Episode 100
Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast
Episode 100
[Introductory music]
Meg:
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell, formerly Meg Proctor, from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
Hi, welcome back. We are really excited to finally share our 100th episode with Nessa Hill. Nessa is an Autistic ADHD-er, the director of Neurodiversity Ireland, and a mom of two neurodivergent kids. Her story is everything we need right now about the power we do have to make real change instead of getting bogged down in despair.
Before we get into the interview, I want to let you know that at Learn Play Thrive, we are in the middle of the biggest course launch we have ever had. Right now, we have pre-sale open for a new course from Gillian Boudreau on how we can create and maintain our own inner sense of calm and regulation, no matter what happens in our sessions and how this is a justice issue, since our Autistic clients are losing bandwidth in nearly every environment, including in our sessions. Watching this course felt deeply meaningful, calming, and inspiring to me. And this course from Dr. Gillian Boudreau is different from any course I’ve ever seen.
Secondly, we have a deep, rich, nuanced, and completely game-changing course on social and emotional learning from Katrina Martin, the creator of Bridges Learning System. This course is everything you have ever wanted to know about what you can and should be doing to support your Autistic clients instead of teaching neurotypical social skills.
And finally, we have a course for OTs — especially school-based OTs, but really OTs in any setting, from Kelsie Olds, on how to infuse everything we do with playfulness and fun and still meet goals, including handwriting goals in the schools. Kelsie is basically the OT we all dreamed we would be when we were in OT school, and Kelsie teaches us everything we need to know about how to turn our OT jobs into our dream jobs. To get the details on all three of these courses which are in pre-sale now, and if you want to enroll in two or three, we’re offering discounted prices for that, check out learnplaythrive.com/new.
All right, the interview is coming up. Please stay tuned after for more of your stories about how you’ve used what you’ve learned on the podcast to change your work and change your communities. We hope this episode leaves you feeling the power that you have to reshape the world for disabled and Autistic kids, especially multiply marginalized kids, because you have a lot more power than you think. Here’s the interview with Nessa Hill.
Hi, Nessa! I’m so glad to have you here.
Nessa:
Thank you so much for having me, Meg. It’s really an honor. It really is.
Meg:
Okay. So, the way this connection started is a few weeks ago, you sent me a message on Instagram that said something like, “You can’t know how much influence you’ve had on our community in Ireland. But I would love to talk someday and tell you how much power we have gained via Learn Play Thrive and the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast.” I love, love, loved this message and reached out to you. And I’m really excited to share your powerful story, especially the end of it, but I want to start at the beginning. So, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Nessa:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I’m so happy to take part in this because, as I said, we are huge fans of the Learn Play Thrive movement, and the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast was really where it started for me. I’m a mom. I have a full-time job, but in my spare time around the edges, I’m the director of a charity. And we set up in 2022, and it was really born out of a crisis. Because when our daughter was experiencing some difficulties, we just find, like, we had no support. I’m not sure how much you know about the Irish systems at the moment, but we’re really in the middle of a crisis in terms of lack of supports for neurodivergent children in particular, lack of school places, lack of appropriate school places, like use of ABA still in the younger years and, you know, really nothing for teens with eating disorders, ARFID. We were really at the infancy of supporting neurodivergent people.
And so, in a moment of crisis, I discovered this and then we went through getting expelled or constructively dismissed from Montessori when my kid was three-and-a-half, going on ADHD medication at that age because she, you know, she really needed it, and finding that there really were no services out there. And deciding like we’re going to, we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re going to create them ourselves because, we can’t, we couldn’t really abide that situation where she wasn’t going to get supported.
So, I got together with some friends and we just thought, “We have to do something here.” All of our kids are neurodivergent and we all experienced stigma. Like, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” And, “Oh, I’m really sorry. Your kid can’t come to the school. No, they can’t go to the same school as their sibling.” It was just, you know, everything was awful. So, we decided this has got to stop. And we were a couple of quite, you know, vocal moms. And we decided we could do something about this. Like, we could start changing people’s minds. And that was the starting point, was like, we need to change our community’s minds about how our children are viewed. They’re not part of our community because they don’t get to take part in the local sporting activities. They don’t get to go to the local school. They don’t get to do any after school activities. There’s no summer camps that will take them on because they’re too involved. So, we decided that we’d just, first of all, get our community to sit down and listen to how wonderful our kids are, and what tiny changes the local restaurant or drama club could make to include them.
