The AutSide Podcast

A reflection on classroom ecology, gestalt learning, sensory regulation, and why many autistic and gestalt-oriented students are failed not by inability, but by systems that mistake compliance, fragmentation, and noise for learning.
Today’s conversation with Cathy kept circling back to one central idea: ecology. Not accommodation as an afterthought. Not support as a bolt-on intervention once a student is already drowning. Ecology in the deeper sense—the total sensory, emotional, relational, and epistemic field that a person must live inside in order to learn at all.
We talked about classrooms, but really we were talking about nervous systems. About the way schools often assume that fluorescent light, constant chatter, crowded walls, synthetic scents, abrupt transitions, and performative “joyful noise” are neutral conditions rather than highly specific environmental preferences. The dominant system treats these atmospheres as normal because they suit the people who designed them. But for many autistic and gestalt-processing students—and, frankly, for many autistic adults working within those systems—they are physically and cognitively destabilising. The hidden question beneath the whole conversation became: who is a classroom already designed for before accommodation is ever discussed?
A second throughline emerged around curiosity and institutional rigidity. Cathy spoke about educators beginning to notice children for whom phonics-first approaches simply do not work. Children who read in wholes. Children whose literacy emerges through scripts, patterns, emotional attachment, rhythm, repetition, and meaning rather than sequential decoding. And yet so much of the institutional machinery remains invested in defending the method rather than investigating the mismatch. I realised again that much of my own work—whether the books, the Substack scripts, the journal papers, or the classroom improvisations—comes from refusing that closure. From remaining curious where systems become static. From continuing to ask what happens when the framework itself is the thing failing the student.
The conversation also kept returning to the distinction between part-to-whole teaching and whole-to-part understanding. Cathy described young children becoming engaged through personalised books, favourite scripts, and meaningful narratives. I found myself extending the same logic into secondary mathematics and science. The principle never actually changes. Many students cannot meaningfully hold fragmented procedural steps without first perceiving the shape of the system they belong to. Once the whole becomes visible, the parts begin to organise themselves naturally. But most curricula are designed in reverse. They scatter disconnected fragments across years and expect coherence to somehow emerge through repetition alone.
What sat quietly underneath all of this was the reality that autistic people often spend their lives performing invisible ecological calculations. Not simply “can I do this task?” but “can I survive this room?” Can my body tolerate the lights, the sounds, the smells, the social atmosphere, the pace, the unpredictability? I realised whilst speaking that much of my classroom has become an unconscious refusal of environments that once harmed me. The natural light, the quiet room during assemblies, the lack of sensory clutter, the permission to stim, build, regulate, or simply exist without constant performance—none of these things began as pedagogical theory. They began as survival strategies. But because they emerge from lived necessity rather than institutional design, students recognise them almost immediately.
Another theme running through the discussion was the way education systems mistake compliance for comprehension. Students are rewarded for reproducing procedures and disconnected facts, even when no real understanding has formed beneath them. High-stakes testing then measures whether students can successfully navigate the language of the system itself. And when they cannot, the failure is located inside the student rather than in the architecture of the curriculum, the assessment, or the environment surrounding them.
I think the deepest thread tying the entire conversation together was this: learning is inseparable from meaning, and meaning is inseparable from ecology. Minds do not develop in abstraction. They develop in relationship to environments that either permit coherence to form or continuously fracture it. And when institutions only recognise one acceptable route to knowledge, one acceptable sensory profile, one acceptable developmental rhythm, they do not merely exclude other minds. They render those minds unintelligible within the system itself.
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A geometry moment became a flood. This video traces how one sentence—“the whole may be the accommodation”—unlocked a book, exposing how schools mistake sequence for learning and offer meaning only after access is denied.
It begins small, because it always does. A classroom moment. A student working at the edge of fit—not incapable, not disengaged, but misaligned with the route being enforced. Then a sentence lands—quietly, almost casually—and something in the pattern gives way. What follows is not an idea but an arrival. The whole system steps forward at once. Not metaphorically—cognitively, physically, insistently. This video sits inside that moment of rupture, where recognition outruns language and demands form.
