When that $15 landed in my PayPal account, I decided to go buy some food.

I’d spent the last few years rationing my food and only eating once a day most days. The doctor told me I had an eating disorder, which was partially true, but my weight loss was mostly due to poverty and food insecurity.

That day, my blood sugar was low and it was raining and I just wanted french fries to help me feel better. But as I turned at a yellow arrow, I was hit by a car that ran the light.

It was a very minor collision, no one was super badly hurt, and in the initial shock of it all, I refused to go to the hospital because of medical trauma. Over the next week it became clear that I was injured and I went to get x-rays which confirmed that I had two broken ribs.

Broken ribs are among the most painful injuries because they cannot be splinted or immobilized. We need our ribs to move so that we can breathe.

Every breath for the next 6 weeks was painful. Even with prescription pain medicine the first week and cannabis after that, I couldn’t get a deep breath without sharp pain.

By the time my body could physically handle driving again, PTSD had set in. I couldn’t even think about getting into a driver’s seat without panicking. I had experienced a ton of driving anxiety before and had even done EMDR around a previous incident, and it felt like all that work had been erased.

So I decided not to force it. I chose to wait until my body felt ready to drive again. Some people said, you really shouldn’t do that. They said, if you wait, you will NEVER drive again. They said, “you just have to get back up on the horse.” But I knew that I needed to go at my body’s pace. Even if that meant never driving again.

In 2020, a few months after my ribs healed, I sold my very old car to a hobbyist who wanted to try to fix it up, and I used that money to build my website and my consultation service which quickly resulted in food security for the first time since I left my parents home at 21. For the last 7 years, I’ve finally had the material safety to start healing my relationship with food, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Also for the last 7 years I have walked, asked friends for rides, and relied on Uber/Lyft and my local cab service. I have sometimes framed this as an economic decision or a better-for-the-planet decision, but really, I was simply afraid of driving, and I wanted to listen to the wisdom in my fear instead of suppressing it.

So for the last 7 years I’ve chosen places to live that are walkable. I’ve asked people I barely know for rides home from local events. I’ve endured absurd wait times for a car to be available. I’ve bailed on more rides than I can count because of the god-awful air fresheners they like to use to try to mask the scent of previous riders.

Early in those years there were two times that I drove because a friend was incapacitated by illness. The mom-friend-override is what made that possible - I dissociated from my anxiety because someone else needed help.

Eventually, my drivers license expired, and I was fully dependent on others unless I could walk to where I wanted to go.

For a long time that dependence felt safe. I was so grateful that someone else would drive and I could safely dissociate in the passenger seat. I enjoyed feeling like a child on a roadtrip looking out the window and asking if we could stop for snacks.

Over time, that changed. I started feeling anxious about being in strangers’ cars. The unpredictable sensory environments and the sometimes rude drivers and the wait times added up to a cumulatively big stressor. The random moments of co-regulation and kismet that were part of this exercise in interdependence became not worth the stress.

Not having a car during hurricane Helene amplified that trauma for me. I couldn’t escape before the storm. I couldn’t drive to get supplies or find cell service after the storm. I spent 4 days without electricity, internet, or running water, and walking 2 miles to get cell service because I couldn’t drive myself to somewhere that had those resources. Those 4 days woke up some ancestral trauma that I am still working to understand.

Since the storm, needing help to get places has sometimes felt ok and sometimes felt terrible. Eventually, needing to rely on others to drive me everywhere became a PDA trigger.

THAT is when I knew, beyond a doubt, I was ready to start driving again. My need for autonomy outweighed all anxieties.

When the PDA autonomy drive settles on a goal, we will move mountains to make it possible, even if that means facing our biggest fears.

Last summer, I started practicing driving in parking lots with my sister or my best friend there for co-regulation and also with very small amounts of nervine tinctures to convince my body that we are genuinely okay sitting in the driver’s seat and this does not call for an adrenaline response. I did short practice sessions with a lot of space between, and gradually, sitting in the drivers seat in an empty lot became boring.

A few months ago, I went to the DMV and got a learner’s permit so I could start driving for real and not just in parking lots. I’ve been practicing with my best friend and my family, in crowded parking lots and on quieter neighborhood streets. I’m not so much practicing the driving part as I haven’t forgotten anything I knew how to do before. I’m practicing staying grounded and in my body while I drive. I’m practicing using the tools that I have to avoid panic and stay present.

Last week, the power went out overnight because of a huge thunderstorm. The wind near my house sounded like a train. A small tornado touched down 14 miles from me. I talked myself out of panic attacks several times that night.

That fear of being stranded when nature is doing some extra wild stuff lit a fire under my ass to get this process moving right now. Every time that a storm has come since Helene, I have wished that I could drive myself to safety before it arrived. I guess this time I am finally fed up with that feeling of helplessness when the storm warnings come in and my only choice is to hunker down.

There IS nothing wrong with needing help. There was nothing wrong with needing help with transportation for the last 7 years, but now my body wants and needs independence in this regard to feel safe overall.

I’m ready to buy a car, register and insure it, and take my drivers test ASAP. I have to do things in that order since I won’t be taking the drivers test with a parents car like I did in high school.

Back in 2020, I wasn’t sure if I would ever want to drive again, and I’m SO glad I followed my own pace with this process.

A couple of days ago I went to look at certified used SUVs and I test drove a 2024 model that I really like. It has high safety ratings, decent gas mileage, and a ton of features that my little 2004 sedan didn’t have.