And then, that just skyrocketed. And we were like, the response was amazing. It was, we were so welcomed. And then, lots of other people want to do the same thing. So, we then also decided, you know, because our kids didn’t have summer camps, we were just going to set them up ourselves. I mean, my co-founder and I have a massive appetite for risk and hard work. And we just decided we were going to set up these two weeks of summer camps. And over the two weeks, we had 70 kids come to their first experience of a social activity with their peers that didn’t involve their parents. And they played, and it was messy play, and water play, and outdoor and it was, that was what really decided for us that we had to do this properly.
So, I started to harass some professionals that live locally, like that were pals that were OTs and SLPs and psychologists in particular, and kind of thinking about Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems, about how we really need to bring in our community and our community of experts to wrap around our kids instead of pulling our kids out to one-on-one therapies, you know, on their own, across town. You know, when they should be at an activity, they’re going to therapy. It just felt wrong. And so, we thought that we could build supports that we really wanted to see, like OT-led playgroups and that kind of thing in our local community.
So, yeah, that’s really, that brought me down a rabbit hole then of discovering that, you know, I’m sure Ireland is a really wealthy, wealthy country at the moment. Post-economic crash, we’ve really bounced back and yet we are so poor in terms of our support for our children. The weakest parts of our society really suffer still because we don’t have any proper disability services or supports for children or adults; and that’s all walks of disability, all types of disability. Our school system doesn’t support children with disabilities of any type properly. Like in Italy, they abandoned the idea of segregated education back in the 70s. We’re just starting to think about that in our Department of Education now. Like, we’re going to think about that now, it’s 2025, and that’s because there’s a massive crisis. There are over 100 kids that don’t have a place to go to school in September, and these children would all have been known to the department from years ago. So, we don’t plan, we don’t take capture any data, we don’t make these, like, long-term 10-to-20-year plans the way other countries in Europe do. Like, Estonia decided they were going to be the best at maths and technology and science. And they are, because they made a 20-year plan and they implemented it. They didn’t just think about what’s going to get me elected next year, what’s going to keep me in my position.
So, yeah, I suppose doing, like, doing the support on the ground also led to advocacy at a national level as well too. And the advocacy part, the most important part for us is the stigma bit. Like, we’ve got to end this stigma. We’ve got to stop how our children are treated, how they’re othered, they’re considered to be different, they’re ‘special’ — I’m using inverted commas here — they’re ‘special education’, ‘special needs’, ‘special everything’, and that’s the bit that just it’s like a big knife that turns my tummy every time that someone says that. Because my daughter is a child, she’s a girl, she’s like any other kid. And she deserves everything that every other kid deserves. Yet, you know, it was a fight to get her a school place, a struggle to get support for her, and so many people are still going through it. So many people in Ireland are still, like, we’re going to — there’s their parents are going to have a sleep out on Friday night outside our parliament because their kids can’t get into the specialized school setting that they need. And why, like, how is that happening in 2025? The parents have to sleep out? So, yeah, that’s a bit about me.
From the Learn Play Thrive courses and the Two Sides podcast, I’ve just, like, sucked up all of this information from the start. From Damian Milton to, like, all the people that blew my mind about GLP, gestalt language processing. And my daughter’s a gestalt language processor. She speaks, but she processes things in whole. I can see that. And I learned so much from Marge Blanc, and Alex Zachos, Rachel Dorsey, and [Name 11:21] and people like that. And then, in terms of our global view of brains and how they’re, you know, the need for diversity and respecting and cherishing diversity came from like Gillian Boudreau, and Mel Houser, and Kelsie Olds, who, you know, people that we’ve then come to get to talk to us as well too. Like, we’ve opened up all these connections across continents, and Casey Ehrlich, who’s like phenomenal in terms of PDA. And then, people like Honey Schneider and Bryden Carlson-Giving, and Devon Pricey, just really bend your mind and make you think bigger and better and change how you — you know, if you can change how you think about being neurodivergent, I think that’s one of the biggest steps that you can take to become inclusive.
Meg:
That’s incredible. I, you know, I know your Instagram name — I think it’s Neurodiversity Ireland — just from seeing you reshare our posts into stories, but I had no idea that behind the scenes and across an ocean, there was somebody with — I wrote this down — “A massive appetite for risk and hard work,” just really taking off and running with it. And you said in your email to me that you took this to some of your government officials, and they’re using it as a little bit of a blueprint. Can you talk about that?
