Most of us in the neurodivergent community have heard - or said - the same statement many times: “If you know one neurodivergent person - you know ONE neurodivergent person”. We are not a monolith.
So why in the heck is everyone in my groups responding to my style of scripting when we have autism, ADHD, and AuDHD sharing a room?
I came at these changes from inside my AuDHD brain - the brain that my Dad couldn’t hypnotize because it was too busy analyzing the entire process to disengage enough to go into trance. I’ve written before about watching my hand levitate, having my internal “WHOA! That’s NEAT! How is this happening??”, and my hand, of course, falling back into my lap. So my first approach to this was Trance Practice - getting the brain used to the process so it stopped asking constant questions.
But my Crowd-Sourcing taught me that more was going on than that, so I started making gradual changes and testing new versions until they worked reliably well. Although it’s only in hindsight that I think I’m starting to understand the why and the how.
Many hypnotists use a “Stairway of Relaxation”metaphor for deepening - as do I. But one day someone reached out to me to say she wanted to attend my sessions but she was afraid of stairs. So I decided to offer a choice - a waterway would run alongside of the stairway of relaxation and lead to the same place at the same time, and we would all meet there together (using body-doubling here, which is one reason the group sessions are popular). I call this “parallel imagery”, offering this choice, and I also offer suggestions of choices for the imagery, so people feel free to create whatever they want as opposed to being stuck trying to visualize what they may think I want them to see (this “fear of doing it wrong” will also be addressed in a subsequent article - sorry, but there’s a lot at play here!)
Everyone was very happy with this: Autistic, ADHD and AuDHD. But these are different processing styles so…how?
Again, I must stress that I am just a Certified Hypnotist with AuDHD. I have no special clinical training or scientific knowledge, so I rely on researching what credentialed people say. The following is my understanding from the literature of the 3 processing styles:
Autism: creating systems from elements and very aware of system flaws. Inconsistencies stick out and the brain wants closure.
ADHD: needs to stay interested, makes connections, associative processing
AuDHD: both of the above processing types running at once and often in friction with each other
So here is my theory: the “gaps” - the purposefully vague descriptions of the journey process, along with suggestions to spur creativity - are being interpreted differently by each type of processing, but are working for all of them.
For the autistic system, the gaps and vague descriptions mean there is nothing to verify, no metaphors that miss a step or fail to land that need to be scrutinized and solved. The mind can stop analyzing and relax.
For the ADHD system, these open metaphors invite creativity - not that the autistic minds don’t also become quite creative, because they really do! - but that the ADHD mind can zoom along its branching pathways and have fun with the customization of the metaphor, which entertains it enough to also allow it to relax into the trance state.
For the AuDHD system, both of those readings may be firing at the same time, which may be exactly why it works - the language is suitable for both paths that that mind wants to take and causes neither processing pathway to stumble.
As I have stated before, I am OmniHypnosis trained (the Elman legacy, built upon by Kein), but over the years I have naturally incorporated things from other hypnosis traditions that work for my clients. “Artfully vague” language and transderivational search are derived from Ericksonian hypnosis, with transderivational search being coined for NLP, so it’s not like I’m breaking new hypnotic ground with those approaches. What I am surmising, which I think may be new, is how these approaches work across neurodivergent processing styles and how very useful they become for this community.
So as I changed my language and metaphors in my Crowd-Sourced hypnosis sessions, I gradually landed on a structure that appears to work for everyone. The Stairway and the waterway are presented, along with some possibilities (“conveyances”) that can be used with them. I usually mention escalators, elevators, or “a fluffy cloud” as travel possibilities in the beginning, and mention possibly floating during the descent. (I have had a couple of people who have intense responses to direction, and I will explain how I handle that in yet another article.) I mention the fanciful options to reassure everyone that they can allow their minds to create absolutely anything as a conveyance - and they do indeed!
What began from my awareness in trying to work with my father - that I had a brain that was paying too much attention to process - and for which I created a quick solution, has grown and branched immensely into language intended to relieve possible anticipations, anxieties, and “bumps in the road” for neurodivergent minds before those possibilities occur - allowing my clients to simply relax and take their journeys.
I made a map, and somehow the road is working for almost every neurodivergent traveler.