My first car’s age and unreliability were huge factors in my driving anxiety before the car wreck even happened. I never knew when I was going to end up stranded on the side of the road. I was looking for a specific photo of ye old blue car this morning and I couldn’t find it, but I did find a very long history of distressed FB posts about my car falling apart.

Modern safety features in cars are so freaking cool. From calling for help when I’m stranded to helping me stay in my lane and even braking for me to avoid an accident, I can see why a newer car would give me far less cause for anxiety than my previous one did.

The compact SUV I’m looking at is perfect for long-distance adventures and will easily convert for car-camping when I want to go sleep in the woods, which is a really high priority for me. My nervous system needs more outdoor time in places that are remote enough to not have cell phone service.

If all goes well with my financing application and proving my self-employment income, I will have my new car by next week and then I’ll take my drivers test a few days after that.

In the meantime, I’m imagining all the adventures that I will get to write to you about after I have wheels again. I’m envisioning some travel blogging focused on nervous system care away from home.

Absolutely no pressure, but if you’d like to contribute to my car fund, I would so appreciate it. Here are 3 ways you can help out if you want to —

1. You can sign up for a course or workshop HERE.
2. You can use venmo (@TraumaGeek) or Paypal for a one-time donation.
3. You can share any of my nervous system content - substack essays, blog posts, or infographics - on social media, with your clients, or with groups of professionals.

Upcoming Live Classes

August workshops: Functional Freeze, Fawn & Masking
Rescheduled from August 19 & 21 to August 26 & 28

September workshops: The PDA Neurotype
Tentatively scheduled for September 23 & 25

Year-long course: 50 Vagus Exercises in a Year
April 2026 - April 2027. Includes access to monthly Q&As & short videos.

Pre-recorded Courses

The Nervous System Study Group
My flagship course with over 2,000 participants to date. 8 conversations exploring the nervous system in the context of the larger systems and networks that we are connected to.

Neuro-affirming Goalworking for Nervous System Care (aka the Self Love Initiative)
3 months of self-paced support, re-imagining how to use goals in a way that works for people who experience disability and chronic illness. The autonomy and pacing of this approach is what makes it work for me as a PDA-er.

The Real Mental Health Villains (aka Healing Self-Blame)
Exploring 9 cultural biases in the modern mental health paradigm that cause trauma and perpetuate mental illness AND ways that mental health care should change in order to be more trauma-informed and neuro-affirming.

My courses always have sliding scale and free scholarship options because I know what it’s like to sit down and cry because I can’t afford to learn something I want to learn. I am also open to barter and trade offers!

A high-quality PDF version of these graphics is available for printing and educational purposes at TraumaGeek.com.
View the other infographics: linktr.ee/TraumaGeek
Professional Patrons get the entire collection of Trauma Geek graphics: www.Patreon.com/TraumaGeek

If you learned something helpful here,
here’s how you can learn more with me:

I’m hosting two workshops in early March on Systemic Trauma and the Stress Cycle. We’re exploring how the stress cycle relates to burnout and 100s of illnesses and how systemic trauma impacts that relationship.

Details here: https://traumageek.thinkific.com/courses/systemic-trauma-and-the-stress-cycle

Inner parent: What do you want for dinner, love?
Inner 5yo: Spaghetti
Inner parent: Okay! But are you sure, we’ve done that for the last 3 meals?
Inner 5yo: Spaghetti!
:::I go put the water on to boil:::

I wasn’t ever allowed to have a picky eating phase as kid - I would have gone hungry before my mom made the same thing for me two meals in a row, because “balanced” nutrition was that important. Instead of incredulously questioning my inner child, I just make spaghetti again.

Experiment #2, Negotiating with my inner child in a kind and loving way about what we should eat.

Inner parent: What do you want for breakfast, love?
Inner 7yo: I’m still tired from yesterday. Can I have cookies and juice for breakfast?
Inner parent: Of course! What do you want with them? I could make eggs, or turkey and hummus pinwheels, or apples and peanut butter.
Inner 7yo: apples and peanut butter, and do we have any bacon left from yesterday morning?
Inner parent: you got it kiddo
:::I cut up an apple and heat up the bacon while the cookies finish up in the toaster oven, and then I make tea to remind me I am an adult and not a seven year old today:::

Cookies and juice is a totally reasonable request when I’m calorie depleted from coping with all the sensory input and social expectations. I know it doesn’t “ruin” my meal to start with sugar. My brain runs on glucose. Adult me knows how sugar crashes work, so I offer protein sources to pair with the sugar for more sustained energy.

Experiment #3, Negotiating with my inner child in a kind and loving way about what is realistically possible regarding food

Inner parent: I’m really tired tonight, so we only have two choices for dinner. We can make a picky plate from the fridge or order takeout, but I don’t have the energy to cook.
Inner 11yo: Can we order hibachi steak and sushi and fried rice?
Inner parent: That’s not in the budget, dear. If we do takeout, you can order one dish, and I’ll get one, but we can’t get 3. Which one is your favorite?
Inner 11yo: I guess then lets make a charcuterie plate from the fridge. I’d rather have the variety. I wish you made more money so we could order all of the things I want.
Inner parent: me too, love, me too

When my inner child tells me what they want, you can be damn sure I do my best to make it happen. That trust is how this practice re-wires my brain. But I’m still a spoonie ND adult with lots of limitations. If the request is unfulfillable, we have a conversation and find a compromise. I help my inner child understand the realistic limitations I face and offer empathy while they have feelings about those limitations.

