(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) I recently learned about hyperverbal autism.
Everything suddenly made sense, like more sense than
it had made before.
And immediately after that, I realized there was
a lot of neurodivergent grief.
And so I wanted to talk to you
about that on this week's Feather Mane Soul
Wisdom Show and share about my neurodivergent grief
circles.
Join us.
You're listening to Feather Mane Soul Wisdom, a
podcast for those looking to rediscover their wild
spirit in spite of life's challenges.
If you're living with a chronic illness or
neurodivergent or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking
to connect with your own inner untamed essence,
then this show is for you.
Your host is Kit Kaelstow, wild spirit storyteller.
Thanks for listening.
And now onto the episode.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of
the Feather Mane Soul Wisdom Show.
I'm Kit Kaelstow, your host.
Thanks so much for your patience.
I had a bit of a break, worked
out some technical issues that I was experiencing.
My main file server went down, so I
had to get everything back up and running,
but we are back.
And I wanted to talk to you today
about hyperverbal autism and neurodivergent grief because I
saw an explanation on social media.
A therapist or clinician was explaining what hyperverbal
autism is and why it's often the reason
that people assigned female at birth were not
diagnosed as autistic back in the 80s, 70s,
90s, long, long time ago.
So let me start by just giving a
brief overview of what that is.
Hyperverbalism is known as a communication processing style.
It is so much more than just talking
a lot.
And I received a lot of feedback in
elementary school and in middle school about, I
talked a lot.
I come from a family of storytellers.
Now, I'm the only one that's a published
author, although that was my mother's dream for
a long time.
But my mom, my grandpa, my dad, to
some extent, if you get them talking about
things that interest them, for example, my mother
was a nurse.
And so she would talk to her nurse
friends about the cases, the patients, maybe, you
know, findings that they had, what they're discovering,
whether different employers were good or not.
And once you got one of my relatives
talking, you pretty much were guaranteed not to
leave wherever you were for like an hour.
And so hyperverbalism, I think, is something that
I saw a lot in my family.
And when I talk about neurodivergent grief, I'll
get into that in a bit more.
Some of the key characteristics are advanced language
skills, speaking with big words, those $5 words,
complex or very technical vocabulary, often from a
young age, needing to verbalize thoughts out loud
to process them.
And so that's something I catch myself doing
quite often throughout the day, to process like
what I want to do next, I'll be
like, okay, I need to do this and
this and this.
Or as I'm doing something, I will speak
the steps to whatever that is out loud
to kind of be able to internalize and
process them.
Monopolizing conversations.
So this means talking at length about very
specific interests, such as your special interests, without
realizing that others have tuned out or want
to add something to.
The one that I really see myself in
a lot is the lack of a filter.
And this is a difficulty parsing or prioritizing
or moderating your speech volume and speed.
Quite often, I will discover I've been talking
really, really loud when I did not mean
to.
And then finally, a key characteristic of this
is using speech as a stem by finding
a favorite word, phrase or talking in rhythmic
patterns.
And so an example of this is there
was a commercial where the jingle was avocados
from Mexico.
And at the time, my spouse and I
were taking turns traveling from where we live
up into Iowa to see our family.
And one of the towns we passed through
is Mexico, Missouri.
And so we'd always, you know, text each
other landmarks.
And so for probably about two years, when
I reached Mexico, I would text my husband
and say, avocados from Mexico, Missouri.
And, you know, I thought that was funny
as heck.
He was just kind of like, whatever.
But that's the sort of sensory seeking or
soothing that you get from languages.
And so hyperverbalism being so much more than
just simply talking a lot brings with it
some challenges.
First of all, it can lead to social
burnout, because people are going to perceive you
as dominating the conversation, as being self-centered,
as being arrogant or overbearing when you are
speaking past expected social thresholds.
And that's one of those non-spoken, non
-delineated rules that neurotypicals have about how you're
supposed to act when you're out in society
that never gets communicated in a helpful way
to neurodivergent people.
It just gets used to basically tell us
how we're different.