Nessa:
Yeah, absolutely. So, when our crisis happened — and lots of people don’t talk about this. Like, our Autistic daughter who is, has this persistent drive for autonomy and all that brings with it, really took this out on her baby sister, not intentionally, but it almost was fatal in our circumstances. And when that happened, I realized, despite having gone onto a waiting list the year before, nobody knew anything about us. And something awful nearly happened and it would have been a national scandal, but nobody knew that we were in this crisis and had been for so long. So, I kind of demanded to see my local representative who brought me to my national representative. And from conversations with them, you know, I, my initial reaction was, “We’ve got to just disband the system. It’s so broken. We can’t keep doing it the way we’re doing it.”
And I suppose after a few of those kind of more meetings where I was furious, I really harnessed that and decided, you know what? I’m going to show you how we’re going to do this. And I’m going to do this, and we’re going to do it really well. And we’re going to do what we need. We’re not going to keep banging on the same broken drum, because loads of people have protested before and it just hasn’t got us anywhere in Ireland. So, meeting with the representatives, they get, like — the minister at the time gave me the kind of mandate to go and create that alternative approach that you want to see. And then, bring it back to me. And if you can demonstrate that this is something that will benefit the community, I’m behind you, you know, I’ll make this work. So, that’s what we’ve done for the last two or three years.
We’ve been hiring. We hired OTs, like, two phenomenal OTs, Jack Cairns and Meghan O’Rourke, who are just like the leaders in neuroaffirmative occupational therapy practice. I’ve been going around gathering up neuroaffirmative practitioners around Ireland, like emailing, and ringing, and knocking on their doors. And Davida Hartman, who’s a phenomenal psychologist. Katie Cremin, lecturer in occupational therapy in our Trinity College University, and Dr. Gavin in UCD. All these people that are on the same wavelength who really want to support the creation of, it’s almost like a playbook or — I’m saying clinical, and I’m also at the same time saying stop pathologizing our children, but I want to create the actual theory behind what we’re doing.
So, what, the kind of crux of our support at the moment are occupational therapy-led or guided play groups where you don’t need a diagnosis, you don’t need anything. If you think you need support, come to us. You can join our group. We have created this kind of matching tool where we will match kids with similar needs to each other so that they have the best chance of successfully participating in the group and staying there and coming back. And they’re coming back, you know, to their second and third year now, which is just super. We’ve created this community of parents and carers around them as well, too, who we’ve connected on a WhatsApp group where it’s just like real-life, real-time support. Somebody’s been through something already. They’re going to know is that therapist, you know, really neuroaffirmative? You know, have you tried melatonin? Does this work? All those types of questions that everyone has. And we, when we were starting out, we’re like, I don’t know where to find any information. Even I don’t even know where to start. You know, the only thing that we were told about was ABA and oh, my God, could we stop all of that and just do it the right way?
So, that’s what we’ve been doing. And then, telling our ministers and representatives that what we’re doing is working because the kids are really enjoying it and are really, you know, developing in their own authentic way and doing things that they want to do. Not that, you know, you might have thought they should have been doing like handwriting or tying shoelaces or all those things, but they’re doing things, like, for example, feeling safe enough to use the bathroom in a different place, or feeling safe enough to let their parent out of their sight for the hour so that the parent can go and get a cup of tea or something. All those little tiny things that you’re never going to see those in a goals book, really. A traditional standard goal writing is not going to ask for smiling, you know, “Can we see 10-times more smiling today, please?”
But that’s what we want, and that’s what I’m trying to also like measure the impact so I can deliver it to the people in charge and say, “This is what we need to be doing instead.” And thankfully, you know, we have had a bit of support from the government department so far, but I’m really asking for more support because we have our eyes on a permanent home where we can expand our services to this eclectic range of supports where we can bring in siblings, and we’ve got a daily life kitchen, and we’ve got a garden, and we’ve got the parent hub where we can show webinars from Meg Ferrell, and people and we have a coffee hatch where we can employ the kids back in our center. And, like, we just want to do it all in the community. So, that’s the plan.
Meg:
So, you saw an opportunity, you saw something that wasn’t being done, and you made a blueprint. And then, you said, “Here you go. This is how it should be done. Let’s do it this way.” It’s incredible. I hope you don’t mind me sharing, we were chatting before we started and you described yourself as somebody who is determined. Like, you hear ‘No’, and that makes you even more determined to do it. And I say this because a lot of us are supporting kids who have that quality. And it’s hard to see, when they’re a kid, how that quality that might make it hard to help them get through all the things they have to do in the day is really going to serve them in their life. And it’s going to be a strength if it’s allowed to be, right?
