Pathological Normativity Theory; Behind Neurodivergence

“Normal” is one of the most powerful words in mental health, and it might be doing more damage than we admit. I’m putting a full framework on the table: pathological normativity theory, the idea that what we call neurotypical may be less of a biological baseline and more of a culturally conditioned performance standard shaped by a WEIRD society (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). When that standard becomes the measuring stick, neurodivergence gets framed as a defect instead of a signal.

We go deep on chronic stress adaptation and why trauma, ACEs, and socioeconomic pressure can shape nervous systems toward vigilance, pattern detection, emotional intensity, and refusal to comply with meaningless tasks. In that light, traits often associated with ADHD and autism stop being “symptoms to erase” and start looking like survival intelligence. I also unpack why “healthy” often gets confused with “average,” and how that same mistake can quietly define who gets labeled disordered.

From there, the conversation turns to what this reframing does to the DSM, masking, social skills training, and even treatment models that can become assimilation under a nicer name. I’m not arguing against therapy, medication, or accommodations. I’m arguing against the story that you were broken, especially when the system demands obedience, emotional suppression, and commodification of self to keep the machine running.

If this challenges your assumptions, share it with someone who has been told to “just be normal,” and leave a rating or review so more people can find the show. What part of this framework do you agree with, and what part do you push back on?

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Theory

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I am your host, Al Medicine, and in today's podcast, we are gonna be going pretty deep into a theory I have not put out in its full capacity before. I've beat around the bush a lot with this because frankly there wasn't enough science, and I was trying to be, and am still trying to be, a little bit of a neuroscience educator, really a behavioral science educator. I don't give a shit about the neurology. Um I give a shit about the behavior that the neurology causes and whether that behavior is adaptable um or not, whether that behavior is good for our current situation and circumstance, or if it is not. So what I mean is like while I was writing Rethinking Broken, I noticed a lot of trends. Um, trends around chronic stress and things that have components of trauma to them, things that well-established components of trauma, things like uh diagnoses specifically, like borderline personality, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, suicidality, all kinds of stuff. Um after the ACES study with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente in '98, we learned so much. And since then, we've done a we've done so many more ACE studies, follow-up ACE studies, and they were all actually worse than the original, um, as far as like health outcomes and the the amount of trauma that the average person goes through, the average white educated person even goes through in America. The trends that I was noticing had a lot to do with the subjective experience. I was trying to come from this, like from a lived experience perspective, because I'm not a researcher, I'm not a neurobiologist. So I'm trying to understand neurobiology from the lens of you and me, of regular people who live inside this meat machine that has a certain way that it functions biologically, um, a certain way that it's expected to function, and it has like species expected stimuli and all this stuff. But as I was consistently putting myself in the mind frame of if this, then this, with these certain um psychological um well, these developmental windows and psychological framings around certain uh troubling circumstances, I noticed these crazy trends. And I didn't want to put them all in Rethinking Broken because I wanted that to stand on its own and there wasn't enough science. But since then, in like two 2017, there was a really, really phenomenal bit of uh science that was done that actually found a similar um metabolic dysfunction, well, the same path actually. They say that they've found that they found the same path and dysfunction uh across ADHD bipolar and autism spectrum disorder. And it all has to do with this chronic stress adaptation. And I I just built my ADHD masterclass and I'm really proud of it. It's really awesome. I'm scheduling I'm scheduling the video portion of it, and then it will be all ready for everybody else to go through. But in that, I talk about how those of us who are neurodivergent and those of us with ADHD or whichever neurodivergent flavor you are, we're we're told we're divergent. That's the word. And divergence indicates some level of pulling away from a healthy, normal baseline. That is exactly what I want to talk about because I do not believe. In fact, I know that what we are considering a normal baseline is not normal, nor is it healthy. It is actually just the successful colonization of an entire culture's mind. That is what it actually is. So what I'm getting at is essentially, I believe that neurodivergence is not a divergence at all. I believe that what we're we consider neurodivergence is just a normal