S2 EP 22 - Growing Up Neurodivergent: Karma Chameleon

You can be smart, creative, and deeply caring and still walk through life feeling like you’re getting “thrown to the curb.” That ache hits a lot of neurodivergent adults, especially when old childhood labels keep playing on loop: too sensitive, too emotional, too intense, too distracted, so much potential if you could just… I’m busting those cognitive distortions and telling a truer story about neurodiversity, ADHD, autism, giftedness, and what it’s like when your brain takes in more than the room expects. 

We start with a memory from childhood that’s equal parts funny and revealing: walking up to neighbors’ houses and asking if they had kids who wanted to be friends. Through that lens, we talk about why connection can become a core driver for neurodivergent people and why shame is often just misunderstood wiring. Then we get into brain science that matters, especially for parents and educators: the middle school brain renovation where the limbic system runs hot and the prefrontal cortex is still under construction. Add sensory sensitivity and emotional intensity, and the world can feel loud, fast, and harsh, even when you’re doing your best. 

From there we connect the dots to adulthood: executive functioning challenges, workplace expectations, the “inconsistent but brilliant” stereotype, and why “failure to launch” is often about planning, time management, stress regulation, and systems that weren’t built for neurodivergent minds. We also talk hyper empathy, reading body language, and the loneliness of being highly attuned. Most importantly, we practice reframes that are fair, specific, and actually usable and we translate that into how we can support neurodivergent kids without trying to fix them, by getting curious about their thinking steps and honoring their process. 

If this resonates, subscribe, share with someone raising or living as neurodivergent, and leave a review so more people can find language that replaces shame with clarity. What’s one label you’re ready to rewrite?

Contact Suzanne Swain:
Email: suzanneswain@gmail.com Website: msmarypoppins.com

Produced By: StellaMix Podcast Productions

Special thanks to our producer, StellaMix podcast productions, another Palm Beach County School of the Arts collaboration. Need a podcast? Connect with Janine Stella ASAP: http://www.Stellamix.com