Nessa:
Oh, my goodness. So, this is like my hobby horse, is about the social skills training that’s still so prevalent here. It’s like, stop teaching my kids social skills because they’re so harmful to that quality, which is the determination and not the, you know, the self-surety that I am doing something the right way for me, and I know what’s right. And a lot of the time it’s, you know, this, I have this streak of justice that I can’t abide anything that’s not just, anything that’s unfair. I obviously drive my husband insane because he thinks I have to be right all the time, but I, it’s just, I need everything to be right. I need people to do things justly and fairly. And so does my kid, and everything’s a negotiation with her. But then, my job and my day job, I’m a negotiator. So, I should be proud of that, that if I have to negotiate with her to brush her teeth every day, that’s going to stand her in good stead. It is hard. It’s hard work, obviously, but it’s about me changing my mindset about how those skills that she has, those real strengths, positives that come from her.
It was her persistent drive for autonomy, you know. It’s something that we really have to stop trying to dampen down. That’s another reason why we started this charity and movement, because our kids from the start are pathologized. When she was identified as Autistic, the, doctor said, “I’m so sorry,” and, “You should grieve for the child.” I’m like, you need to stop telling parents that, because if you don’t tell parents that, and you say instead, “Your kid is Autistic and they’re going to be really good at being honest and socially just,” and all the positives that come with it, that would have, you’d have a totally different mindset. If the community heard that as well, they would have a totally different mindset. Language is so powerful. And if you change from those rigid ‘repetitive interests’ or ‘unusual ways of playing’ to ‘passionate’, and ‘determined’, and ‘novel ways of playing’, you have a totally different outlook, and you look at the child in a totally different way.
And so, the social skills training bit is something that we’re really going after and asking people to stop trying to fit our kids into the neurotypical kind of mold that they’re never going to fit. And it’s so harmful. My daughter has since, from age three, been able to tell me — because of what she’s been experiencing and say, for example, in the Montessori environment, feeling completely out of place there because she wasn’t able to behave — she would come back and say, “I’m a terrible girl. I’ve got no mind. I’m so awful. Nobody wants me,” and, “I want to die,” when she was three and has always expressed that since, “I’m no good,” when she’s in moments of realizing she’s different, or she’s doing something differently, or she’s not the same as the other members of the group who are doing X, you know, she will say those things.
And I can see how we go from that feeling of I’m not, you know, ‘I’m not the same’ or people are looking at me saying, “Can you stop making so much noise? Will you stop moving so much?” or, “Why are you drawing all those funny things?” Like, all those, you know, other-ings that we do to kids. It becomes a mental health issue. It becomes a self-esteem issue and becomes something that, like, one of the most powerful things that I heard when I started looking into all of this was the statistics that attach to Autistic girls. And the Kennedy Krieger Center did a study last year and found that of under-eight (year olds)’s who are neurodivergent, the under-eights that they surveyed, over 35% of them wanted to end their own lives. So, it starts that young, right? And I know it does. I’ve got it. It’s here. It’s in my house. And we need — everyone else around the kid needs to step back and ask themselves: What am I doing to prevent this from happening? What can I do? How can I change? How can I be better?
It’s not about the kid. She does not have to change. Sure, she needs to learn everything that every kid needs to learn, you know, but not how — not to change yourself, not to learn when somebody asks me something in standard social skills training, it would be ‘Don’t upset the other person’s feelings’. But if somebody asked my daughter, “Is my hair nice?” She’ll say, “No, I really don’t like it like that. I like it the other way,” which is honesty. And why would we teach somebody not to be honest? Why do we teach somebody to deny what they’re feeling for somebody else’s feelings? It’s just creating those situations where, you know, girls become rife for abuse and low self-esteem and all of that leads to all the problems that — and I’ve been through a lot of them. And I’ve only just, I identified, been identified as an Autistic ADHD in the last year or two. If I had known that, I’m not sure that anything would have changed, you know, in terms of parenting or anything like that. But if I had known that myself, I probably wouldn’t have gone through all the various crises that I have gone through, you know?
