Also posted over at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/igcampbell_im-gonna-break-a-taboo-or-three-here-for-activity-7097675694574383104-et8O
I’m gonna break a taboo or three here for instructional purposes:
Being autistic and hearing all your life “be less blunt for fuck’s sake” means that ALL the brain goblins come out when it’s corporate review time and you need to advocate for yourself. It is one of the most anxiety-making, depression-inducing scenarios I face, and that’s even in the context of having as a boss one of the folks I trust most on this good green earth. (If I didn’t trust him, I surely wouldn’t be talking about this in public!)
But if you’re involved in review and compensation processes for neurodivergent folks, please reflect on the following:
Most of us neurodivergent folk have been told all our lives to be less blunt, less self-interested, more yielding and more reserved. Those admonitions are internalized into weights tipping the scales in any conversation we have with ourselves, from how clean the closet is, to breakfast, to friends to romance to work, and can easily activate fight-or-flight trauma reactions that few others understand.
In review and compensation talks most advice is to be the opposite. You can never expect anyone to advocate for you but yourself, especially to the extent of your needs. You’re told to be strong-willed and firm in negotiations, to be up-front and bold. Strategic, but fully self-interested.
So it is worth understanding that when you enter into review and compensation talks with a neurodivergent employee, you’re suddenly putting them in the position where they can either be passive, or take the chances being the traits that they’ve been taught not to be through friendship-ending conflicts and relationship breakups, through family drama and social trauma packed on social trauma. Not only does it re-engage past complex trauma but in the immediate here and now it deals with our livelihoods, adding to the survival-horror, fight-or-flight activation. And frankly, most of our bosses have taken advantage of this over years and decades.
If you’ve got ND employees, please keep this all in mind when you engage them. Remember we’ve been taught socially, over and over again, that advocating for ourselves will be seen as a threat or insult to others, to groups, to organizations, to paradigms. And often the result has been exclusion.
I don’t have good answers for how to conduct this in a way that wouldn’t make me break out in a cold sweat just trying to decide whether to self-advocate. And to remind you all: there are few people in the world I trust more than my current boss, who is a joy and an honor to work with. I’m incredibly lucky and privileged to be at a place where I can push back against reaction within myself without going on the war path. But the reaction is what it is. Please be mindful of it, please find some way to work with it gently.
Us neurodivergent folk can contribute greatly when we understand the novel safety of a great boss and company. Hold that space for us and you’ll see miracles worked.