Experiment #4, Letting my inner teen make the grocery list

I won’t share the whole list because its long, and I don’t want to subject my inner teen to the internet’s judgement about what they eat. My inner teen still sometimes wants toddler food like juice boxes and cheerios, but they also need an extreme level of variety to be happy with food. They are a sensory sensitive gestalt processor who finds safety in food gestalts - specific pairings and combinations of foods that relate to specific moods or environments.

Choosing foods my inner teen wants is healing my relationship with food. The health of this relationship has become infinitely more important to me than calories or weight. I’m re-doing the motions, re-wiring the synapses so that my bodymind gradually unlearns the deep rooted fear of food. My grandparents were teens during the Great Depression, so I’m healing an entire lineage of food scarcity trauma.

Explanation, where I got this idea

In 2018, I was diagnosed with anorexia, but it was actually orthorexia and ArFID. That sent me on a journey of research about how eating disorders are treated medically. I found out what they did in outpatient refeeding programs and started doing that for myself, but I quickly realized that positive self-talk about the food was just as essential as eating. Forcing myself to eat was re-traumatizing, so I needed to find a way to encourage refeeding where my whole mind, body, and soul would be on board with the process.

An ancient tumblr concept re-applied,
the mom friend over-ride.

The mom-friend override was a phenomenon named in the 2010s on tumblr. It describes how a person with anxiety is unable to do a thing for themselves, say make a phone call or order food, but they can do it for a friend if their friend needs them to do it. If you google mom friend override, you’ll see a number of memes about this silly little social theory.

People who do the mom-friend override tend to be people who prioritize others needs over their own as a coping mechanism. I theorized, maybe I can use this mental trick to take care of myself, by being the mom-friend my inner child needs. If I can see my inner child’s needs as separate from my own, I might be more motivated to take care of them. And I was right! The more I can metaphorically and symbolically create a space for my current self to meet my inner child’s needs, the easier it has become to take care of my body in a variety of ways such as through food, water, movement, and connection.

Study with Trauma Geek

The Nervous System Study Guide, eBook pre-sale

I’m turning my Nervous System Study Group curriculum into a workbook you can engage with on your own or in community. This eBook covers polyvagal basics and critique, neurodivergent and systemic trauma, and pathways toward healing, with reflection questions in every chapter.

I’m converting eight lectures into a readable workbook, adding extra details and brand-new infographics along the way. I’m intentionally not working toward a fixed deadline—deadlines can be a PDA trigger for me—but knowing people want this book genuinely helps me feel inspired to write.

This book is for curious humans at any stage of nervous system learning—from beginners to those with advanced training. This material changed my life. Learning it helped me stop searching for something to heal me and start understanding how my own nervous system works.

Learn More

The Real Mental Health Villains, winter study group

This course was originally scheduled for November but moved to January to accommodate my need for rest and recovery from post-viral inflammatory syndrome.

If you want to stop blaming your brain and body for your mental health, join us January 14 - February 18 for The Real Mental Health Villains. We’ll be working on returning blame to the mental health system by analyzing 9 harmful biases that show up in mental health discourse and ripple out to the rest of life.

If interacting with the mental health system made you feel like you were in an abusive relationship, this is a space that can help you understand why. Our brains and bodies aren’t the mental health villains we’ve been taught they are. The REAL Mental Health Villains are societal myths that have a hold on our collective subconscious, myths that we can consciously choose to reject and replace.

The info shared in the group is intended to spark an outside-of-class process of unburdening shame that we learned from the mental health system. It’s important that people who join have a safe place to reflect and process such as therapy, a journaling practice, dance, or some other hobby.

Learn More

Pre-recorded courses, permanent access

If learning live is not your thing, I have 3 self-paced pre-recorded courses. You get permanent* access to recordings (*for at least as long as the internet exists).

You can learn with me about Holistic Nervous System Science, Neuro-affirming Goalworking (redefining goals), or 50 Vagus Exercises in a Year.

Learn More

What Accessibility means to me

Accessibility starts with prioritizing my own health, wellness, and trauma healing journey, because if I burnout and cannot show up, my work won’t be accessible for anyone.

Accessibility does not mean I can give more than I’ve promised. If you know you cannot access teaching via video, please don’t sign up for a video-based course.

Accessibility in my work is primarily about the fact that disabled people often experience financial struggle because of systemic ableism, and disabled people are the people who are most likely to need my work, and I never want learning with me to add to that financial struggle.

I LOVE being able to include people who wouldn’t be able to participate for financial reasons, because for most of my life I have been a person who would look at course pages and cry because I couldn’t afford to learn. I never want money to be a reason that people cannot access the education I am offering. That’s why everything I offer has sliding scale options and free scholarship spots.

I don’t have a scholarship fund. I plan scholarship spots into the pricing so that if I sell 25 seats in a course, I can give 25 free spots, if I sell 100 seats in a course, I can give away 100 scholarship spots, etc. Scholarship sign up forms are at the end of each course page.

This is the problem with the DSM: the DSM is first and foremost a tool of social control, not designed for the purpose of helping people.

Because this system of labels guides our insurance systems and disability accommodations, we still use it to access help, but adopting its philosophy as our personal truth perpetuates a system of violence. In this essay I’ll share some reasons the DSM is not a source of accurate information, and why lived experience is currently the most accurate information from a scientific and human rights perspective.

The history of the DSM

The DSM is a sociocultural document. It is not scientific or evidence-based.

Rigorous research about neurology was not considered in the formation of the DSM. Rather, a group of scientists determined the formation of diagnostic categories through discussion and voting. (5)

The people who initially determined diagnostic criteria for the DSM were wealthy white male scientists who believed in eugenics. They labeled traits that they possessed as normal and traits that they disliked as abnormal.

