Core Concepts

30 terms

AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication)

Communication tools and strategies that support or replace speech—from picture cards and gestures to text-to-speech apps and eye-tracking computers. Used by people who find speaking difficult, exhausting, unreliable, or impossible, whether always or sometimes.

Accommodations

Changes to environment, tools, timing, or expectations that remove barriers so people can participate equally. Not special treatment or lowered standards—just different paths to the same destination.

Alexithymia

The inability to identify and describe your own emotions. You feel things intensely but can't name them—like having a complex emotional storm inside but only being able to say "I feel bad." Affects 50-85% of autistic people.

Autistic Burnout

Complete physical, mental, and sensory collapse from the cumulative cost of existing in a neurotypical world. Skills disappear, speech vanishes, and previously automatic tasks become impossible—not tiredness but neurological system failure.

Co-regulation

When one nervous system helps stabilize another through presence and connection. Not talking someone through their emotions—literally sharing your calm until their system remembers how to regulate. Like emotional jumper cables: you can't charge a dead battery by yelling at it, but you can share power from a working one.

Double Empathy Problem

The mutual difficulty autistic and non-autistic people have understanding each other's communication styles and perspectives. Not a one-sided autistic deficit, but a two-way translation problem between different neurological cultures.

Emotional Contagion

Absorbing others’ emotions automatically; can be stronger for autistic and highly sensitive people.

Emotional Dysregulation

Neurological differences in how emotions are experienced, processed, and expressed. Characterized by intense feelings that may seem disproportionate to triggers and difficulty returning to emotional baseline—not a character flaw, but brain-based variation.

Executive Dysfunction

Difficulties with the brain's management system for planning, organizing, initiating, and completing tasks. Like having all the pieces but struggling to assemble them in the right order at the right time.

Hyperactivity

Excessive movement, restlessness, and high energy levels that are developmentally inappropriate and often interfere with daily functioning, commonly associated with ADHD.

Interoception

Your internal body sense—the ability to feel hunger, thirst, heartbeat, temperature, pain, and other signals from inside your body. Many neurodivergent people experience this "eighth sense" differently, making basic needs harder to recognize.

Lived Experience

First-hand knowledge, insights, and wisdom gained through personally navigating life as a neurodivergent person, providing invaluable perspectives that cannot be learned from textbooks or observed from the outside.

Monotropism

The theory that autistic minds naturally focus like a laser on one thing at a time, rather than spreading attention thinly across many things. This intense single-channel processing creates both superpowers (deep expertise) and vulnerabilities (difficulty switching tasks).

Neuroaffirming

Creating spaces, practices, and attitudes that accept and support neurodivergent people as they are, rather than trying to change, fix, or hide their differences.

Neurodivergence-In-Context

The idea that many difficulties arise from inaccessible environments, not deficits in the person.

Neurodivergent

Having a brain that functions differently from society's constructed "typical" standard. Encompasses autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, Tourette's, and other neurological variations that aren't illnesses needing cure but different operating systems deserving respect.

Neurodiversity

The natural variation in human brains and minds; a paradigm that views neurological differences as natural human diversity rather than deficits or disorders.

Neurominority

A distinct population sharing a particular form of neurodivergence, often facing systemic prejudice, discrimination, or pathologization from the neurotypical majority.

Neurotypical

Someone whose brain functions in ways society considers "normal"—no autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or other neurodivergences. Not better or worse, just the statistical majority. Like being right-handed in a right-handed world.

Sensory Avoidance

Reducing or avoiding certain inputs (noise, light, textures, smells) to prevent overload and stay regulated.

Sensory Integration

How the brain combines input from different senses to guide movement, learning, and comfort.

Sensory Overload

When your brain receives more sensory input than it can process—like a computer with too many programs running until it crashes. Lights become painful, sounds pierce your skull, textures feel like sandpaper, and your nervous system screams for escape.

Sensory Seeking

Preferring or seeking extra sensory input (movement, pressure, sound, texture) to feel regulated.

Special Interest

An intense, passionate, and often lifelong fascination with specific topics that brings deep joy, expertise, and meaning to autistic lives. Not just a hobby—a core part of identity and wellbeing.

Spiky Profile

A very uneven pattern of abilities—strong strengths in some areas, significant challenges in others.

Spoon Theory

A metaphor where daily energy is represented as a limited number of spoons. Each activity costs spoons, and when they're gone, you're done—no amount of willpower creates more. Created by Christine Miserandino to explain living with lupus, now universal disability language.