What if we started to dream from a place of how life could be?
- What if we started with what the most sensitive people among us need to flourish?
- What if we had designed our lives around the most vulnerable people in our communities, rather than the most able?
- What if a different pace unlocked gifts for us all?
- What if neurodivergent people had at least one safe place they could experience this magic right here, right now
What if therapists, coaches and professionals understood how to create these magical spaces for neurodivergent people, within their practices, regardless of what is going on in the rest of the world?
Take a walk with me for a moment to explore what this could be like for us all…
This is a gentle world built from the inside out.
Not a world that has learned to merely tolerate difference. Not a world that has bolted accessibility onto systems never designed for the people who need them.
It’s a gentle world with entirely different foundations. A world that asked, at the very beginning: what do the most sensitive people among us need in order to flourish?
Building outwards from that answer, for the benefit of everyone.
This is not a fantasy of perfection. It is a description of what becomes possible when we stop treating neurodivergent experience as a problem to be managed and start recognising it for what it is: a form of intelligence the world has been ignoring, at enormous cost to all of us.
I am a coach, facilitator and researcher working at the intersection of neurodivergence and consent. I have spent years listening to neurodivergent adults describe what it costs them to move through the current world: the sensory load, the masking, the exhaustion.¹
I have also listened when we have explored a different question: What do you know that the world needs to hear?
The answers to that question is the foundation of the world I am about to describe.
From What If to What Is
Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Towns movement, argues in his book ‘From What Is to What If’ that imagination is not a luxury. It is a political necessity.²
The capacity to imagine differently has been systematically undermined: by an education system that rewards right answers over creative questions, by an economy that monetises attention and leaves no room for dreaming, by a culture that makes the present feel unavoidable.
Hopkins asks what becomes possible when we reclaim ‘what if’, not just as wishful thinking, but as the first act of genuine change.
You cannot build toward a world you cannot first imagine.
That argument matters particularly for neurodivergent people, whose imaginations and capacity for deep, lateral, unconventional thinking, have so often been treated as symptoms rather than gifts. Reclaiming the ‘what if’ is both a political act and a form of self-restoration for this community.
I am also taking my inspiration from William Morris, who in 1890 wrote ‘News from Nowhere’: a dream of a future England that had become beautiful, unhurried, and genuinely free, not through technology but through the recovery of craft, community, and a pace of life that honoured human beings.³
Morris did not write a policy document. He wrote a world you could walk around in.
That is what I am trying to do here.
So: walk with me in a gentle world.
What Neurodivergent People Can Experience
Neurodivergence includes autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, PDA, and many other ways of being and experiencing the world. These are not deficits with compensating strengths sprinkled in. They are different nervous systems, different ways of sensing, processing, connecting, and knowing. While people’s nervous systems are more sensitive, it does not automatically mean they are less capable.⁴
It’s important to highlight the dramatic differences in the way neurodivergent people experience the world at this point. I cannot say that what I write here applies to all neurodivergent experiences. Those of us who are non-verbal and have limited mobility have experiences that require further detailed research and consideration in my opinion. As do people from other minoritised communities and people with multiple intersecting differences.
Bearing that in mind, what follows are some generalisations about how life can be different:
Sensory sensitivity can mean many neurodivergent people take in the world more intensely. Light, sound, smell, texture, temperature are not part of the background experience. Instead they are very much in the foreground and sometimes overwhelmingly so.
Strip away the overload, and what remains is acute perception: the ability to notice what others miss, to sense the subtle wrongness in a space or the shift in a person’s mood before anyone else has registered it.⁵ This hypersensitivity is often pathologised. Here I would like to explore sensitivity as information.
Processing differences mean neurodivergent people can need more time to absorb and respond. In a world that rewards speed, this looks like a disadvantage. In a world that waits, processing time brings depth and the capacity to arrive at an answer genuinely thought through rather than a reaction grabbed at speed.⁶
Pattern recognition and systems thinking, common in autism and ADHD, mean neurodivergent people can see connections, contradictions, and structural problems that others miss or prefer not to see.⁷ In a world of compounding crises, this is precisely the intelligence needed, and it is only fully available when not consumed by survival.
Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), common in ADHD, is an intense response to possible rejection or disapproval.⁸ It is experienced as a wound. We can look at it differently: the person who feels exclusion this acutely carries a precise knowledge of about what genuine feelings of belonging require. That knowledge, given the right conditions, is a gift to any community serious about inclusion.