Meg:
Thank you for sharing. We say it every time we talk about masking, but lives are literally on the line. And I’m so sorry that your daughter had to feel the weight of that and you as well. And I appreciate all the work you’re doing to fight for our kids and our grownups and our communities. I know a lot of people in the U.S. right now are feeling very disempowered and very afraid because we’re at risk of losing so many of our extremely hard fought for, hard earned supports that kids can access. Just curious what you hope that folks in the U.S. and elsewhere who are feeling like they don’t have any power take from your story?
Nessa:
Yeah. So, I think my message to you was probably triggered by watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and, like, Trump’s month in office or something. And we were just, my husband and I were just sitting gobsmacked, like, have we not learned from past experience? Like, what — what, how can this happen again? And we’ve had a bit of it over here with Brexit and parts of Europe moving towards the right. And we experience what happens in the States because, for example, Trump’s first executive order, one of them was to cancel DEI in the government departments. And so, immediately you’ve got big corporations who are here, thanks to our low tax regime, cancelling their DEI initiatives here. And you have tweets from Trump asking R.F.K. to investigate the link between vaccines and the cause of autism. And that reverberates here and we feel it, you know, we suffer with you and I felt your pain. And which is why I reached out because I’d seen your post about these small acts of civil resistance people can make in the face of what feels so overwhelming. I, you know, for me, it’s overwhelming that Trump’s back in power in the States.
You know, we’ve listened in the last week to the governor of Illinois’s speech, J.B. Pritzker, talking about gathering up your courage, your justice, and your humanity; and taking a stand. And for me, that’s what boils down to is, you know what? You’re not going to change the minds; I’m not even going to change the minds of the ministers here. I can’t do that. I can’t turn the ship. But what I can do is gather up all the people on the ground who actually work with our children, talk to them, connect them. We can share knowledge. We can share information. We can speak out, right? We can talk to our schools. We can talk to educators. We can talk to other parents. We can, if we see something that’s not right, like ABA for example, we can speak out about it.
There’s nothing stopping me from saying the reason why I abhor ABA is because it’s like dog training. It comes from gay conversion therapy methods. It’s not right and it causes harm to our children and we need to listen to the people who are telling us that they’ve been through it and they want it to stop. Other things you can do are you can stand up and volunteer. You know, you can actually do something yourself. You don’t have to wait for somebody to do it for you. It’s also professionals — is your practice doing right by the child? And if it’s not, can you stop that and reassess, and take part in something like the LPT course? And relearn; you can unlearn and relearn. And do it together. The professionals can join forces and they can open the gates to the information, you know, that other people need to do better.
The other thing I would say is for parents, is not — I suppose beyond parents too, just don’t pull up the ladder. If you’re okay and you got sorted out, turn around and ask your neighbor, how can I help? What is it that I can do? And what I can do — I suppose that’s the question that everyone can ask themselves — can I understand a bit better? Do I know what it means to be Autistic? Do I empathize with the kid who’s ADHD? Do I actually understand? And if I don’t, what can I do to understand more? What is it that I can do to be better? So, that’s probably all the changes that have come about in society in Ireland have started with civil resistance. I’m going back to day dot, you know, when we finally got access to abortion rights here, because back in the seventies, women took the train across the border to get contraception. And it’s that seed that starts the process, you know. And gay marriage is finally here. That came from a groundswell of civil justice.
So, there are things, those are the kind of things that I’m proud of in Ireland, is that when we do stand together, that we can make change. But I’m not proud at the moment of the extent of homelessness, the lack of housing that we have, and the lack of supports, the lack of health service, lack of women’s rights, children’s rights. Like, I’m not proud of any of that, but I’m proud. I’m proud of what we’re doing and I want other people to know that they can do the same thing too.
Meg:
Yeah, I think the really good news is what you and I have experienced is when you speak to people’s values, it is contagious. I didn’t work very hard to grow an audience for Learn Play Thrive, because people were like, “Yes, I never knew that. I never knew how to do that. But now that you’re saying it, yes. How?” It’s contagious. So, I love your message to providers of how can they model and share values-based affirming practices in their work. And also, the systems of power and oppression to some degree only have as much power as we give them. And so, the worst thing people can do right now is to scroll endlessly to consume all of the bad news and get completely overwhelmed and disempowered by it. They win if we just lie down on the ground and give up, they by default win. But we can do what we can do what’s in our power. And that’s different for everybody, right? Like, you have a different skill set than me and people listening have a different skill set than each of us. But we each have something we can do to try to build the world we want to live in while we are living under these oppressive systems of power.