expression of the biology of the human species developed under stress and under specific types of stress. And I believe that neurotypical is pathological, and I think it's patho pathological on many levels. And so the official theory that I am trying to put forward with this I call pathological normativity. So pathological normativity theory is a new framework for understanding who we really are and why neurotypical might just be the like the most misleading word that we use every single day to describe people. I want to tell you something that I well, it took me 30 years to figure out. I was told that I was disordered. I was told my brain was wrong, it worked wrong. I was told that the way I experienced the world, the intensity, the pattern recognition, the inability to perform small, meaningless tasks, the sensory overwhelm, the refusal to just comply and do what I'm told, was a pathology in need of correction. And I believed it. For decades, I believed it. Then one day, I started asking different questions while writing Rethinking Broken, and they led me to a different framework. Instead of going, what's wrong with me? I was like, wait, hold on. One piece of information broke the wall for me. And that one piece of information was that in biochemistry, in Western medicine, our labs that you get when you get your blood drawn, they're called labs. What we consider healthy, what we consider the healthy range is actually just the average range. We don't know what healthy actually is. We just know what most people are and we call that healthy. And so all of the parameters that we have about what is healthy for a person is based off of just our one culture and just the biology of our sick culture and whatever most people are, if you're not that, then you're wrong. That's essentially what it means. Like, I don't know if you know that, but that that threw me for a loop, man. That really threw me for a loop, realizing that what we assume to be healthy isn't actually healthy at all. We have no which makes sense, there's no way to actually show what is like healthy and say this is healthy for the entire population. Even if we just grabbed and did the labs for the healthiest people, whatever that meant, um, it would still like there wouldn't be enough sample size. It's like it's a whole thing. You can't get to that. So you have to just settle on average. And this is what's happening on a societal level. That broke that broke the wall for me to allow me to like see the crack for when the cracks are where the light gets in, right? And here was my crack. It was, oh my, what we considered healthy is not necessarily healthy, it's just average. And so these are my four pillars for pathological normativity theory. Pillar one is that the neurotypical person is a construct of cultural conditioning, not a biological baseline. Here's the uncomfortable truth that our entire mental health industry is built to avoid. What we call neurotypical is not neutral, it's not healthy or a universal human state. It's not the default human operating system. It's the successful product of intense and lifelong conditioning into a very specific, dominant culture. And that culture actually has a name. In the research world, it's literally called weird. I did a whole episode on weird science. Um, and weird is an acronym here. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. And it turns out that around 80% of all psychological and social research is done on this one population, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. That acronym was coined in 2010 to describe the populations that make up the overwhelming majority of social research, which is a very, very, very narrow slice of humanity that researchers kept mistaking for universal. The problem is that weird populations are actually outliers on like countless psychological measures, from visual perception to moral reasoning to concepts of self. Yet their way of being became the standard against which all humans are judged. What we call neurotypical is the successful internalization of this weird cultural programming. Isn't that it's so good? I love that it's like literally weird cultural programming. It's the product of being raised in a society that prizes individualism over relationship, analytic thinking over holistic, and obedience over authentic response. A neurotypical person is in this framework someone whose innate responses have been successfully suppressed and replaced by a predictable, culturally programmed and culturally beneficial set of behaviors. They are high performers within a very particular system. But performing well inside a system is not the same as being psychologically or socially healthy. We need a more accurate term for this. Instead of neurotypical, I suggest we start using colonizer conditioned. Pillar two. This is the central pillar. The dominant US Western capitalistic weird culture is not just different or flawed, it is literally pathological. And its pathologic its pathologies include obedience over individuality and expression. It punishes critical questioning, it rewards compliance, creating a populace success uh susceptible to manipulation and authority, as we see right now. We see this in how easily populations are led into war, debt, into accepting conditions that degrade human life. Questioning is punished, compliance is rewarded, the mechanism is visible everywhere