There was a vast amount of overlap between the group of men who formed the first DSM and Nazi scientists. Hans Asberger is known for this, but he was not the only scientist on the first DSM committee to participate in or sympathize with Nazi psychiatric programs. (6)

Their original intention for the DSM was to use these diagnostic categories to divide people into two groups: people to be treated so that they return to functioning “normally” (aka performing to capitalistic/industrial standards) and people to be incarcerated or killed because they will never fit normative expectations in any way.

“If science is defined as some kind of systematic study of observed experience applied to hypotheses or theories, and then confirmation or refutation of those hypotheses or theories, followed by new hypotheses or theories that are further tested and refined by new observations – if this is the core of any scientific inquiry, I think that no objective observer can attribute the history of DSM-III, IV, and 5 to anything that approximates this process.” (3)

A clear example is the existence of homosexuality as a diagnosis in the DSMs I, II, and III. Homosexuality was removed from the DSM IV as societal attitudes towards gay people shifted. There was never scientific evidence that homosexuality was a medical condition. Homosexuality was only considered disordered originally because it didn’t fit the cultural norm.

The modern problem of the DSM

The DSM is a tool used to validate and enforce neuronormativity. Neuronormativity is the idea that there is one right way for our nervous systems to function.

This idea is widely held by mental health professionals who agree with the DSM and has been taught to the wider population through recent public focus on mental health awareness.

The use of the DSM to define our experiences is questionable for both scientific and moral reasons. Studies show, psychiatric diagnosis “ignores the biology of mental illness.” (2)

The leader of the DSM IV and other scientists point out the current problems with the DSM.

“In the DSM process, psychiatric leaders enforce their opinions, and then they refuse to change them at all based on any experimental research. That’s not science.
Worse, the leader of DSM-IV is explicit that science is low in priority and should not be valued as the main method of revising diagnosis. Instead, he says, we should base revisions mainly on “pragmatism,” meaning what DSM leaders think is good for everyone else. (A direct quote: It seems clear to me that pragmatic concerns for patient welfare always trump ‘science,’ especially since the ‘science underpinning psychiatric diagnosis is so thin and subject to alternative interpretations.”)” (3)

“Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.” (4)

A 2019 study ruled the DSM “scientifically meaningless” with the note that “almost all diagnoses mask the role of trauma and adverse events.” (1)

The disorder model of mental health stigmatizes neurological differences from normativity as illness or disease. Science more accurately characterizes mental health issues as injury, wounding, and adaptations to stress, disconnection, and lack of support.

The vast majority of the entries in the DSM are genetic neurotypes or trauma response syndromes. One major problem with the disorder model is that both genetic neurotypes and trauma responses are biologically ordered even when they are culturally disordered.

The characterization of mental health problems as originating from distinct disorders is a social theory, not science. The disorder model presented in the DSM continues to divide people into groups of functional vs severely disabled in keeping with its original goal.

The false binary of being fixable or not fixable is harmful when we apply it internally to ourselves AND when people apply it externally to others. Either one implies we are broken, which is not a safe story for people to hold. When we apply it to ourselves it leads to shame and increasingly worse physical and mental health symptoms because shame is an extreme stressor; when we apply it to others, it leads to manipulation, control, denial of agency and autonomy, psychological injury, and most severely imprisonment or death.

The Neurodiversity Paradigm

The Neurodiversity paradigm developed out of disability studies and queer theory beginning in the 1990s. It is organized around resisting the ableist philosophy of neuronormativity.

Neuronormativity is a tool of empire and of colonization which attempts to punish or correct everyone who doesn’t fit the societal ideal for neuro-cognition. Interpersonal and systemic discrimination for not fitting normative ideals causes a significant amount of trauma and distress to neurodivergent people and even sometimes results in our deaths through stress related illness or lack of support that would be offered to a more neurologically “normal” person.

Neurodivergence has become an internet buzzword in the last five years, along with the rise of Neurodiversity-lite, philosophies that use neurodivergent terms but still enforce neuronormativity. When people don’t know the history of the ND paradigm, they may assume neurodivergence = DSM diagnosis without questioning what the diagnosis itself means.

The Neurodiversity paradigm includes cultural analysis of diagnosis and analysis of the power dynamics at play in the mental health system, it does not prioritize diagnostic manuals as a source of truth about who people are or how they function or what their future will be.

Psychiatry and neurodivergence are entirely different things. It might seem like they overlap because both groups use terms like Autism, ADHD, or PTSD, but we aren’t working with the same definitions. Invoking lack of evidence in psychiatry when we are talking about neurodivergence is harmful and oppressive. Psychiatry continues to be one of the main oppressors that the ND paradigm is attempting to free us from.

The DSM (and medical system) is accountable to us, we are not accountable to it

The neurodiversity movement is a political movement that uses the neurodiversity paradigm as a foundation for changing the world.

Like the LGBTQ+ community has reclaimed the word queer, we have reclaimed words like Autistic, ADHD, PDA, and more. When we use these words, we don’t mean the DSM definition.

Today we rely on those same diagnostic labels to access support from a gatekeeping medical system.

Neurodivergent people define themselves, acknowledging the differences in our neurological function and how that impacts our lives. We know ourselves better than any external observer could.

The medical system has never been a defining source on the topic of neurodivergence. There are no scientific tests that show who is neurodivergent and who is not, just like there are no scientific tests to determine gender, sexual orientation, or many other dimensions of cultural identity. Being neurodivergent is about moving through the world as a neurodivergent person and diagnosis isn’t the central piece of that journey - countless neurodivergent people go their whole lives undiagnosed.

