How can Reframing Techniques Benefit a Neurodivergent Mind?

This is a story about how our subconscious mind embraces metaphors, even within the realm of chronic trauma/CPTSD. While there's a standard therapeutic approach, dealing with it also demands intuition, creativity, realness, and improvisation. The narrative is inspired by a client who granted permission to share a glimpse of their journey.

The therapeutic journey with our client has been lengthy, navigating through challenges that tested both parties. Stuckness, a common and anticipated hurdle, triggered feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness, prompting thoughts of prematurely ending either life or therapy. This was unsettling for both the client and the therapist.

Over time, through reflection and introspection, the client and therapist acknowledged the mysterious workings of the brain. Amid people-pleasing behaviours, a desire to fit in, and occasional lapses in presence and compassion, they found it easy to slip, inadvertently prolonging the therapeutic process. Recognising the fine line between rapport-building and creating momentum, our therapist understood the importance of choosing the right phrases to anchor in the client's psyche.

In response, the therapist and client decided to apply a different method to the main therapy theme, aligning with the client's neurodivergent brain and creative personality traits. The new approach provided ease, consistency, and necessary structure, allowing the client to relax into the process. This created space for unspoken therapeutic aspects like humour and playfulness, which became crucial in accessing the subconscious and anchoring empowering beliefs.

So what’s happened, we hear you screaming in despair!? Well, our therapist introduced the concept of a "by-product" during a session, drawing inspiration from the book "Re-work" by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. Using the analogy of sawdust being a by-product of a woodwork factory, they explored and transformed negative work experiences into i.e. an opportunity of exercising clear communication or leveraging neurodivergence as a superpower rather than a disability.

For example, our therapist gave an analogy of sawdust being a by-product of woodwork factory. Essentially, a factory makes furniture or floor board and inevitably produces sawdust which can be cleverly made into a plywood or cat litter, etc., which is not a primary focus of a factory. Then the therapist asked our client how they could transform their unpleasant experience at work into “sawdust”; or how they can use their neurodivergence as a superpower and not a disability or a shameful personal trait.

Curiously, in the following session our client explained to our therapist that "sawdust" became a keyword in their life, and that it offered relief from the depressive experience. The therapist's suggestion prompted them to see their challenges in a new light. While the process is ongoing, both parties in this therapeutic relationship now have real evidence of a "good life," avoiding mere superficial positivity.

Whilst the intervention was partially that of reframing, it had a hypnotic command on the client’s subconscious mind because it sounded like the truth for it. Hence, it latched onto the command as if it was a source of clarity and lightness. Obviously, relaxation, humour, rapport and a matching therapeutic method played part in the process, this way preparing the space for the missing piece. The moral of the story: do not devalue the sawdust!