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) describes a profile in which everyday demands trigger strong anxiety-based avoidance.⁹ This exists because the world is full of demands that override genuine autonomy. In a world of genuine consent and genuine choice, the PDA nervous system is not avoidant. It is perhaps the most honest responder to genuine freedom. A nervous system that will not be coerced, that insists on authentic engagement, that cannot pretend to agree when it does not. In the right world, this is not disorder. It can honour it's alternative name of Pervasive Drive for Autonomy and brings a beautifully deep integrity.
Differences in body language and expression mean the visible signals we use to read consent such as eye contact, facial expression, and the “enthusiastic yes” may look different for neurodivergent people, or may not reflect their internal state at all.¹⁰ Reading consent from cues alone, without understanding neurodivergent communication, is not just inadequate. It is actually a source of ongoing harm.
Underpinning all of this is the understanding that many neurodivergent people have a deep and precise internal knowing. An acute sense of what is right for them, what aligns with their values, what their body is saying yes and no to. While this inner wisdom is real and reliable, it is only audible when everything else is quiet and respectful enough to hear it.
The gentle world I am imagining is one in which everything else has, finally, become quiet and respectful enough.
How We Know We Are Safe
We do not feel safe in our minds first. We feel safe, or unsafe, through our bodies. Through what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Our five external senses scan the environment constantly, sending signals to the nervous system: safe or not safe. This happens before thought, faster than language.¹¹
For neurodivergent people, whose sensory processing is often more acute, the physical environment has an outsized impact on felt safety. A flickering light, a chemical smell, or a room too loud or too bright are signals of threat. A nervous system in threat cannot access the reflective part of the brain that genuine consent requires.¹²
Alongside this outer sensing is the inner knowing: a sense of what feels right and true and aligned with our values. This is our internal wisdom, the quiet signal that tells us whether something is genuinely right for us, when we are settled enough to hear it.¹³
Genuine consent lives at the meeting point of both: a body that feels safe enough in its environment, and a self settled enough to access its own inner knowing.
The gentle world I am imagining has been built, from the ground up, to support both.
Walking Into the Gentle World
You arrive in a market town. The kind that has always been a gathering place, a centre for trading and community. Yet something is different here, and you feel it before you can name it.
The air first. Clean in a way that registers as relief in the body. Then the sound: not silent, because this is a living place, but layered with intention. People chatting, water running, wind in trees lining what used to be a car-dominated high street and is now a wide planted walkway. No engines. No relentless mechanical roar you didn’t know how intrusive it was until it stopped.
You are, without knowing why, more fully yourself than you were a moment ago.
A neurodivergent person who has lived in cities knows the exhaustion of environments that demand constant sensory management, the cost of filtering and adapting when the world is working against the nervous system at every level.¹⁴ Perhaps they know, or perhaps they have only been able to imagine, what it would feel like for that cost to simply not be there.
This is where the gentle world built from neurodivergent experience begins: with the sensory environment taken seriously as a condition for all human flourishing. Architecture here has learned what neurodivergent people have always known: that light, acoustics, the option to be alone when needed, the availability of calm are not luxuries. They are healthy infrastructure.¹⁵
Because the most sensitive among them set the standard, the environment works better for everyone. The elderly person overwhelmed by noise. The new parent whose nervous system is already stretched. The person in grief, or in pain, or simply tired in the ordinary human way. Everyone benefits when the most sensitive set the terms.
The Pace of Things
The most radical change in this gentle world is not visible. It is temporal.
Things here take the time they take.
Speed, in the current world, is the mechanism by which genuine choice is most reliably bypassed. The rushed appointment, the form that must be completed now, the response expected before the question has been processed. In the gentle world built from neurodivergent experience, processing time is not an accommodation. It is just how things are done.
When a doctor asks a question, there is time for the answer. When a person says ‘I need to think about this’, the response is genuinely welcomed, because the people who designed these systems understood that a yes given under pressure is not a yes at all.¹⁶
Many autistic and ADHD people know their answer clearly only after the moment has passed: after the appointment ended, after the conversation moved on.¹⁷ In the current world, this is experienced as failure.
Here in the gentle world, it is simply how some people process, and the systems have been built for it. You can return. You can revise. You can say ‘I’d like time to think about that’ or even ‘I said yes but actually it is no’ and be heard without penalty. An individual’s integrity is honoured and respected, with understanding of how that integrity ultimately benefits us all.
Work is structured around output and meaning, not hours logged. The school day is not a factory shift. The consultation is not a conveyor belt. Time has been returned to the people who live in it, rather than at the mercy of technology or some twisted plan for eternal financial growth.
What has grown in that returned time instead, is genuine thought. Genuine relationship. Genuine consent.
The Gift of Accurate Perception and What It Saved
Here is something the people of this gentle world discovered early, and it changed everything.