When we use the DSM to access support, the DSM is serving us, it doesn’t define us. When we use deficit framed language to access support, that language is serving our purpose of communicating needs, it is not defining us. When we borrow terms from the pathology paradigm to help us connect with others who have a similar experience to our own, we can hold those terms loosely or completely redefine them.

Any time I talk about Autism, ADHD, C-PTSD, etc, I am talking about the lived experience of a community of people. The source of evidence that matters to me is the lived experience of neurodivergent people.

I write and teach to boost info from the ND community. I don’t care about the DSM. It’s fine if you care, but the DSM is irrelevant to me and my work and if you try to correct my writing with it, you are invoking a tool of oppression.

I might have sent you this link because you thought to drop something about the DSM in my comment section, and if that’s the case I hope you’ll take this opportunity to learn or at least recognize that there is more out there to learn.

I HAPPILY block people who double down on defending the DSM after being informed about its history. Seriously, it brings me so much joy to filter out people who are deeply unaligned with my values.

I took the word neurodiversity out of my Facebook page name almost a year ago because I don’t want neurodivergent people in my audience who defer to or celebrate the psych industry. My work is not for everyone who calls themselves neurodivergent. My work is for anti-establishment neurodivergents who are aligned with the neurodiversity paradigm and are participating in the neurodiversity movement.

Resource List

As a policy, I often don’t cite sources because I’m usually talking about lived experience ideas from the community that aren’t published research, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to share a list of scientific proof that the DSM is not scientific. This is one of the rare cases when research validates the community’s lived experience.

1. Psychiatric diagnosis is scientifically meaningless for 5 concrete reasons.

2. DSM 5 ignores biology of mental illness

3. Why the DSM 3, 4, and 5 are unscientific

4. NIMH directors debunk psychiatry’s unscientific modus operandi

5. The Origins of the DSM (video lecture by Dr Jame Davies)

6. The dark side of psychiatry: eugenics, Nazi and Soviet psychiatry

If you want to learn more with me, this is where you can find me in 2026!

My courses always have sliding scale and free scholarship options because I know what it’s like to sit down and cry because I can’t afford to learn something I want to learn.

1) 2026 Workshop Series

March 2026: Systemic Trauma & the Stress Cycle

June 2026: Sensory Trauma

July 2026: Chronic Illness

August 2026: Functional Freeze, Fawn, & Masking

September 2026: The PDA Neurotype

October 2026: The Neuroscience of Community (Understanding C-PTSD)

If you can’t make it live, recordings are shared the next day. Recordings are available at a discounted rate the week after the live workshop.

2) Year-long Course: 50 Vagus Exercises in a Year

Includes:

- Monthly Q & A
- 4+ Vagus Exercises each month shared via short videos
- Discussion Space
- A copy of my eBook when I finish writing it

3) Pre-recorded Course Library

Holistic Nervous System Science (The Nervous System Study Group)

Neuro-affirming Goal Working for Nervous System Care

The Real Mental Health Villains

Here’s my take:

Vaccine injury is real. I’ve experienced it myself and seen it over and over in the ND community.

Recognizing that vaccine injury exists does not suggest that it causes Autism, because Autism is genetic.

Vaccine injury can cause extreme distress in Autistic people, which frequently leads to clinical diagnosis of a person who was born Autistic.

In this personal essay, I’ll share how I’ve experienced vax injury myself and how that led me to understand why some parents of Autistic children continue to believe the myth that vaccines cause Autism.

My experience of vaccine injury

In 2021, I got a covid shot. I was motivated by fear of losing access to community and hope that it would cure the long covid I had suffered with for about 13 months. After a week of horrific symptoms, my long covid indeed disappeared. But that week made me rethink everything I thought I knew about vaccines.

The best way I could describe those 5 days is sensory hell - all of my sensory systems were crying out in pain at the slightest bit of stimulation. My immune response to the vaccine had set off a set of symptoms that I recognized as an intense mast cell flare. I had suicidal ideations because the pain was so bad, though I was not in danger of acting on them because I knew they were a direct result of the severe inflammation pressing on my brain.

My skin felt on fire. I wanted to climb out of my body. I wanted to scream or disappear. All of my muscles and joints ached, but that barely registered compared to the way that light and sound and anything touching me hurt my skin. I couldn’t eat or shower. I was mostly nonverbal, not just nonspeaking, but unable to process or think in words.

During one of my many meltdowns that week, I wondered if this is how some Autistic babies feel after vaccines. I thought about how a baby might act if they were in this much pain. I started to understand experientially why people might think vaccines and Autism are linked, especially if they equate Autistic distress with Autism. If someone saw me before and after that vaccine, they would definitely say, “Something is different now. This experience has somehow changed this person.”

I realized this was part of a bigger pattern in my life. Vaccines have triggered year-long mast cell flares for me at least 3 times before, maybe more but I can’t say for sure whether it happened before I was 3 years old. Each of those longer-term experiences of vax injury felt exactly like my experience of long-covid. The immune activation that the vaccines provoked just never went away. My immune system got stuck in “fight an illness” mode for many months and it was miserable. Systemic inflammation, fatigue, cold and flu type symptoms, and severe sensory sensitivity didn’t go away until my body finally felt safe enough to turn off this immune system fight mode.

After 5 days of sensory hell, I woke up the next morning feeling better than I had in more than a year. Long covid gone. I didn’t fully understand why I suddenly felt better. But I thought maybe it was because I had a ton of safety and nervous system support during that very intense immune system reboot.