It can mean that social cues are missed
because of the way that you process language,
the type of advanced language skills that may
mask challenges in interpreting sarcasm or tone or
even turn-taking.
It also can be very exhausting because we're
not just speaking in this manner.
This is also how the internal monologue goes
in your mind.
And so that internal hyperverbal processing where your
thought speed, your emotional volume, trying to figure
out social cues can be extremely, extremely exhausting.
And so I am not a therapist, and
so I don't feel like I can, you
know, speak too much on hyperverbal autism except
as somebody who experiences this.
But what it does do is it brings
up the topic of neurodivergent grief.
And neurodivergent grief is a topic that at
least for me personally, I have been extremely
interested in and exploring.
In fact, I spearheaded the publishing of an
anthology back in 2021 on neurodivergent grief because
the topic interested me back then.
Now that I have become a certified pet
loss grief specialist and a certified grief coach,
I really am seeing the intersections and the
ways that grief really connect with a neurodivergent
experience.
And so neurodivergent grief shows up with the
hyperverbal autism in many different ways.
One of the first ways I've already touched
upon, and that is if your natural way
of speaking, if the way your brain processes
words, if the words and vocabulary you like
to use, and the way, you know, my
spouse explained it was that he likes to
use exact words.
So if he has one of those five
dollar words to borrow a phrase from publishing,
if he has one of those big words
that means something specific, he's going to use
that rather than a less specific simpler word.
I'm reminded a bit about my college experience
and how, you know, the professors really looked
for certain terms related to my discipline.
And some of these terms I had not
heard of because they did not come up
like, and I'm not sure I'm going to
pronounce it right, but heuristic or pedagogy.
Words like that that seem to be very,
very specific and very big can affect the
verbal processing.
And that so there's grief there because if
the way that you are speaking is not
accepted by the vast majority of people, and
let's be honest, a lot of hyperverbal autistic
people grew up and went through a large
portion of their adult life not realizing they
were autistic.
And so they basically internalized the grief that
the problem was them, that they are not
right.
We know that's not correct.
And that's something that with wild spirit storytelling,
I really am working to get to the
heart of and help change the thought processes
for people who have internalized those stories that
don't belong to them.
But there's grief there because for one, there's
grief of not being accepted.
There's grief of not being considered a part
of a group or as an adult, never
fitting into a workplace situation, never feeling, excuse
me, never feeling as if you could fit
in, or as if you're going to fit
in.
And that gets exhausting in and of itself
when you have that experience over and over
again.
It also means that you're constantly misunderstood.
And it means that you start to second
guess the way you present yourself in the
world.
And that second guessing starts to lead to
isolation.
It starts to lead to burnout, depression, and
it starts to lead to pulling back and
not not participating in the things that bring
you joy.
And so there's grief over the lost joy.
There's grief over the feeling like you're not
able to be in the world as you
are.
And there's grief for the what ifs.
There's grief for the what if I were
different?
What if, you know, my communication style were
different?
And you start to think about that and
it can it can really bring up a
lot and it can really be a lot.
And so that's why I really think something
that does not get talked about enough.
It is that people need to talk about
neurodivergent grief.
And that is why if you go to
feathermanesoul.com and click on events, you will
notice that I am now running a monthly
neurodivergent grief circle.
What this circle is, we come together over
Zoom.
Cameras are totally optional.
You don't even have to talk if you
don't want to.
We'll start, I'll give a little reading, a
little talk, maybe podcast length about where I'm
focusing right now or what's caught my attention
in this space.
And then we just open up the floor.
And this is a time for you to
bring what grief you're experiencing, bring what grief
you're dealing with as related to your neurodivergent
identity, and share it with the group.
If you feel like you want to ask
for advice, you certainly can.
But the focus of this is not an
advice circle.
In fact, I would suggest and one of
the rules is you don't give advice unless
somebody asks for it.
A lot of times people just want to
be heard.
They want to be witnessed.
They want to have their experiences validated.
And if somebody asks for assistance, you know,
we'll talk that over.