Neurodivergent people, when not overwhelmed, are extraordinarily accurate perceivers.
The autistic person who notices the structural contradiction before anyone else. The ADHD person whose restlessness in a meeting is the body’s response to something wrong that no one is naming. The highly sensitive person who reads the emotional temperature of a room with a precision others mistake for anxiety.¹⁸ The person with RSD who knows exactly what exclusion costs, and whose knowledge makes them an incomparable advocate for genuine belonging.
These are not compensating gifts. They are the natural expression of nervous systems more attuned, more responsive to what is actually happening.
In the current world, this atonements is a burden: too many overwhelming signals, and not enough safety.
Neurodivergent people spend so much energy managing excess that their perceptive gifts are largely unavailable, to themselves or anyone else.¹⁹
In this gentle world, the excess has been reduced. And something extraordinary has become available.
Consider what accurate perception means at a collective level. The people who could not normalise pollution (whose bodies reacted to the chemicals, the noise, the ultra-processed food, the fractured information environment) were not oversensitive. They were accurate. They were registering, before the rest of the population, what was making everyone sick. The question was never why they were overwhelmed. The question was why everyone else wasn’t.²⁰
When this world decided to follow their lead, everything changed. Air quality improved because the person who couldn’t breathe bad air without crisis set the standard, and everyone breathed better. Food became slower and cleaner because the person whose gut rejected additives set the menu, and everyone ate better. Cities became quieter because the person who couldn’t mask noise set the volume, and everyone thought more clearly. The information environment became more honest because the person who fell apart under epistemic manipulation set the terms, and everyone became less manipulable.
This is the deepest gift of a world designed for the most sensitive: it is a world that has stopped poisoning itself, by finally listening to the people whose bodies were always telling the truth about what the world was doing to all of them.
Neurodivergent people in this world are not just flourishing. They are leading. Not in a hierarchical sense, but in the sense that their perceptions, their pattern recognition, their refusal to pretend everything is fine, have become central to how the community navigates.
The ecological crisis of the previous era was worsened by the systematic suppression of exactly this kind of perception.²¹ The most accurate sensors of the burning were told they were too sensitive, medicated, managed at the margins.
That is not what happened here.
When the Environment Changes, So Does the Experience of Neurodivergence
There is something important that people in this gentle world have come to understand, and it quietly transformed how neurodivergence is seen.
Much of what we used to call the ‘disability’ of neurodivergence was not inherent to neurodivergent minds. It was the predictable response of a sensitive system to an environment it was never designed for.²²
The anxiety, the burnout, the shutdowns, the exhaustion, were all real. However, they were not fixed features of neurodivergent neurology. They were the cost of the mismatch between a particular kind of sensitive nervous system and a world built without that in mind. Remove the mismatch, and something shifts.²³
In this gentle world, autistic people are not less autistic. ADHD people are not less ADHD. Their neurology has not changed. Yet the experience of that neurology has changed profoundly because the environment is no longer fighting them at every turn. The sensory overload that used to consume so much capacity is largely gone. The masking that used to cost so much is largely unnecessary, because difference is no longer something to hide.²⁴ The executive function demands that used to be overwhelming are more workable, because systems have been designed around how neurodivergent people actually function.
What remains when the hostile conditions are removed is something that surprises people who were only ever shown neurodivergence through the lens of struggle: a person who is perceptive, creative, deeply principled, often joyful, capable of forms of attention and connection and care that are genuinely remarkable.
The diagnosis has not disappeared and understanding your neurology is still useful and meaningful. Yet the weight of pathology that used to sit on that diagnosis has largely lifted. Because the world is no longer making neurodivergent people sick, neurodivergence is seen more clearly for what it is: a range of human nervous system variation that, given the right conditions, contributes something the world cannot afford to be without.²⁵
The richness of neurodivergent experience: the depth of feeling, the quality of attention, the capacity for joy that is fierce and specific and real, has always been there, underneath the survival. Freed from the work of merely getting through the day, neurodivergent people bring that richness into community life. Their friendships are deep. Their creative engagement is total. Their sense of justice is uncompromising. Their capacity to be fully present, when not overwhelmed, is a gift to everyone around them.
This is what was always possible. The world just had to stop making it impossible first.
Consent as the Foundation of Everything
In this gentle world, consent is the quality of the relationship between a person and the world they live in: an ongoing, living yes that emerges when people are safe, informed, and free enough to know and speak their own minds.²⁶
This understanding came largely from neurodivergent people. From research documenting what happens when consent is obtained without the conditions that make it real.²⁷ From autistic people who said yes to procedures they didn’t understand because the alternative felt more frightening than compliance. From ADHD adults who signed contracts they couldn’t process because no one took the time to find out whether genuine understanding was possible. From PDA people whose avoidance was read as non-compliance rather than as the clearest possible signal that the conditions for consent were absent.