What I learned from that experience

As I recovered from my week of sensory hell, I started researching and connecting with other people who experienced chronic systemic inflammation after a vaccine. I noticed a common theme with those people - they tended to be neurodivergent with EDS, POTS, MCAS, PANDAS, or other pre-existing medical conditions.

The Facebook groups that I joined to talk about those symptoms with other people who had the same experience were helpful for about a month. And then they were suddenly deleted and a massive information campaign began to suppress any story that could conflict with the narrative that vaccines are always safe for everyone.

I since started wondering how much vaccine skepticism and resistance is happening because people can see the ND mast-cell spoonies like me have a life-threatening reaction for days or longer and the medical system continues to say, “that doesn’t happen” or “evidence shows it’s safe.”

Seeing a lot of the neurodivergent community participate in that coordinated suppression of some people’s experiences felt deeply unfair to me. In so many other circumstances we have identified that research evidence often fails to account for the full breadth of the neurodivergent experience and frequently ignores the existence of outliers.

Instead of admitting a gap in the science or a need for more study, the public message was a dogmatic certainty of safety. That dogma has led to neurodivergent people being gaslit and refused medical care for their vaccine-induced chronic inflammation responses.

More recently, I’ve been looking for evidence that explains why hypermobility could be a potential predictor of vaccine injury, and I found a fascinating chain of connections.

• The cell danger response is a normal part of our healthy immune response. Our immune systems follow a cycle that is a lot like the stress cycle. The cell danger response becomes a syndrome or illness when the body gets stuck in this part of the immune response and cannot complete the immune cycle. This “stuck” immune response is a part of 100 chronic illnesses such as diabetes, ME/CFS, autoimmune diseases and more.

• RCCX/CAPS gene theory ties a gene for increased immune activation and a gene for increased ligamentous laxity to a gene that is involved in Autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergent conditions. Anyone’s immune system can get stuck in the cell danger response with the right conditions, but it tends to happen more often for Autistic people who have EDS and immune conditions. It’s also easier for our immune system to get stuck in fight mode if we were experiencing trauma when the initial immune activation happens.

• The collapse of the iliac vein because of collagen/elasticity differences in blood vessels has been tied to long-covid, chronic lyme, mold illness, and many other post-exposure illnesses.

“Vaccines trigger a collapse of the iliac veins in susceptible persons (e.g., those with ligamentous laxity and a corresponding weakness of the tissue lining the vessels). This, in turn, causes a variety of complications including micro-clots and mast cell activation syndrome.” - The Hidden Link Between Hypermobility and Vaccine Injury

The real way vaccines and Autism are connected

I remember a toddler I used to nanny for. After a particular set of vaccines, he developed eczema and a lot more tactile sensory sensitivity. For the next few years we played with trains together, we flapped and spun, made funny noises at each other, chased the ducks in the yard, and watched his favorite shows. I understood this kid well enough that I was able to teach his parents how to understand him better.

When he was almost 4, he was diagnosed with Autism. At the time I thought, that’s weird, this kid seems so normal to me. I didn’t know I was Autistic yet, and I didn’t understand Autism beyond Hollywood stereotypes. Later after I was diagnosed myself, I realized that he was Autistic long before the vaccines. It's just that the eczema made his skin sensitive to clothing and that caused some level of sensory overwhelm all the time which made his nervous system that much closer to dysregulation and meltdowns and caused him to need a greater degree of control over his environment to feel safe.

I thought about how easy it would be for an observer to pinpoint vaccinations as the starting point of his extreme tactile sensitivity, and then to make the logic jump to thinking that the vaccines caused his Autism. Especially if they don’t know what Autism looks like without severe distress.

If the first time your baby meets the DSM criteria for Autism is just after a vaccine, it makes logical sense to blame the vaccine. The missing information is that the DSM criteria doesn’t define who is Autistic. It identifies a genetically Autistic person who is distressed enough to merit a psychiatric diagnosis. Without vaccine injury or other traumatic distress, an Autistic child may not be recognized as Autistic until they are much much older.

Autistic people tend to be recognized as Autistic during significant burnout, trauma, illness or other crisis. Autistic people who aren’t that distressed tend to be viewed by others as not-really Autistic or just quirky until their sensitivity leads to trauma, and then everybody knows we’re Autistic.


I’m not saying all Autistic people should avoid vaccines. Please don’t read things into this that I am not saying. If you are Autistic and have never experienced vaccine injury, there is no need to worry. You are only at risk if you have experienced significant inflammation post-vaccine. And that risk needs to be weighed with the risks of not being vaccinated. Personally, I’m choosing to avoid most vaccinations, but I will still get a tetanus shot if I need one.

I am pro-vaccine as long as there is fully informed consent, and I think that the medical system has largely been failing at the informed part of that consent agreement. Validating fear and mistrust of the medical system is important if the goal is to get people to intrinsically want to get vaccinated, like enthusiastically consent, rather than jump into a decision solely out of fear or peer pressure.

Who will have a bad reaction to vaccines is very predictable if scientists would actually study this. There are most likely genetic markers. There are certainly immune markers. We need formal studies of post-vaccine inflammation in people with EDS and MCAS and other immune conditions and we need evidence-based treatment for these reactions. We need our medical system to engage in good faith with the community that has experienced vaccine injury rather than treating us like we are “science deniers” for talking about our lived experience.