What it reveals is both simple and destabilising: much of modern schooling is built on a part-to-whole logic that assumes sequence is neutral. Break the concept down. Order it. Pace it. Measure it. Then, if a learner cannot enter through that sequence, we offer “accommodation.” But what if that framing is already the error? What if, for many learners—particularly autistic gestalt processors—the whole is not enrichment or extension, but the entry point itself? What if the accommodation is simply the thing that should have been there from the start?
From there, the argument does not stay contained. Geometry becomes a doorway into everything else—language, science, history, assessment, credits, time. Each structure reveals the same underlying assumption: that the sanctioned path through content is the content. That fragmentation is rigour. That support is something added after the system has already excluded. This is not presented as a grand theory but as a pattern traced from lived experience—one classroom, one practitioner, one mind mapping the terrain it moves through daily.
The form of the project matters as much as its claims. This was not written linearly. It arrived as a field—dense, recursive, insistent—and had to be released before it could be organised. What you are encountering here is both an introduction and a threshold into that field. The video names the conditions of its own making: the flood, the urgency, the need to translate pattern into language before it calcifies into distress. In that sense, it is not only about schooling. It is about a way of knowing that does not begin with parts.
What follows, across the series, is offered as a script garden. Not a doctrine, not a fixed model, but a set of phrases and patterns that can travel. Into classrooms, meetings, conversations, decisions. A way of asking different questions. A way of noticing when “support” arrives too late. A way of holding open the possibility that the difficulty may not belong to the learner at all—but to the design that refused them the whole.


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Today’s episode explores the disconnect between scientific evidence and the aggressive marketing of executive functioning interventions, particularly for autistic and gestalt-oriented children. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, argues that popular service providers frequently misuse research by applying studies of allistic populations or broad diagnostic categories to children with unique cognitive architectures not represented in the data. By analysing three specific papers, the text highlights a category error where typical developmental correlations are mistaken for proven treatments for neurodivergent learners. Families are cautioned that what is labeled as executive dysfunction may actually be a structural mismatch between a child’s natural processing style and neurotypical environmental demands. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks advocates for ethical transparency, urging practitioners to prioritise relational safety and environmental adaptations over commercialised compliance training.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/194947984
Let me know what you think.
The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

After another Autism Awareness Month, this video offers a decoder ring for claims about gestalt processing—showing how research, marketing, and hope get entangled, and how to ask whether a support actually fits the child in front of you.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that follows April—a saturation of language that claims to see, paired with a quiet absence of what actually needs to be seen. Gestalt processing remains largely untranslated in mainstream discourse, or worse, translated into forms that no longer resemble the thing itself. This video begins in that gap—not to fill it completely, but to name it clearly.
What emerges online, especially in parent-facing spaces, is not always false—but it is often misaligned. Interventions are shared as solutions, research is cited as proof, and personal success stories are offered as pathways. Yet beneath that surface, there is a recurring structural problem: the child being described is not always the child being addressed. When language architecture is misread, support can become a kind of well-intentioned misrecognition.
This video is an attempt to slow that process down. To take the confident claims and return them to their source. To ask what was actually studied, who was actually included, and what kind of mind the task was built to recognise. In doing so, it introduces a simple but necessary shift—from asking “does this work?” to asking “for whom, and under what conditions?”
It is not a rejection of support. It is a refusal of overreach. Because in a space where urgency and hope are easily mobilised, the difference between evidence and extrapolation begins to matter deeply. Families deserve more than adjacent research stretched into certainty. They deserve clarity about what is known, what is assumed, and what is being sold in between.
As an opening, this piece sets the ground for a larger analysis—one that moves beyond the surface language of intervention and into the systems that produce it. The research pipeline, the service economy, the expansion of constructs like “executive functioning,” and the quiet erasure of gestalt language processing within all of it. Not as abstraction, but as something that lands—materially—on children, and on the people trying to care for them.