This body of knowledge is changing how the world thinks about what consent requires.
It requires safety: the senses registering an environment the nervous system can trust. A person in a sensory environment triggering their threat response cannot access the reflective part of their brain.²⁸ They cannot genuinely consent.
It requires time: the processing allowed to complete at its own pace, not the pace of the system demanding it.
It requires genuine options: a yes given when no is impossible is not a yes.²⁹
It requires access to inner wisdom: the person settled enough to hear what they actually know and feel and want, rather than what fear or exhaustion is telling them.³⁰
In this gentle world, these requirements are not aspirational. They are structural: built into healthcare systems, educational institutions, workplaces, legal processes, and the architecture of public space. Not because neurodivergent people lobbied hard enough, but because the world finally understood that without these conditions, no one is truly free.
What Practitioners Would Find
In this gentle world, practitioners, therapists, doctors, social workers and teachers, would find something unexpected.
Their work would become easier.
The people they work with would still have struggles and when there is time, the environment is safe, and people are not already exhausted from simply existing, something opens. Genuine communication becomes possible. Trust develops. The healing work becomes what it was supposed to be.
Practitioners trained in neuro-affirming consent know the question is not ‘did they agree?’ but ‘were the conditions right for genuine agreement?’ They know visible cues are unreliable, that a flat affect is not indifference, that avoided eye contact is not evasion, that someone who seems fine may be in shutdown.³¹ They know their role is not to simply obtain consent but to create the conditions in which consent can genuinely arise.³²
What a neurodivergent person experiences, sitting across from such a practitioner, is something that used to be remarkable and is now simply ordinary: being genuinely met. Their pace respected. Their communication accepted. Their no as welcome as their yes.
They are inherently enough.
Why We Begin with the Gentle World
The second article in this series will make the present moment we are currently living through very clear. I will name what is actively destroying the conditions for ND consent, and why neurodivergent people are bearing the greatest weight of that destruction.
I began here, with this gentle world, deliberately.
Because we do not build what we cannot imagine. Because the people I work with, and learn from, and live alongside deserve to have their flourishing described before they are asked, once again, to describe their suffering. Because the gifts they carry, their sensitivity, their pattern recognition, their refusal of false consensus, their fierce inner knowing, need to be named as gifts before we can understand what it costs the world to suppress them.
And because the gentle world I have described is not as far away as it feels.
It is built from things we already know. From what neurodivergent people have always known. From what the research confirms. From what the body has always been trying to tell us, if the world were only quiet enough to hear it.
We can build this world together, one session at a time.
In the next article, we will look honestly at what stands in the way.
This is the first article in a three-part series. Article Two, ‘As the World Burns,’ examines the impact of ecological crisis, economic precarity, and AI on neurodivergent consent capacity. Article Three, ‘Ecological Consent Load,’ introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding the cumulative impact of environmental conditions on the capacity for genuine consent.
The author’s ND Consent framework, developed through qualitative research with neurodivergent adults, offers a practitioner-level response to the conditions described in this series. Find out more at: www.untangleroots.org
References
1. Raymaker, D.M. & Nicolaidis, C. (2013). Participatory research with autistic communities: Shifting the system. Disability Studies Quarterly, 33(4). Research with neurodivergent communities consistently documents the cumulative costs of navigating neurotypical-normative environments, including masking, sensory load, and exhaustion.
2. Hopkins, R. (2019). From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. Chelsea Green Publishing.
3. Morris, W. (1890).News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest. Serialised in Commonweal. Reprinted by Oxford University Press (2009).
4. Chapman, R. & Carel, H. (2022). Neurodiversity, disability, wellbeing.Synthese, 199, 1109–1130. Argues that neurodivergent conditions are better understood as forms of human variation than as deficits, with distinct perceptual and cognitive profiles.
5. Marco, E.J., Hinkley, L.B.N., Hill, S.S. & Nagarajan, S.S. (2011). Sensory processing in autism: A review of neurophysiologic findings.Pediatric Research, 69, 48–54. Documents the neurological basis of heightened sensory processing in autism.
6. Sonuga-Barke, E.J.S. & Sergeant, J.A. (2005). The neuroscience of ADHD.Cortex, 41(4), 428–430. Processing differences and temporal perception are well-documented features of ADHD neurology.
7. Grandin, T. & Panek, R. (2013).The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Discusses pattern recognition, visual thinking, and systems-level perception as characteristic strengths in autistic cognition.