Transcript

Childhood Memory Of Making Friends

Labels That Quietly Do Damage

Middle School Brain Under Construction

Adult Struggles Executive Functioning

Hyper Empathy And Reading People

Busting Cognitive Distortions With Reframes

Parenting With Curiosity Not Fixing

Listener Prompt And Community Updates

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Well, hello everybody, and it is a beautiful day to bust a few cognitive distortions. How's it going? My name is Susanna M. Swain, EDS LMSW, and welcome to the Middle School Mary Poppins podcast. I'm sitting here with my little buddy, mixed breed albino friend, Lieutenant Steve. Say hi, Steve. He says hi. Anyway, so we're sitting here today, and I am thinking a lot about growing up neurodivergent and what that means. And as an adult or something, you know, moderately resembling an adult. I think about what it's like to, you know, get out of school and not have people talk to you about being neurodivergent. And you have to cope throughout the day with being, say, ADHD or autistic or or or or or all the way down the spectrum of divergence. Now, I do believe that a divergent will in fact survive the apocalypse. However, it's hard to be a neurodivergent, isn't it? I mean, yesterday I was going through some things and I realized, you know, during a meeting that I get thrown to the curb a lot, like a piece of trash. Does that happen to y'all? Do you feel like people just throw you away like you have no value? Well, I just I think we need to change the narrative, you know? I think we need to change this and realize that the neurodivergent adult has a lot more power than the neurodivergent child. Same ideas, bigger body, more effective. So let me start with a little memory. When I was a kid, we moved into this new neighborhood. We had an opportunity to buy a nicer house and a you know fancier place, so we took it. It was the 80s, why not? It was a beautiful home. And we lived along a canal and things like that, so I could go fishing. But I didn't wait for people to come to me when we got to that new neighborhood. This is the little neurodivergent Suzanne were talking about. I decided to go to them. And I didn't know that socially that's a little odd, but I would walk up to houses and knock on the door and ask if they had any kids there and would they want to be friends? And in my mind, this made absolute perfect sense because I thought, you know, we need more friends in the world, and why wouldn't people want that? So why don't I just come to your door, like DoorDash with friends? And bless her, bless her little heart. I didn't know any better, and I thought that's just how people work. But now as an adult, I look back on that moment and you know, I don't feel very embarrassed about it because I, you know, when I grew up, I was like, oh my gosh, Suzanne, you did not do that. And I was literally holding a care bearer the whole time. Friend bear. I was very specific about it. I just felt curious about what I was thinking about because it it wasn't a child being too much, it was a child whose brain prioritized some connection above and beyond anything else. I think a lot of us, especially those of us raising neurodivergent kids, are starting to have more of these moments lately. Are you? When we look at our child and something clicks and we think, wait, oh gosh, this person is me. This little person is totally me. And it's like this fear wall hits you. But you have to remember that your greatest asset as an adult who's neurodivergent is to help kids who are as well and to be a lighthouse for them. So the moment can be a little bit unsettling when you think about these memories and social things that you did that maybe you went out on a limb. But it's not just what we did though, it's how we felt about it. You know, being the neurodivergent kid who I always felt things really deeply and I overthought everything, and and sometimes we couldn't even seem to think in the right way at all, whatever that right way is. But maybe you were that kid who talked too much or not enough, or you were the kid that got lost in imagination, or that kid who got overwhelmed by noise and chaos and expectation. I don't know, somewhere along the way, many of us were given labels. You know, you're too sensitive. I got that one a lot. You're too emotional, you're too distracted, you're too intense. In my case, I was able to figure out people's motivation for doing things, and boy, oh boy, did that not make me some friends. So I was like, Well, aren't you doing this just because you feel blank? Yeah. Not always the best thing. Think, don't say. That's a big deal. But here's one thing I think did the most damage. You have so much potential if you could just blank. Like, you'd be so pretty if you just, you know, it's one of those things where it's derogatory and people think it's perfectly okay to talk to neurodivergent this way and say, well, you know, if you could just get beyond your neurodivergence, you could do so much more. And I'm like, with my neurodivergence, I have so much potential. I don't understand why you can't consistently show what you're capable of, because life is a roller coaster. And I will have peaks and valleys much like you do, except mine may be more extreme and in a firestorm that you know you know you don't really know anything about. So the truth is many of us didn't understand either. But now we know a bit more about this, and we know that brains don't all develop in the same way. Thank goodness. In middle school, the brain is going through this massive renovation. Think of it like totally redoing a mall. The emotional center, the limbic system, is really active, and that's why feelings start to feel really big. So the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain, this is the part responsible for your planning and organization and impulse control, long-term thinking, is still under construction. So you get this kind of like mismatch with big feelings and not enough regulation. You fail me? Is this you? But now you layer the neurodivergence onto that, see. And brains that are the most sensitive to things like sensory input and emotional cues, internal thoughts. Brains don't filter as easily. That's like putting four coffee filters in the coffee pot. We have to go through many filters to realize whether this is real or not. We require more proof. But see, then what happens? The world feels really loud and fast and intense. And it feels like people are really harsh when they offer criticism. Like some criticism I got yesterday where, you know, your life is really complicated, yada yada yada, but we're gonna do this terrible thing to you anyway. And this may be you. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that you have to deal with things like that because people should be better. It's not you. Your neurodivergence just picks it up. I mean, some research points to increased activity in all areas of the brain connected to your creativity and language and things like associative thinking, which means that some kids and adults really can tell incredible stories, make those unique connections, and see patterns others miss. We can do things better, faster, and more efficient. But at the same time, you can also struggle with things like organization or follow-through, or definitely staying on task, or in my case, going down rabbit holes and never coming out. But those couple of things tend to get a little bit misunderstood. We're seeing this play out in adulthood in ways that are pretty important, actually, though. There's been a lot of conversation about young adults who struggle with that failure to launch. In other words, this is where you have trouble kind of leaving the nest. Again, I mean, I don't really love that phrase, but about one in three young adults now live at home at some point in their early adulthood. And that's when researchers start to look closer, and they're not finding any kind of lack of ability here. They're finding challenges with executive functioning. Things like planning, initiating tasks, managing your time, regulating stress. Does this sound at all familiar? As adults, we are still living with the same stresses that we have as kids. It's just magnified in our adulthood and all of the social rules that go along with being an adult. So if you're a kid, enjoy being a kid because you know you don't have to pay bills really, but there are