This is a not an anti-vax or anti-science take. Rather, it’s a call for more care and safety around the vaccination process. Over-exertion and “pushing through” an acute bout of covid is the main predictor for developing long-covid. Over-exertion during a vaccine-induced immune response can have a similar effect.

Over-exertion includes sensory and cognitive overload, emotional stress, extreme weather changes, and exposure to allergens or environmental toxins. If we get a shot and then go home to recover in a place where relational or systemic trauma is ongoing, then we’re more likely to have a bad reaction. If we can take a day or two off to rest after a shot, and find a safe place to go to for those days, that is ideal.

Pacing any intentional immune activation so that we have adequate time and a safe place to recover is helpful for the average person and extremely beneficial for people who have pre-existing conditions that risk long term inflammation responses.

I’m not qualified to give medical advice. Any recommendations I make are from the perspective of my lived experience, informed by community research, and offered as a form of self-expression, access intimacy, community care.

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Here’s a quotable summary of the conversation we aren’t having about Autism and vaccines:

Vaccine injury is real.

Vaccine injury cannot cause Autism, because Autism is genetic.

The myth that vaccine injury doesn’t exist creates medical trauma.

Genetic Autism, particularly when co-morbid with hypermobility spectrum conditions and mast cell conditions, can predispose people to vaccine injury.

When Vaccine injury happens to Autistic people, it causes significant distress.

Autistic distress is not Autism, but it’s what society thinks Autism is.

People assume that the start of Autistic distress is when a person “develops” Autism, but Autistic babies are Autistic even before birth.

Want to learn more with me? I’m hosting an 8-week course focused on the big picture understanding of the nervous system, including the cell danger response and connections between systemic trauma and chronic illness. We begin Aug 20, 2025.

8-week Nervous System Study Group

My most recent 8-week course had just ended, and a wave of extreme fatigue hit me. I crashed, and for the next 4 days, I could not do anything except eat, sleep, read, and, watch Netflix.

I recognized the early signs of AuDHD/C-PTSD burnout. My body was warning me that if something does not change in my environment, this state would be my new normal.

I also recognized a familiar pattern. I had pushed myself to cope with stressors for a period of time to reach a goal, and near the end of that process, I had the choice to take a break and honor my capacity or borrow spoons from the future in order to complete the goal. I borrowed energy from my future self, knowing it would result in exhaustion, just not predicting quite how much exhaustion.

In my calculations of how much “pushing through” would cost me, I only imagined a few days of recovery time. I didn’t realize my cumulative stressors were so close to being tipped over the edge into burnout.

AuDHD/C-PTSD burnout is a condition that impacts my entire experience of life - mind, body, and soul.

This kind of burnout includes a profound shutdown state, incapacitation, loss of skills, and sometimes pain, inflammation, and other flu-like symptoms such as light sensitivity, nausea, or dizziness. When burnout is severe, it can cause malnutrition, catatonia, and suicidal ideations.

Where NT career burnout is a form of situational depression caused by feeling stuck in meaningless work, neurodivergent burnout is caused by cumulative overwhelm and chronic overstimulation. ND burnout can happen even when we are doing deeply meaningful and heart-connected work.

ND burnout happens when cumulative stress is high and when we do not have enough safety, support, or space to recover from overwhelm.

After I slept for 4 days, the tone of my burnout state shifted. I had recovered enough of my capacity that I now felt overwhelmed by my state of understimulation. There had been little joy or connection or healthy dopamine mining in my recovery space, just rest and a reduction in stressors, which was boring AF.

I felt like the Autistic part of me still needed more low stimulation days. But the ADHD part of me was itching to DO something.

So I sat down with a notebook to start to analyze my burnout state, listing reasons why I’m in burnout this time and listing ways I could find more safety and support for my nervous system. This is an activity that has helped me get out of burnout on countless occasions.

As I took stock of what was wrong to start to make a plan for supporting my nervous system better, I realized I wanted to share these lists. I think you will find some themes that are common to many other ND people in my reasons for my mini-burnout and in my plan of action to help me cope.

Reasons for my burnout (this time)

1. Hormones. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in my luteal phase. I’m grateful that my luteal phase now brings fatigue instead of full-on PMDD since starting low dose Testosterone. Though I’ve depended on cycle tracking for 15 years because my hormones impact my mood and energy so much, I’m in perimenopause now and nothing is predictable anymore. The fact I’m in perimenopause at age 36 is an existential stressor: how long will this unpredictability last? do I still have time to have a child? when will my doctor say it’s time to add other hormones to my HRT?

2. Political moment. The daily influx of both systemic and secondary trauma on social media is enough to put any sensitive person into burnout. Witnessing the collapse of democracy in real time on and off social media feels like the death of a childhood dream. Mirror-pain synesthesia means when I see images of the horrors of immigration camps, bombings, and starving children, I feel whatever pain my body imagines they are feeling. I find myself sobbing for women and trans siblings who are losing access to life-saving healthcare in other states because the people in charge want to engineer our society into creating more white babies. My activism feels so small in the face of all of this.

3. The internet is changing. This might not seem like a big deal, but to my hyperlexic Autistic brain that formed around researching things on Google starting in the 4th grade, it feels monumental. In the last few months, google search results that have been the same for 10+ years are now wildly different. Search engine censorship and paid ranking is at an all time high, and documents about marginalized communities and justice related topics are harder to find than before. For so many years I relied on being able to find some info by memorizing which page of the google search results the link would be on. That is not a thing anymore.

