“Do You Know Where the Dragons Are?” - Introducing a Novel Enactive Framework to Map the Wide Unknown of Social Spaces With Neurodivergent Young People

Abstract

Experiences of being are fundamentally different for neurodivergent young people. Differences in brain connectivity and function conferred by neurodivergence give rise to differences in construal processes underlying intersubjective engagement and shared meaning. Normative therapeutic and educational interventions refer to ‘social communication disorders’, ‘cognitive inflexibility’ and ‘social anxiety’. Peers call them ‘weird’. Parents struggle with guilt, exasperation and despair. The world demands social conformity. “Toby” (11yrs) requested a map and sword to slay the fearsome dragons lurking in the unknown spaces between himself and others- between here and there; intention and action; words and meaning; friend and foe. This paper describes a contextualizing model in a novel systematized approach to meeting the social engagement challenges of neurodivergent young people, devised in collaboration with those young people as Experts by Experience. The approach was formulated on the principle that social competence in neurodivergence should be shaped around self- discovery of authentic modes of being and relating, rather than imposed normative criteria. The 12 Social Spaces model integrates theoretical and clinical principles of Personal Construct Psychology, Enactivism, play theory, neurocognition and social competence, to provide a contextualizing framework of twelve interactional spaces to scaffold social cognition during evolving play between neurodivergent young people.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Cynthia Pollard, Head of Therapies, whose exhortation to “go and play with your ideas and see what you can make of them” I took literally; and, of course, to every young person who was kind enough to take a maverick Speech and Language Therapist seriously and play along. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided a masterclass in preparing a complex paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).