And if you think about things that we have in the U.S. right now that we still have, like free breakfast and lunch for kids. Those weren’t gifted to us by the government. That was started by the Black Panthers because they didn’t lie down and say, “Oh, man. Our poor kids. I guess there’s just nothing we can do.” They said, “Kids deserve to be fed.” They found a way to feed them. And eventually that sort of got co-opted by the government and then taken in and systematized as a way of taking power away from the Black Panthers, but it fed children, right. So, the people who are going to make change are the people who listen and watch and then say, “Okay, what can I do?”
And your acts of building community, of building mutual support between you and the other people in your community, those are real acts of resistance. So, if all you do is get to know the needs of the people in your neighborhood, in your community, and find ways that you can share and support each other, that is taking power away from oppressive systems and giving it to people who need it instead. So, I love your message so much, and I’m so grateful to you for sharing it with us. I hope people can walk away kind of feeling their power instead of feeling so disempowered.
Nessa:
Thank you so much, Meg. And one thing that J.B. Pritzker said was, “Getting along to get on does not work.” So, it’s within us all to do something, you know, and it’s within us all not to lie down, as you say, and just let it happen. We can all take part.
Meg:
Absolutely. For people who want to follow along with your work and your journey, where can they find you and your organization online?
Nessa:
Yeah, we’re on Instagram at @NeurodiversityIreland, and we’re also neurodiversityireland.com. And yeah, you can find us at either.
Meg:
All right. Thank you so much, Nessa.
Nessa:
Thank you, Meg.
Meg:
I hope y’all enjoyed that conversation with Nessa as much as I did. In addition to Nessa’s story arriving in my Instagram inbox, we were so honored to receive a number of messages from you all, our listeners. I can’t thank you enough for sharing those. And even if we don’t include your audio clip, please know that we listened to them all. We were so moved by your empathy, your openness, your vulnerability, and your self-awareness. So, I’m excited to share a few of the clips from those of you who called in.
I hope in this very complicated time — we’re recording this in March of 2025 — these stories give you a sense of solidarity and hope for the positive change we are all collectively making in our communities and around the world. One theme that I noticed is how much you as practitioners have felt empowered to align your work with your values, which necessarily has helped your students, your colleagues, and your families.
To get us started, here’s an example of colleague collaboration, and its ripple effects:
“Hi, Meg. My name is Diane Warzecha. And I’m an OT working in a public school district in the San Francisco Bay area. My friend and colleague — Linda DeVetter-Dearborn, who is a speech pathologist in the same district — and I, we have been listening to Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast since 2021. We are so excited about this opportunity to let you know the profound impact the information you have shared in your podcast has had in both of us; and really, more importantly, on our district staff and, of course, our students. Meg, your podcast has inspired us to do so many things in our district. In the 2021/2022 school year, we began sharing information in the form of a weekly email called Autism Updates. This was initially shared with a small group of staff within our district, but it is now expanded to a larger group of district staff and also individuals outside of our district.
This week, we are sending out Autism Update #111. And these updates, we share neurodiversity-affirming resources and information about the Autistic experience. We sourced our information from your podcasts as well as many other Autistic-led spaces. We have also engaged with some of the Autistic professionals who we were introduced to through your podcast, and we have also since hired them to speak to our district staff. To date, we have hired the following speakers for professional development opportunities in our district: Maisie Seotantyo, Rachel Dorsey, Matt Lowry, Joy F. Johnson, Tiffany Hammond, and Sarah Selvaggi-Hernandez. We have also learned about PDA through your podcast and have recently engaged a local provider to design a three-part professional development opportunity to educate our staff on PDA strategies to benefit our students. Because of this series, we are also hoping to provide additional training in this subject as it was a very popular opportunity.
We have also been working closely with Maisie Soetantyo, who’s local to our district, on many opportunities, including school assemblies and a neurodiversity-affirming teacher training program, as well as some other things hopefully in the future. In addition, we have engaged Matt Lowry for our case consultation opportunity for our teachers, which took place over the course of the Spring and Fall of 2023. For those public school employees who are listening to this and wondering how we have funded these opportunities, we have worked hard on finding creative ways to fund these opportunities through LEA funding and other district funds, which we’ve discovered through our enthusiasm for sharing the work that we are doing.
