If you are neurodivergent (editing to add: I mean ANY degree of neurodivergence, whether you were aware of it in childhood or not, whether professionally diagnosed or not,) I highly recommend following professional children's disability advocates who are themselves neurodivergent
and these can be like, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, whoever. Anyone who works in what might be called "special ed," who is neurodivergent.
Because they will be posting ALL of the things about what neurodivergent kids benefit from in an educational setting and what is harmful to them. That's their job, and they're uniquely good at spotting those patterns bc they share many experiences with the kids themselves, and once WERE THEMSELVES disabled kids in an educational setting. They Know what options/accommodations/interventions feel like and what they needed and did not get. AND, they used that experience as motivation to learn as much as possible about learning and child development and what kids actually need, from an expert standpoint.
They'll tell you exactly why what happened at school hurt you. Because they know. and they know what alternatives might have actually supported you instead of traumatizing you!
Reading about this is extraordinarily triggering for me, to be clear.
But I do it, because when I am reading about best practices, it immediately becomes clear the gap between that and what I received growing up. The advocates explain WHY kids benefit from one setup and are harmed by another. I can absolutely tell immediately what specific aspects of my childhood and upbringing were the most traumatic to me based on the extremity of my reaction to the content. I can gauge that by tracking my emotional reactions to reading about varying specific topics or situations, and the ways that adults might handle those situations. Because whenever I was made to feel like the way it happened was the only possible way it COULD happen, and told I was weak and broken and not trying hard enough for desperately needing something different? They were lying.
We now know that they were lying. There were other ways to do it that would have had my own experience and wellbeing in mind. Ways that would not have damaged me so profoundly during such a crucial developmental period in my life. Often the solutions posed by advocates are ways that I was advocating for AT THE TIME, AS A CHILD -- the number of "best practices" I read nowadays that are just LISTS OF THINGS I EXPLICITLY ASKED OR BEGGED FOR. I swear to fucking god.
Anyway. If you related to my last post about school trauma, here is some actionable advice. I like NeuroWild and Destiny Huff (on fb and insta) for starting out, and you can find and follow other people doing that work through them, hopefully.
I joke about it being humiliating to be traumatized because "my parents made me go to school" but I am extremely serious that school trauma can ABSOLUTELY be some of the most damaging childhood trauma. Schools are not built to serve children, and they're especially not built to serve any children who fall outside of certain very specific parameters, who happen not to thrive under the way the education system works.
This is the root of everything wrong with academia -- the way our entire society approaches both 1. child rearing and 2. education are, from a prosocial and literally human-centric perspective (I think of this as Social Ergonomics,) some of the least effective and most harmful ways of doing those things.
Many, many people are stuck in their lives because of what they do not realize is school trauma. It is very rare even in childhood trauma spaces to discuss school trauma, because it is a type of trauma which inherently requires people to question the entire foundation of some of our least questioned Systems. Institutional trauma is extremely hard to discuss, because it rests at the intersection of 'discussions of interpersonal abuse and trauma' and 'sociology-focused institutional justice frameworks' which are things that do not often overlap.
This is why it is helpful to learn about institutional justice/advocacy/liberation frameworks AS WELL as learning about interpersonal abuse dynamics. Many people who are survivors of institutional abuse, who have a concept of what abuse is but do not have a framework for what it looks like in a dynamic other than intimate interpersonal abuse, are unable to recognize themselves as having been abused. That's why I tell people to read about mad pride, prison abolition, youth rights, etc. To recognize your own trauma as trauma requires recognition of the ways in which our society routinely traumatizes people.