once you learn to see it. The next is emotional suppression. It demands the silencing of emotional truth in favor of performative stoicism. And it is performative. This leads to the widespread alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe one's own emotions, and a culture of unprocessed trauma that manifests as violence, apathy, and disconnection, frankly. People are taught to cut themselves off from their own interior world and then wonder why they feel so hollow. Men especially, I just did a podcast episode on that. Next is the commodification of self. It conditions people to view themselves as products, as wage earners, as consumers, as assets. Your primary value is your predictable contribution to the economic machine, either as making things or as buying things. This creates an existential dread and a hollow sense of self because you were literally being trained to experience yourself as a tool for someone else's use. Like you're literally being trained to see yourself as a tool for somebody else. Then there is the exploitation of future labor. This is the bottom line as to why it happens this way. Saying that the culture wants very specific things and it wants predictability. That's why it rewards neurotypical, because neurotypical are people who have suppressed their own biological responses and been successfully colonizer-conditioned because they need future labor. The entire economic structure is built on a promise. Like the entire economic structure of the entire world is built on a promise. As a planet, we are$350 trillion in debt because we keep conditioning generation after generation to promise their future labor to a system that was never designed to sustain human life. Our economic system is a pyramid scheme requiring future generations to be just as obediently conditioned to pay for the present's excesses. That's literally how the world and debt works. If you haven't listened to that podcast, go listen to that podcast just to like the world's$350 trillion in debt. To who? Aliens? It's mad. But this is this is a core symptom of a system that has lost all connection to anything remotely resembling sustainability or human life. And these are not bugs. They are the features, they are the features of neurotypical. So for all of us neurodivergent people, all of us not colonizer-conditioned people, we really need to understand that what we're told to do, what we're told to be neurotypical, is really truly pathological because the system itself is pathological. So pillar three is redefining this divergence from a deficit to like a living immunity, from like constitution of like we are we are wrong. Our constitution, our fundamental architecture is somehow wrong and screwy and in need of fixing, and switching that to a view of is the way that we are conditioned useful in this context or not? Like I'm tired of talking about neurodivergence as a form of constitution and that it's some kind of deficit. It is a highly adaptable, like the humans are a highly adaptable animal, and we only adapt to specific contexts. That is the only way that it can be. So for pillar three, if the culture is pathological, then successfully conforming to it is not a sign of health. Becoming neuro more neurotypical or showing up masking and being more neurotypical is not a sign of health. Which, and this is important because it reframes everything that we thought we knew about neurodivergence. The word itself is a problem. Divergent implies deviation from a healthy standard, but if the standard is sick, then the deviation isn't a deficit. The people we currently call neurodivergent are, for a variety of reasons, simply those who didn't successfully absorb the dominant culture's conditioning. We didn't resist as an act, like all of us were children. We were children. We were just being, and the colonizer looked at all of us and said, This one won't take the programming. They're they're deficient. There's something wrong with them. They won't take the programming. Clearly our programming is the best programming. The accurate term is not neurodivergent then. The accurate term is colonizer conditioning resistant. We are colonizer resistant. And why? Typically, because we grew up suffering from the chronic stress that is put on the people who are actually keeping this economic machine running, the slaves who are keeping this economic machine running. That chronic stress at home is a huge factor as to why we are not as easily colonizer conditioned. But we have to understand this resistance correctly. It is both constitutional now and contextual. Constitutional for many of us because the resistance is built in. It's the way our sensory processing now works, the way our pattern-seeking cognition operates, the way our emotional intensity registers the world. This is the part that like was conditioned into us that allowed the colonizer conditioning to not sink in because it was our exposure to chronic stress that had these things burn their way into our neurological hardware. And so the colonizers conditioning just couldn't run their program. And it's contextual because resistance is also shaped by environment. Research increasingly shows that chronic stress in childhood fundamentally alters stress response systems, including the HBA axis, cortisol regulation, children raised in homes with chronic stress, whether from prov from poverty, trauma, or having