Why I stopped looking for a cure
Ten years ago, when my daughter was three years old, we were living in an absolute nightmare of a situation. She had rage-filled meltdowns that would last for hours multiple times a day. Our house looked like a bomb site, and our family was in a permanent state of flight or fight. I had begun having panic attacks, and none of the parenting tactics that worked with my other four children seemed to work with her. It's hard to describe the hopelessness that had overcome our family.
After some serious advocating, we were given a diagnosis by our paediatrician of Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), Sensory Processing Disorder, a genius IQ, and ADHD. Due to her young age were given special approval for our daughter to begin medication even though it was contrary to the recommended labelling. After an even longer wait, we were then able to finally get an appointment with one of the most respected paediatric psychologists in our area. I was so hopeful that we had found our cure.
Three appointments in, at the end of the session, the psychologist says to me, "I'm sorry, but you're lying to me. ODD only happens when kids are abused, and there is no way that you have the stable marriage and home life you keep telling me." I walked out of the office, got into my car and sobbed- uncontrollable, gut-wrenching sobs.
From that moment, I understood that the mental health care model has a fatal flaw in its foundations. This well-respected psychologist believed at a fundamental level that my daughter, and our family, were disordered. We had done something wrong that caused this to happen to us. ADHD was a matter of biology and inherited brain chemistry, but the ODD was our fault. Somewhere along the way, we messed up on the nurture part of the equation.
Culturally, we see conditions such as ODD as conditions that people may have a genetic tendency towards but are somehow activated in a person due to the environment. We operate under a system where widespread consensus around nature vs nurture determines whether a person is disordered or divergent. The more society sees mental health issues related to nurturing (e.g. ODD), the more willing we are to classify it as a disorder. When society sees it as nature (e.g. ADHD), we are more inclined to call it neurodivergent. Nature vs nurture is just one more binary detrimental to the individual. Every human is a complex mix of nature and nurture, and the divergent should be allowed to be a complex mix too.
I never went back to that psychologist. And after that day, I also stopped looking for a cure. I realised that my daughter didn't need curing. Her beautiful divergent brain was a gift from which she didn't need to be saved. Instead, she needed tools and support to help her manage her divergent brain in a neurotypical world.
You do not need to be cured or rescued from your divergent parts. I would argue that those parts are the gift of the Creator given singularly to you and woven into your being. We need to be given the support and environment that allows each of us to live out the most authentic parts of ourselves with acceptance and safety. The divergent parts of each of us are not the source of disorder. However, the severely flawed systems and environments surrounding us, constructed to serve only a select few, are the sources of dysfunction.
JOURNAL PROMPT: In our family, we have a little saying, "weird is a side effect of being awesome." Is there something in your own being that you have always thought of as broken or disordered? What would it look like if you flip the script and see it as a divergent way of being awesome that just needs a more supportive external environment?
Written by Diana Henderson
dianahenderson.com.au
From this week’s guest series, "A Diverging Faith", with a subscription, in the App.
