clinical expertise. And when the applicant is racialised or autistic, the scrutiny grows harsher, the tone sharper, the accusations of “not cooperating” faster.

This is not a misunderstanding. It is a systemic gap between law and life. It allows Sweden to sign reports to the UN affirming its commitment to equality while constructing daily barriers that ensure those rights never materialize on the ground.

The contradiction is stark. Internationally, Sweden markets itself as a leader in inclusion. Domestically, its municipalities enforce exclusion through delay and disbelief. Equality is promised in treaties and legislation, yet denied in everyday practice.

The Human Consequences Behind the Equality Myth

When Promises Collapse Into Outcomes of Homelessness and Harm

Laws cannot be lived on. Behind every legal promise is a person who cannot wait out bureaucracy. Disabled people experience the failures of SoL and LSS not as abstract violations but as daily crises.

When municipalities delay rent support, eviction follows. The purpose of SoL is to prevent homelessness, yet people are routinely pushed into it. When demands for paperwork never end, autistic people already battling executive dysfunction collapse under the weight of compliance. When medical certificates are dismissed, survivors of PTSD and anxiety are retraumatized by administrators who have no clinical training yet claim the authority to overrule physicians.

These are not side effects of a strained system. They are the outcomes it produces.

Even the state admits the consequences. In denial letters, municipalities sometimes concede that eviction will have “serious social consequences.” They write this acknowledgement in the same breath as they refuse support. That is not protection. It is abandonment by design.

For racialised disabled people, the cruelty is sharper. Anti-Blackness merges with ableism, casting ordinary survival as suspicion. A bank withdrawal becomes proof of irresponsibility. Compliance is reframed as defiance. Needs are twisted into demands. These are not misunderstandings, they are patterns of discrimination written into daily practice.

This is why Sweden’s disability system cannot be judged by its legal framework. It must be judged by its outcomes. And the outcomes are devastating: homes lost, health destroyed, lives cut short.

The question is no longer whether the system is failing. It is failing in plain sight. The question now is what must be done — immediately — to ensure that the rights guaranteed under SoL and LSS are more than words on paper.

What Needs to Change Right Now

How Leaders Can Act Without Shame and Uphold Disability Rights

Municipalities cannot admit that their systems have collapsed without undermining the equality myth Sweden sells to the world. Caseworkers cannot confess mistakes without risking their jobs. So responsibility is pushed back onto the disabled person, reframed as “difficult,” “uncooperative,” or “irresponsible.” That is how institutions protect themselves while people are left to collapse.

The truth is that frontline staff are not villains in this story. They are caught inside a machine that fails them as much as it fails us. They carry impossible caseloads, are pressed to enforce laws without training in disability or neurodivergence, and are trapped in underfunded systems where failure is inevitable. What looks like individual neglect is in fact structural design.

That is why the blame must be placed where it belongs: on government pressure, chronic underfunding, and the refusal to invest in accessible, competent social services.

The solutions are not complicated.

Accessible communication must be recognized as a right, not treated as a concession. SoL and LSS obligations must be applied urgently and consistently, especially in eviction cases where the law is clear. And leadership must frame compliance not as an admission of failure but as an act of integrity under pressure — proof that municipalities can still act in line with the values Sweden claims to uphold.

Other municipalities, lawyers, and EU monitoring bodies have already documented the same failures. This is not one case. It is a national problem. Acting now does not expose one office to shame. It shows that Sweden is capable of living up to the laws it has already written.

The window for denial has closed. What remains is the choice: continue to hide behind procedure, or step forward and fulfill the commitments that have been promised for decades.

Call to Action Naming the Tactics and Demanding Accountability

Naming the Tactics and Demanding Accountability From Sweden’s System

What we are witnessing in Sweden is not a string of unfortunate mistakes. It is a pattern. The same tactics appear across municipalities: cases dragged out until eviction becomes inevitable, requirements shifted just as old ones are met, blame pushed onto applicants even when evidence is overwhelming, speculation treated as fact, discrimination recast as misunderstanding. Each tactic has one effect: responsibility is shifted from the state onto the disabled person, leaving us to pay with our health, our homes, and our dignity.

This is not protection. It is systemic harm disguised as process.

Sweden has signed the UN CRPD, bound itself to the EU Disability Strategy, and enshrined protections in SoL and LSS. On paper, the rights are there. In practice, they collapse into bureaucratic cruelty and institutional indifference.

That is why I am gathering evidence — audio, video, emails, testimonies — to show these failures in undeniable detail. This material will be published here, on Substack, and submitted to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO). But documentation alone is not enough.

If you have been impacted by SoL or LSS failures by delays, denials, shifting demands, or discriminatory treatment, your voice matters. Share your story. Add it to the collective record. Because abuse thrives in silence, and silence is what keeps these systems intact.

Naming the tactics breaks their power. Telling the truth out loud is the first step toward accountability.

Conclusion Why I Refuse to Stay Silent

I am not writing this from the sidelines. I am living it and I am watching countless others live it too.

For more than a decade, my work has exposed systemic harm and demanded accountability. I have written books, spoken across institutions, and stood in public arenas where silence was expected. I have been honored with awards, including the Raoul Wallenberg Prize and the Stockholm Region Sustainability Award. But those recognitions mean little if I do not speak when it matters most.

This exposé is part of that same commitment: to reveal what is hidden, to document what institutions deny, and to amplify the voices of those whom systems try to erase.

Sweden markets equality to the world. But equality means nothing if autistic people, disabled people, racialised people those already carrying the weight of survival are left to collapse under inaccessible systems and deliberate neglect.

I will not allow these failures to remain behind closed doors. The evidence is here. The testimonies are here. The demand for accountability is here.

The full exposé article will be published on here with audio, video, and official documents. It will also form part of a collective disability rights report to the Parliamentary Ombudsman (JO).

This is more than documentation. It is a call to act. Because justice delayed is justice denied.

If this resonates, share it with someone who needs it and consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing. Every share helps, your support sustains the work.

This essay is accompanied by the work of Bisa Butler, whose textile portraits layer fabric, color, and history into living testimony. I chose Butler’s art because her figures refuse invisibility. Where institutions reduce disabled people to files, her work insists on presence vibrant, complex, undeniable. In a text about systemic erasure, her portraits remind us that dignity is already carried in our bodies, even when states refuse to see it.

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social

Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.