8. Dodson, W.W. (2016). Emotional regulation and rejection sensitivity.ADDitude Magazine. RSD is increasingly recognised as a core feature of ADHD experience, describing intense emotional responses to perceived rejection or criticism.
9. Christie, P., Duncan, M., Fidler, R. & Healey, Z. (2011).Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. The foundational text establishing PDA as an anxiety-based profile characterised by the avoidance of demands through social strategies.
10. Milton, D.E.M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’.Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. Argues that communicative differences between autistic and non-autistic people are bidirectional, and that reading autistic communication through neurotypical norms produces systematic misunderstanding.
11. Porges, S.W. (2011).The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company. Establishes the neurological basis for the body’s pre-conscious safety-scanning via the autonomic nervous system.
12. van der Kolk, B. (2014).The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. Demonstrates the physiological basis of threat response and its impact on higher cognitive functions including reflective decision-making.
13. Siegel, D.J. (1999).The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press. Introduces the concept of the window of tolerance and the neurological conditions necessary for reflective, values-based engagement.
14. Raymaker, D.M., Teo, A.R., Steckler, N.A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S.K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A. & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). ‘Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew’: Defining autistic burnout.Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. Defines and documents autistic burnout as a distinct phenomenon resulting from chronic exposure to environments mismatched with autistic neurology.
15. Mostafa, M. (2008). An architecture for autism: Concepts of design intervention for the autistic user.International Journal of Architectural Research, 2(1), 189–211. Demonstrates the measurable impact of architectural design on autistic sensory experience and functioning.
16. Maté, G. (2019).When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Vermilion. Addresses how chronic stress and the suppression of genuine self-expression — including the inability to say no — affects physical and psychological health.
17. Barkley, R.A. (2012).Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford Press. Documents time perception and delayed processing as core features of ADHD executive function differences.
18. Aron, E.N. (1996).The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You. Broadway Books. Establishes the concept of high sensory processing sensitivity as a distinct, heritable trait associated with deeper processing of stimuli.
19. Mandy, W. (2019). Social camouflaging in autism: Is it time to lose the mask?Autism, 23(8), 1879–1881. Reviews evidence on the costs of masking and social camouflaging, including exhaustion, loss of identity, and increased mental health burden.
20. Zuboff, S. (2019).The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books. Analyses how digital environments are designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, with particular relevance to epistemic manipulation and manufactured consent.
21. Hogg, T.L., Stanley, S.K., O’Brien, L.V., Watsford, C. & Talevski, J. (2021). The Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale: Development and validation of a multidimensional scale.Global Environmental Change, 71. Documents the disproportionate burden of ecological anxiety on those with heightened environmental sensitivity.
22. Oliver, M. (1990).The Politics of Disablement. Macmillan. Foundational text of the social model of disability, which locates disability in the mismatch between individual difference and social/environmental design rather than in the individual.
23. den Houting, J. (2019). Neurodiversity: An insider’s perspective.Autism, 23(2), 271–273. Argues from lived experience and research that many features understood as symptoms of autism are better understood as responses to hostile environments.
24. Pearson, A. & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice.Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60. Analyses the social conditions that produce masking and the costs of its removal or maintenance.
25. Armstrong, T. (2010).Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences. Da Capo Press. Argues for a reframing of neurodivergent conditions as forms of human biodiversity with distinctive strengths.
26. Fisher, N. (2021).Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of Their Own Learning. Constable. Explores consent, autonomy, and self-directed learning with particular attention to neurodivergent children’s need for genuine rather than procedural agreement.
27. Donaldson, A., Gillard, S., Ramos-Leal, J., Evans, A., Farquharson, E. & Abubakar, I. (2023). Informed consent processes in research with autistic people: Challenges and recommendations.Autism, 27(3), 685–697. Documents specific inadequacies in standard informed consent procedures when applied to autistic research participants.
28. Porges, S.W. & Dana, D. (2018).Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal-Informed Therapies. W.W. Norton & Company. Extends polyvagal theory to clinical applications, including the conditions necessary for genuine therapeutic engagement.
29. Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2013).Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Macmillan. Demonstrates that conditions of scarcity — including financial, temporal, and cognitive — measurably reduce the capacity for autonomous decision-making.
30. Brown, a.m. (2019).Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. AK Press. Offers a framework for consent as an ongoing, embodied, relational practice grounded in genuine desire rather than compliance.
31. Milton, D.E.M. (2012). Op. cit. See reference 10.
32. Walker, P. (2013).Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing. Examines fawn response and compliance patterns as trauma adaptations, with implications for understanding apparent consent in contexts of chronic stress or power imbalance.
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