I personally work across several sites in the district and I’m often receiving feedback from staff that I encounter about the impact these learning opportunities have had and how they work with our Autistic and neurodivergent students. This, Meg, is all thanks to you for introducing us to this particular lens on autism and for introducing us to these amazing professionals. As you can probably tell, Linda and I are passionate about sharing this information and doing better for our students now that we know better, thanks to the work you are doing. Our goal is to foster a positive self-identity for our students and to increase knowledge and acceptance of different neurotypes within our district and beyond. Since we began this mission, our connections with and understanding of our students by our staff and by ourselves have never been better. Meg, thank you so much for the work you’re doing it is making a difference in our students’ lives and we wanted to let you know that, and thank you for this opportunity to tell you that personally. Thank you so much.”
Meg 2:
We also got to hear from some lifelong learners, which brings me so much joy. Cheryl Stair, who’s based out of New Jersey shared:
“You have helped me as a 60-year-old part-time OT to try to look at and acknowledge the amazing differences that exist in human beings. And my goal as an OT is always to take those strengths, to take those interests, and to make a positive impact; to be a cheerleader, to be a supporter, and a friend. So, that they can reach their own highest good. Thank you again.”
Meg 3:
May we all grow up to be more like Cheryl.
Okay. Here’s William Pickard, who’s been a support worker for over 30 years. And William’s takeaways model the Learn Play Thrive values:
“Your podcast is a constant reminder to me that there’s no one ‘fix’ for anybody. It’s not about getting to societal norms. It’s about having the authenticity and autonomy of each individual client at the forefront of your mind. And every time you come on with the podcast, it reminds me that that’s what I need to do. And that that’s the battle I need to fight with, the forces which try and make cultural norms the target and the satisfaction of their own targets.”
Meg 4:
William then went on to name a practical example of how he used what he’s learned to advocate for a specific student. Here’s William:
“I went to a meeting around a child who needed to wear have ear defenders because he was noise sensitive. And the OT suggested that we started to remove the ear defenders so that we could start to get him used to and sensitize to the noise. It’s a very old story. But through listening to your podcast and to listening to your thoughts, I was able in that meeting, to stand up and say, ‘No, that’s inappropriate. We need to make environmental adjustments to the school if we’re going to be able to enable the child to have places where he can remove his defenders.”
Meg 5:
William, I just LOVE this story. We don’t need to fade out accommodations and supports, and I’m so glad you were able to confidently stand up for your client.
Next, we heard about other concrete changes that you all made, starting with one of my personal passions — the need for bodily autonomy for our clients.
“Hello, I’m Sapna, a speech-language pathologist calling from Copenhagen, Denmark. I have, for quite some time, been following Learn Play Thrive. And, you know, looking through your materials and listening to the podcast and all the courses that you’ve done. One of the things that I really liked was about — and something that I used in my practice here with Autistic children — was, of course, about the fact that when you’re offering to help physical help, it is important to take permission because it has such great implications on how a children see autonomy over their body. I will usually do it even before, but it was not something that I would think about before offering physical help. After listening to or going through one of your trainings, I realized that this is something I have to consciously think about. And I’ve been really practicing this. But, you know, all the children that I work with, whether they need help with, you know, carrying something, or they need me to hold their hand, or, you know, they need help in outside play to climb up to something, I now consciously think and would ask this question, ”Do you want me to hold your hand? Or do you want me to carry something for you? Do you need help with that? Is it okay if I, you know, help you go up on that swing?” And I feel like with one of my kids, especially, this has kind of transferred on to him being able to kind of ask similar questions of others. So, while I model and use this language with him, he started using this language with other people. And, you know, kind of using that as a way to offer help. So, I see it has two-fold implications on respecting the autonomy and teaching children that they have control over their bodies, but also modeling language, so that they can offer their help to other people and, you know, get closer to other friends or use communication skills. So, it’s one of the examples of the language, mindfulness in using the language, that I picked up from a few courses. So, thank you, and keep up the good work.”
Meg 6:
Sapna, the ripple effect you described gave me chills. That is so powerful, and thank you so much for sharing.
Another practical, international example comes to us from Elizabeth, who’s an OT in Queensland, Australia.
“It is lovely to be able to have this opportunity to reflect on all the different ways I now approach my practice as a direct result of listening to the podcast, as well as joining the Summit this January. Things that I’ve really focused on in my practice have been introducing and utilizing affirming language. My therapy now focuses more on interoception, executive functioning, and sensory strategies. And I do my best to advocate and educate individuals, families, schools, and service providers about Autistic culture.”
Meg 7:
Jamie, an SLP in Mascoutah (mu-skoota), Illinois, shared how learning about gestalt language processing “lit a fire” inside of her, and how that has inspired her work and collaboration.