so many other reasons too. You will have to be an adult who grows up with being neurodivergent, or you may be a neurodivergent adult right now. So, like for individuals with ADHD, those challenges get even more pronounced. Adults with ADHD are more likely to change jobs frequently, struggle in the workplace, and you know, struggle with expectations and not meeting them, and be seen as kind of inconsistent, but brilliant. And not because they don't care, and not because the systems that they're in are not designed for how they work. I mean, these systems that we go into don't think of the neurodivergent as being the innovator. They see them as almost a black sheep because they bring innovation that they may or may not want. Then we have giftedness. Some of our brightest kids are also the most overwhelmed, poster child right here, because their thinking can be advanced. I had some pretty big questions at a young age, and some people didn't care for it. But their emotional regulation is still developing at a normal, typical pace, and this is something I did not understand. Social skills and things were developing normally, but my brain was just on hyperspeed, and you feel disjointed. And even as an adult, I feel that way. I feel like my brain just goes and it's hard to stop it. It's actually called asynchronous development when your brain sometimes develops at a different rate from all that. So you end up with a kid who can understand really complex ideas like love and war and things like that. They think big to little instead of little to big. So close to them, locus of control. Most kids who are not neurodivergent, they think small to big. So whatever's close to them, their locus of control, and what's close to them is one way. But us as neurodivergent folks, we think big. We think love and then break it down into all of its tiny little minutiae. So we can understand these complex ideas, we can ask those deep questions, and we can think very abstractly, which makes people feel extremely uncomfortable. But that's what makes you an innovator. But you may still struggle with all of the frustration and organization, emotional regulation. And from the outside, that can look really confusing. But from the inside, it makes perfect sense. And this is where I want to pause for a second, because this part actually really matters. As an adult, I've realized something about myself, I think. I often have way more empathy for the people that I work with than they ever would have for me. Like I am an emp I have actually hyper empathy. I have so much empathy for everyone around me that it literally cripples me sometimes. You know, you can only do so much for people, but I can get drained. And kids refill that meter. It could be really hard. Because when you grow up being the person who feels really deeply and notices everything, let me tell you. And you try really hard to understand others and do gymnastics in your brain trying to understand others, you don't stop doing that, you just get better at it. You become very attuned to tone and emotion and subtle little shifts in character, like the tiniest little movement. You're like, oh, I know what that means. You read body language more than you listen to words, which is good because body language is 80% of communication. You really can tell a lot from that. So it's smart. You're doing the right thing. You're learning to read the situation in multiple ways to confirm whether it's good, bad, truthful, not. That's a strength, but it's a lonely strength. Because not everybody developed that skill. And sometimes you find yourself thinking, like, why can't people see me the way that I see them? I see just potential in people. I want to see potential in people. I'm a teacher, that's what I do. But I just feel like people underestimate me and talk down to me and you know, I always say, Do you guys am I what's wrong? Like, am I not capable? And I feel so incapable all the time that it becomes really difficult. So is that you? And that question, I mean, is this a lot of neurodivergent people out there? Is this what you're carrying quietly? What I mean, what if we told a different story though? So what if instead of I was too sensitive, we can just reformulate what we're saying to say, I felt things deeply in a world that didn't explain how to handle that in any capacity? That's fair. What if instead of I was scattered? You could say something like, My brain was making connections faster than I can even begin to organize them. That's fair. Speak fairly about yourself. You're probably the most hypercritical person of yourself that you know. What goes on inside your head can be evil. Y'all feel me there? I know you do. Because the evil voice is lying. That mean voice that tells you that you're not good enough and smart enough and all that stuff, it's lying to you. Because instead of I was too much, you could say I was pretty intense and curious and I was alive. Because you see and you feel. Because the same traits that make your childhood hard are often the ones that make adulthood meaningful. So that kid who knocked on doors to make friends becomes an adult who values connection above all else, which is probably why I have such an issue with money, because human connection can never have a monetary value, or in other words, be worth money. So the kid who daydreamed becomes the adult who creates and innovates. The kid who felt everything becomes the adult who understands people. I don't think that's failure. I think that's transformation. I think that's evolution, that's becoming. And now we get to do something different for our kids. So when our kids struggle and we often pause and ask, what's their brain trying to do? But instead of jumping straight to correction, we need to move toward understanding for a modern brain. We can say, I see you and I hear you, and your brain works in a really interesting way. Or tell me how you got to that. Explain, have them explain the steps they got through in order to reach one conclusion. What is their scientific process? And stressing that the thought process is a scientific process through hypothesis and all of those things, it can help to make a lot more sense. And you can see where the linear path of thought goes. And when we do that, we're not just helping them, we're also healing something in ourselves. Maybe the goal isn't to fix our kids, it's really not. And I find that a lot of therapists want to be fixers, but I don't think they spend enough time with people's kids to really get it, you know, to be a teacher, to become a therapist afterward is amazing. Please do this. If you if you're thinking in education that you'd love to be a therapist, look into social work and clinical social work because you understand that it's about helping our kids through the waters of whatever they're going through at the time. So it's not fixing. I don't want to be fixed. I don't think you want to be fixed. Nobody wants to be fixed. But we want to have more understanding of the waters we're navigating. And in doing that, we might actually begin to understand ourselves a little bit better. So something to think about next week or so. What's something that you loved completely, like obsessively, like in the 80s? Like, what did you love? Like, I loved Alex Kid in Miracle World, and I love to play Miss Pac-Man. And but what were you really into as a kid? Paula Abdul for me. Straight up Nat. Something you could do for hours, but something that you could do without anyone ever telling you to do. That might have not been a distraction, by the way. That may have been your brain showing its early stages of superpower. So it is a beautiful day to bust some cognitive distortions. And I want to give y'all a little quick update on Miss Tanya. And she is doing well. She had her first chemo treatment last week and is starting to feel a little bit better. So I really want to thank all y'all for your emails and thoughts and concerns and questions. Keep them coming. SuzanneSwain at gmail.com, msmarypoppins.com. If you'd like to make a donation to her GoFundMe, you can feel free to do that there. But I want to thank every single listener. Wow, we hit number two in the whole country yesterday. What? So thank you all very much for your listenership. I hope you're getting something out of this podcast. And as always, Steve and I tell you to stay clever, little foxes. Take it easy. I'll talk to you soon.