parents who themselves were colonizer conditioning resistant and thus also oppressed by the system, we developed different neuroendocrine patterns. Our bodies adapt to survive in one environment, and that adaptation makes them receive less receptive. It makes us all less receptive to the conditioning that's attempted elsewhere. So if like if if we have a lot of stress at home and school is less stressful than home, then you're probably going to be conditioned by home rather than school. Which is why we wind up with all this vigilance stuff. So here's what happens. If you're coming from a home with chronic stress, the eight hours of conditioning that they try to do at school simply cannot compete. The intensity of what you're surviving at home has already shaped your nervous system for vigilance, for pattern detection, and for reading threats. Those adaptations, often labeled as attention problems or behavioral issues, are actually the body's wisdom. They were never going to absorb the colonizer's programming because your system was already optimized for something else, surviving at home. This is the key concept in rethinking broken. Chronic stress adaptation is not damage. It is the body's intelligent and fairly predictable response to an environment that demanded protection. And that same adaptation often makes us colonizer conditioning resistant. So we are not resistant because we're broken. We are resistant because we adapted to the truth. We adapted to the threats and to the reality that the colonizers' promises were never ever meant for us. Traits labeled as dysfunctional within the pathological system are in fact crucial intelligences for human thriving. Hyperfocus is deep problem-solving capacity. Heightened sensory awareness is a more complete connection to our reality around us. Rejection of small talk is a preference for authentic, meaningful connection, getting down to what actually matters. Pattern recognition identifies systemic flaws that the conditioned mind is trained to ignore. Emotional intensity is aliveness that refuses to be extinguished, and that is the response under threat to be able to survive the fight flight response or freezer fawn or whatever. That constant vigilance, also a legacy of survival. That vigilance, if you don't know what mood your mom and dad is going to come home in, you have to stay constantly. Vigilant even when they aren't around. You're waiting for them to come home and you're trying to predict what is going to set them off. And so you're constantly looking around your environment and thinking about things and predicting things, trying to find ways to make yourself safe. This vigilance is not a pathology, it is a legacy of surviving chronic stress. And most of that chronic stress is can is created by socioeconomic conditions. So, pillar four, the goal, it's not inclusion, it's cultural transformation. This pillar follows quite logically from the first three. If the culture is pathological, then inclusion into that culture is not a victory. That is not a thing to celebrate. That is not a win. It's assimilation into sickness. Pathological normativity theory rejects the goal of inclusion or accommodation into a pathological system. That would be like asking the healthiest people in a plague city to be more accommodating to the sick. The goal must be, and is for me, to dismantle the pathological aspects of the dominant culture and rebuild it based on the strengths and the needs of those who have been resisting it all along. The goal is to make the culture livable for humans by making the culture less pathological, not by making the colonizer conditioning resistant better at navigating the colonizer's sick pathological system. This is not about flipping the hierarchy either. It's about dissolving that framework entirely. It's about calling it what it is. It's about building a world where no child is told that their native way of being is a disorder, where no child stress adaptations are mistaken for deficits. It's about building a world where colonizer conditioned might finally have the permission to wake up, to feel again, and to reclaim the parts of themselves that they have buried for so long. Because this is also not a dig on neurotypical people. They were successfully conditioned by the dominant culture because the dominant culture provided their family and their socioeconomic group with enough of the stuff that they were able to have a relatively peaceful life at home that allowed them to have their dominant cultural conditioning happen in school and in programs and by parents who totally buy into the system because the system benefits them. And it's not a failure of them, just like it's not really a gold star for us. Like the only reason that we became not neurotypical is because we had more shit to deal with. That's not a gold star. I want to go like, oh, you had a shitty childhood. Here's a gold star. No, fuck all of that. And they don't get a gold star for having it having an easier life at home and being conditioned into this pathological way of existing in the world. So once you hold these four pillars, the framework changes everything. The DSM, which the diagnostic manual, I think we're on five now, it stops being a medical manual and starts being what it actually is, which is just a catalog. It's literally the colonizer's field guide to identifying what and who has been successfully