Hyperverbal Autism and Neurodivergent Grief

(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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