Otherwise, it's just a matter of sharing and
perhaps sitting with or working through those emotions
that come up in the moment.
It's a very gentle place.
Grief circles last anywhere from 60 to 90
minutes, and they are free to attend.
Although I would love a small donation.
I've set a suggested amount of $5 to
help offset my cost in running those.
Again, it's feathermanesoul.com slash events.
But beyond that, beyond attending a grief circle,
how can you deal with the grief and
the emotions around being a hyperverbal individual?
And how can you handle that and make,
you know, make that better, make the experience
better for you?
Well, first of all, it comes back to
a core tenet of my work.
And that is remembering that you're not broken.
If anything, the system in which we live
and the society and culture in which we
live is broken.
You're not broken.
You're not wrong.
However, your brain processes that, you know, information,
however verbal or not verbal you are, however
you feel like communicating in a given moment,
is not wrong.
It is not something that you should, you
know, try to tuck away or hide from
the world.
Because your emotions are real and your emotions
are valid.
And you have something of value to contribute.
Now this is usually about the time when
people look at me and kind of go,
yeah, right.
I've heard this all before.
However, it is important to remember that you
do have something of value to contribute and
that your contributions are welcome regardless of what
people tell you or how those contributions are
perceived.
The way I look at it is this.
We each have core values inside of us.
You know, they might be things like be
kind, be consistent, do what you say you're
going to do when you say you're going
to do it, be reliable, be creative, be
curious.
As long as you are acting within those
values, and of course, you know, those values
would not include like doing harm to other
people or hurting other people.
Those are not core values.
But when you act within core values that
are deep inside yourself, and that do not
actually wish or create harm on another person,
then you're doing the best you can with
what you have.
And the other person has to meet us
halfway.
At least.
Communication is a two-way street.
The very idea that neurotypical people expect neurodivergent
people to completely ignore our own innate communication
style, our own innate ways of processing things,
in order to be easy and convenient for
them is excuse my French bullshit.
Communication is a two-way street.
They need to meet us halfway at the
very least.
If we're doing the best we can, and
they're not reaching out at all, then that
is on them.
If we're doing the best we can, and
they're trying to understand, and we're trying to
find some center mutual ground, that's great.
But that should not mean suppressing or denying
our own communication styles, the way our brains
work, and how we process information.
And that includes being hyperverbal.
I feel pretty strongly about that, if you
can't tell.
And so I think for me, learning about
hyperverbal autism, which was something that until I
had seen this post, I did not know
about, hadn't been brought to my attention.
I honestly thought that the way I spoke,
the way I thought, the way my speech
patterns were, was actually part of my ADHD.
I thought it was the impulse control, and
that's how that works.
So the fact that being hyperverbal can affect
our speech patterns, and the way that we're
understood, also can be masked by other conditions,
or other ways that our neurodivergent brains work.
All of that really kind of comes together
to prove and to show that we each
communicate in our own unique ways.
And the most accessible communication is the communication
that's easiest for us, and the communication that
allows us to be as authentic and as
comfortable in that communication setting as possible.
So I just wanted to throw this out
there, especially with an invite to the grief
circles.
I am really curious what you think about
hyperverbal autism, or maybe some of the grief
that's come up around your speech patterns, or
the ways that you process information.
If you're seeing this on a platform that
allows comments, I would love to hear your
comments below.
If not, you can go to feathermanesoul.com,
click on blog, and you'll see this post,
and drop me a comment on the blog
post.
I really hope you can make the grief
circle.
Thank you so much for listening, and please
don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you're
hearing my voice.
You've been listening to the Feathermane Soul Wisdom
Podcast, hosted by Kit Kaelstow.
Learn more about Feathermane Soul at feathermanesoul.com.
As a wild spirit storyteller, Kit is passionate
about helping those who are neurodivergent, disabled, or
living with chronic illness rediscover their own inner
wild spirit.
Visit feathermanesoul.com to receive free gifts, or
book a free call with Kit to discuss
how wild spirit storytelling can help you.
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