conditioned and who is not. It is not a manual for fighting resistance. It's just taxonomy. It's just taxonomy, people. The DSM, just like if you look at the ADHD stuff, you look at like how you have to get diagnosed, it's a list of questions about do you disrupt stuff? Are do you are you having a hard time being a good, predictable worker? If the answer is yes, then you were pathological, and if the answer is no, then you are healthy. That is what the DSM does. It is a way of naming and classifying those who are conditioning resistant so that we can be managed, medicated, therapized, and suit and smoothed out. They just want to smooth out our edges, or we're gonna bring the whole pyramid scheme card house tumbling down. The social skills training that we get stops helping and starts becoming assimilation training. It's learning to perform the colonizer script to avoid punishment. Masking, when we look at like, because we talk about masking, especially in autism and ADHD and stuff all the time, we talk about masking a lot. Masking stops becoming a coping strategy, and actually it's code switching. And for any people of color who are listening to this, black folks know exactly what code switching is. Asians know exactly what code switching. Everybody except for white people know what code switching is. And masking is code switching under threat. It's passing. It's what colonized people have had to do to survive in the master's house in time and memoriam. It's it's code switching. ABA therapy stops being treatment and starts being conversion therapy. It's not about helping the child, it's about extinguishing native behaviors that the conditioned find unsettling. That's what all of this is. All of this is about extinguishing native behaviors. And I mean native to our biology, native to our existence, native to our way of life. And yes, native like Native Americans, native like they belong to the earth. That's why they're native, they belong to the earth and not to this colonizer system. And it's these it's these people and the things that they find unsettling that rule everything. And they're like, oh, well, I'm uncomfortable, so this needs to be trained out of you and your children. The child the child labeled disordered stops being a problem to fix and starts being the canary in the coal mine. It starts being a human being whose nervous system adapted intelligently to its environment. And the biggest problem is that the environment is caused by socioeconomic stress, which is a systemic problem. And it is exactly our system that has created the socioeconomic problems. So you'll never hear them talk about this because it is our pathological, money-hungry, cancerous pyramid scheme economic system based on capitalism that has created these intenable experiences and this unsustainable way of life. And the poorer you are, the more you know how fucked up our system is, because you can't survive under it. And these are the people who don't get successfully conditioned. So of course we're labeled as we're labeled as as a an offshoot, as something wrong, as something pathological, because we it is the literal experience of the cost of the system, these socioeconomic classes and the the stolen labor that all of like my family and all Midwestern and Southern people, factory workers, it is exactly those people who are essentially the slaves of the system. And there are layers of slavery, because they're a slave to the system, but so are the the kids doing sweatshops in Taiwan or in um Morocco or whatever. We are products of that system. The system chews up people and spits them out, and when they get spit out, they are changed. They are changed, they are colonizer conditioning resistant because it is exactly the colonizer system that chewed up and spit out our families and created the socioeconomic um environment that we were raised in that prevented our conditioning. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. So here is my new vocabulary. The people that we call normal, they stop being the goal and they start being something closer to tragic. They are walking around in a trance, convinced the walls of their cages are just the way things are. It's just the way the world is. They traded sovereignty for safety. They traded a sense of aliveness for predictability, and they've traded their own authenticity, not even for belonging, but just for fitting in. They've lost something. Something really important, something that I think makes life worth living. They've lost the their own direct access to their internal world. They've lost access to their interiority. The ability to feel the full spectrum of life has been taken away from them. The pattern recognition that sees through the lies and the critical thinking to be able to ask those questions, gone. Meanwhile, the disordered person is standing outside of the cage, at least me, and going, Why are you all just standing in there? Like you can like there's bars. Don't you see the bars? You can like literally just turn around, like turn sideways and step through them and step out. But it's very uncomfortable. The people inside the bars are kind of fat, fat and happy in some ways. Uh fat and happy enough for them, because again, they've lost access to their interiority, so they don't know how miserable they are. They have no idea. And it's why they're afraid of people like us, people like