4. Economic instability. I can feel the collective fear of another recession or depression. There is an ancestral trauma pattern in me that says to hunker down and move less so that I need less food to fuel my body. I am not experiencing food insecurity now, but I remember all of the years that I did, and I fear having that experience again. In the last few years I began to learn what it was like to feel secure in knowing that my needs would be met. That peace feels so brittle now, like any moment the support I lean on could crumble.

5. Teaching about Neurodiversity is uniquely difficult. It is simultaneously a radical liberatory concept and a pop culture buzzword. The community of people who want to learn about Neurodiversity is fractured. Students may have read all the same ND social theorists as I have, or they may mistakenly assume that neurodiversity falls under the authority of psych professionals and medical researchers. Questions about neurodivergence sometimes bring up simple explanations of biology, but more frequently, student’s questions delve into societal patterns of trauma and oppression. I love talking about these things, and it’s exhausting at the same time.

6. The comment section is increasingly stressful. This is a pattern with many writers and content creators. People want you to write exactly what they want you to write and they forget that writing is an art. People are dysregulated, easily misinterpret things, and demand that I change for them. People criticize without understanding the framework I’m coming from. There’s moral judgement and accountability demands being thrown around when we aren’t even fully understanding each other. I’m doing my best to only check comments when I’m feeling grounded, but even then, I can feel myself bracing and tensing as I open a thread, armoring against the potential of being misunderstood or worse.

7. I need more stimulation. My environment is more suited to a past version of me. For years I’ve been lowering demands, removing stimulation, finding sensory protective technology, and building my schedule around the assumption that I can probably only do one thing in a day. That was true when I had long covid and it’s true when I’m having chronic illness flares. In the last few years, my mast cell issues are less severe, I’ve integrated more stuck trauma, and my body is stronger, so having only one thing a day scheduled now feels boring. Finding safe stimulation to add that won’t push me immediately back into burnout feels tricky.

A gradually paced plan of action

When I look at my list of what’s overwhelming me, it’s mostly things I can’t control. Just seeing the list externalized helps a lot. Then I started working on list #2, what can I add to my environment to help me get out of burnout?

1. I want to change my language around how I get out of burnout. I’ve been saying “I’m pulling myself out of burnout” but I realized this is not possible. If I’m working to pull myself anywhere, I’m not going to get out of burnout because part of me is fighting with the part of me that needs to collapse. I’m trying to think of it more like surrendering to gravity or letting wherever burnout is pulling me and building a softer padding to land on so that someday I can climb out again when I feel safe enough to.

2. I decided to restructure my week to have a clear rhythm. Fridays and Saturdays are social days. Sundays are for meditation, connection, and re-centering. Mondays are intentionally unscheduled days. Tuesdays are preparation days. And Wednesdays and Thursdays are teaching days. I built this schedule around how I tend to use these days in order to help me protect my autonomy. I also give myself permission to write whenever and wherever I want to. And I can substitute rest for any days plan.

3. I’m disconnecting from the comments section more. I’m only reading comments if I really want to, not because I feel like I should, and not impulsively when I am approval-seeking. I’m thinking about what layers of support I can add to the experience of checking social comments like listening to music I enjoy or sitting in a favorite coffee shop or the park. I’d like to “binge watch” the comments section two or three times a week instead of checking in several times a day.

4. I’m taking a break from teaching Neurodiversity courses, at least for a few months. Nervous system content is easier for me to teach from the heart. It feels more integrated, more easily embodied, and less tender than talking about neurodivergent trauma. I also find the nervous system info to be essential to truly understanding neurodivergence. Neurodivergent liberation depends on us understanding how our nervous systems work in a collective context.

5. I’m writing a letter to a local space about disability accommodation. I used to find a lot of support from this space, but a few years ago they created new policies which made it impossible for me to keep participating. I want to write to them asking for an accommodation, and I want to explain why their policy may pose a challenge for other disabled people. It would be deeply healing to have access to that space again.

6. I’m creating an event in my home for supportive conversations. I want to have chats with people in my local network about practical organizing, mutual aid, and other anarchist stuff. My top priority is safety for our nervous systems so that we can keep having hard conversations. And I love an excuse to cook in large quantities. For some reason, making enough for me and 5+ others is easier than cooking for just me. Feeding people is one of my favorite forms of access intimacy.

Two steps forward, one step back

Just before I sat down to write out these lists, I spent the weekend dancing to feel alive again. After sleeping for a week, I’d lost the ability to imagine a positive future. I could only imagine feeling terrible forever, and I knew that wouldn’t give me much insight into my burnout state.

When a friend invited me to go to a dance workshop weekend, I was in. My burnout had just shifted from over-stimulation to under-stimulation a few days before, and dancing seemed like a great way to get back into my body after nearly a week of feeling shutdown and disconnected.

The dancing was emotionally and spiritually nourishing but physically exhausting. I danced for too many hours. Sensory overload happened multiple times and finding space to fully recover wasn’t really possible. I came home feeling as burned out as when I left but in a completely different way - new parts of me felt nourished and new parts of me felt drained.

Each time I find something that might be the right kind of stimulation to my nervous system, I tend to overdo it or find some other kind over overwhelm along the journey there or home again.

Burnout treading is something I’ve been doing for at least 20 years. It sometimes feels just as hard as it did when I crashed in my early 20s. But I’m grateful to have far more awareness and a lot more support tools so the crash doesn’t feel quite as permanent as it used to.

Rest is just the first piece of my burnout recovery; finding more safety and connection is just as important.

If you want to learn with me in a live course this summer/fall, sign up HERE. My courses always have sliding scale and free scholarship options because I know what it’s like to sit down and cry because I can’t afford to learn something I want to learn.