“A few years ago, I first was introduced to gestalt language processing through the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. And it was eye opening. And so, so evident to me that majority of my caseload at the time were gestalt language processors. And I took what I learned, I immediately brought it to my bosses. I needed everyone to be on the same page, and it was like, ‘We have to —’ a fire was lit inside of me, ‘We have to do something more. This is not enough.’ After that, it’s literally been a constant state of learning and unlearning. And this community has been a huge, huge resource in part of that for myself.”
Meg 8:
So many of you highlighted the meaningful paradigm shifts in your practice, with a focus on unlearning compliance-based therapies, and replacing them with more neurodiversity-affirming, authentic, autonomous supports.
To that end, we’ll hear from Jen, an OT & parent coach in the Boston area:
“I’ve listened to every podcast and keep up with those regularly. I’ve listened to many of them more than once, and I’m constantly sharing them with others. It’s been so perspective shifting, and it was really just what I needed. It helped my practice in a way that I just, I can’t even really give all the, you know, it’s just hard to explain it. It’s changed the relationships I have with my students, for sure, in the best of ways. I was much more easily to connect with students, I was much more able to understand students’ perspectives, and the sessions were so much more meaningful for the students. And I could tell that because students were so much more engaged, they were able to meet expectations so much more easily… So, it’s really just been this huge game changer for me and for the students I worked with.”
Meg 9:
Thank you so much for sharing your story Jen — and I recognize your name from the early, early days of the podcast and LPT, so thanks for being one of our long-time supporters and cheerleaders.
Weaving in themes of empowerment, collaboration, and being client-centered, Mark, an OT in a home setting in the Denver and Boulder areas of Colorado shared the following:
“This podcast has really impacted me in a lot of ways and I love the chance to listen to episodes regularly so I keep getting reminded of the same very important things. I have been able to advocate better for my clients and their wants, and their right to a happy and meaningful life on their terms, at least in most part. And I found that parents and teachers and other professionals I talk with really do respond well when I advocate for my clients because I think we all know this innately. And I think there’s the culture may be fresh for being, receiving what this podcast is putting forward, as putting the client’s wants and needs for a high quality of living first because of the positive responses I’ve seen.”
Meg 10:
Mark, I just want to echo this. That my work is easy because all of you really know your values. And when people hear something that aligns with their values — even if it challenges their practices — so many people will stop and pay attention. That’s true about all of you, and, from what it sounds like, true for some of the folks who y’all are sharing what you learn with.
We’ll end with Angie, an SLP in San Francisco.
“In grad school, I feel like we primarily learned about the medical model of disability, which is all deficits-based. So, starting my career as a school-based SLP, I received a lot of goals written by others that I didn’t necessarily agree with. So, it was very difficult to take on these goals and take data on them when it wasn’t based in the child’s strengths, or what was really important for that family. But now, I have had my eyes open to the social model of disability, and I feel empowered to spread a connection-based ideology with parents and other professionals.
The podcast has been so inspiring and thought provoking. It’s instilled a lot of change in me in the way I practice, and I feel happier and more confident in my skills. I feel like we are all trapped in a constant push-and-pull of a capitalist society. So, finding the beauty in connecting with others in a real way has motivated me to remain in the field of speech therapy, and spread love and optimism, and teach others about what it means to be neurodiversity-affirming, connection-based, and child-led. The podcast has lit a fire in me and revealed a passion for the work I do. There’s so many people who can benefit from listening to the guests you have on Two Sides of the Spectrum. And I love being able to recommend it to other professionals and parents. So, I just wanted to say thank you for the work you do, Meg, and the podcasts and courses you offer are really helping to change the world.”
Meg 11:
When Angie said “feel happier and more confident in my skills” I just started smiling. I’m so glad for that for you, Angie, and for your clients.
So, as we wrap up our hundredth episode, I just want to share my deepest, most heartfelt thanks to all of you for listening, caring, and doing the hard work on the ground. We’ll be back in 2026 — if not before — with something new for you so we can keep growing and learning together. In the meantime, you can find us at learnplaythrive.com, or on Instagram as @LearnPlayThrive.
[Ending note]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a minute to rate us on your podcast app and share the episode on your social media. This helps us reach more people and create even more change. And if you’re looking for more, visit learnplaythrive.com for a neurodiversity quiz, free master classes, and in-depth continuing education courses. Join us back here next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.