me, and afraid of my unbridled joy. Because they have no idea what that's like, and so it's dangerous for them. So here's my suggestion. My suggestion is a new vocabulary. I've already suggested a few of them, but I think here's a few that we can continually use from this day forward. Stop saying neurotypical and start saying colonizer conditioned, or pathologically normative. Or if you're really nice, you can just call them system adapted. Instead of neurotypical, try system adapted. I like colonizer conditioned because I'm an asshole, and that's is what it is, and I like to call things exactly what they are, and in a way that is shocking because, well, that's the truth. It is shocking, but that's the way it is. Instead of saying neurodivergent, say colonizer conditioning resistant, or say the cognitively uncolonized, that's my favorite. I mean, you could even call it a the immune response. I was talking with a friend who was like, it's like we were the immune response. I'm like, yeah, that's actually quite accurate. We're the immune response to the systemic pathological conditioning. So stop framing your traits as deficits. They are not symptoms that need to be erased, they are signatures of a mind that refused to be erased. Stop framing your stress history as damage. It's not damage, it's adaptation. It is intelligence, it is the body's wisdom. So, what this philosophy is not. I want to say really clearly that this is not an attack on the colonizer conditioned. Like I said, they didn't choose this. They were children just like we were. They were shaped by the same forces that tried to shape us. Many of them are suffering deeply, but they just can't name it because the conditioning taught them to not look. The conditioning creates that alexithymia. This is not a rejection of all help, all support, or all intervention. Some of us need accommodations, some of us need therapy to heal from the trauma of being forced into a shape that we were never meant to take. Some of us need medication to function in a world that wasn't built for us. And these things are not contradictions. They are survival. But they are not cures for a disease that we never had. They're not. We are not broken. So I'll end where I started. I spent 30 years believing that I was broken. As I started writing, re-rethinking broken, I realized that that wasn't the case. My brain was not malfunctioning. I thought that if I just tried harder, masked better, suppressed more, I could finally be normal. Eventually that bottle got too expensive, and I was wrong. The people that we call neurodivergent are not broken, and they're not broken versions of normal. We are not disordered. We are not deficient. We are the colonizer conditioning resistant. We are the uncolonized. We are the people whose native consciousness refused to be erased. Unfortunately, a lot of the reason that that is the case is because of the amount of stress that we went through, but that stress is the result in many cases of socioeconomic pressures created by a cancerous, pathological, capitalist system. We are the immune response to a culture that mistakes conformity for health. So if you are one of us, if you've always felt too much or not enough, if you've refused too much, seen too much, if you've always been told to just tone it down or try harder or just be normal, then here's the truth that nobody ever told you. You weren't the problem. They are. The conditioning that they tried to imprint on you was the problem. And just because everybody else was more successfully conditioned than you were in that way, doesn't mean that you were the problem. You survived that conditioning. Against all odds. So congratulations. So this is pathological normativity. These are my four pillars. I truly believe this. What we call neurodivergent is not divergent. It is just a natural because we are a highly adaptable species, we are a natural response to chronic stress. And I don't believe that it's pathological, and I think it's all context dependent. I think we are labeled pathological inside a system who needs that predictability in order to keep creating more debt, to be able to keep creating more fake wealth for billionaire investors now. We don't have anything wrong with us. And I believe that sticking to calling people who have been colonizer-conditioned neurotypical does all of us a massive, massive disservice. So let's start calling them what they are. Colonizer-conditioned. They are system adapted people, and we are system resistant. We are the cognitively uncolonized. At least in that way. So if you enjoyed this podcast, if you like my theories and listen to me spouting all of my crap, then awesome. Yay. I appreciate that. Uh there are ways that you can support the show. I do this for free. It's going on a witch. Put out a thousand episodes? Five, I don't even remember. I know, a pun put out a bunch of episodes now. And I'm really excited about it. But I do it all for free. Nobody pays me for this. If you feel like buying me a latte so I can slam one in between recording these, then you can do that through the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Please comment, please share, and rate the podcast. If you hate it, rate it. If you'd love it, rate it. Um, but ratings help, period. I appreciate your attention if you've made it this far. You are awesome and remembered. Stay curious and stay uncomfortable.