Here is the link to the larger piece, Executive Functioning: Where the Evidence Stops Short.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe

A brief re-introduction: an autistic gestalt processor, late to language and diagnosis, writing from a script garden of delayed echolalia. Fifteen short points to orient new readers entering the work midstream.
Opening — Welcome / Re-introduction
With Cathy off enjoying a jazz festival this weekend, I wanted to take this time to do something a little different.
There have been a lot of new people arriving—through conferences, through quotes shared on Instagram and Threads, through someone passing a piece along—and I’ve realised that many of you are stepping into the middle of something that’s already been moving for quite a while.
So, this is a kind of re-introduction. Not a summary, not a “best of,” but a way of placing myself—so you have a sense of what you’re stepping into.
I’ve written over 2000 pieces on The AutSide, and over 200 on Sensual Residue. That’s not because I set out to build something that large. It’s because this is how my mind works. Language accumulates. Patterns return. Things get placed, and then re-placed, and then seen differently over time.
So, if you’re new, you’re not arriving at the beginning. You’re arriving somewhere in the middle of an ongoing process.
And I don’t expect you to catch up. I don’t expect you to read everything, or even most things.
What I do want to offer is a kind of orientation.
A way of saying: this is how this space works. This is how I work.
Because what I’m doing here doesn’t always map cleanly onto what people expect writing—or teaching, or theory—to look like.
So instead of trying to explain it all at once, I’m going to give you fifteen short points. Not as rules, not as claims—but as places you can stand for a moment.
And from there, you can decide how close you want to come.
And before I move into those fifteen points, I think it’s important to place something more personal.
I’m an autistic adult. A gestalt processor—and I mean that in the whole sense, not just language. It’s how I organise experience, memory, meaning. It’s the architecture underneath everything I do.
I also live with ADHD, with alexithymia, with sensory processing and integration differences. All of that shapes how I move through the world—what I notice, what overwhelms, what holds.
I came to literacy quite late. Language, as it’s typically understood, wasn’t something I “acquired” in childhood. It’s something that formed over time, differently, and often outside the structures that were meant to support it.
And I was diagnosed late.
Which meant that for most of my life, I didn’t have the frameworks for any of this. I had to figure it out from the inside—through pattern, through experience, through returning to things again and again until they made sense in a way I could hold.
So, what you’re encountering here isn’t just writing.
It’s the result of that process.
1. I’m not a content creator.
First things first.
I think it’s important to say that plainly, because it frames everything else.
I’m not here producing content to meet a schedule, or to grow something, or to keep an algorithm fed. That’s not the relationship I have with writing. What I’m doing is much closer to needing somewhere for language to go—somewhere for things to land when they arrive.
There are days where nothing comes. There are days where something arrives fully formed and I just have to get it down before it moves again. And there are long stretches where I’m circling something without quite knowing what it is yet.
So, if you’re here expecting a consistent product, that’s not what this is. What this is…is a record. A living one. Of how something moves through me over time.
And if people are here for that, I’m grateful. But I’m not shaping it to hold them. I’m shaping it so I can stay with it.
2. The Substacks are my script garden.
The phrase that makes the most sense to me is “script garden.”
Not archive. Not portfolio. Not platform.
A garden is a place where things are placed, but not finished. Where something can sit, and change, and sometimes come back in a different form entirely. Some things grow. Some things don’t. Some things come back years later and suddenly make sense.
That’s what these spaces are for me.
I park language there. Phrases, patterns, fragments—things that feel like they matter, but aren’t fully understood yet. And over time, I start to see how they relate to each other.
So, if you read across pieces, you’ll notice repetition. Return. Slight shifts.
That’s not redundancy. That’s how the meaning forms.
3. Much of what I write is delayed echolalia.
This is something that often gets misunderstood.
Echolalia is usually framed as repetition without meaning. But for many of us, it’s actually how meaning is processed. Language comes in, sits, and then returns later—changed, layered, carrying something new.
That’s what I mean by delayed echolalia.
A phrase I heard years ago might reappear in a piece, but now it’s holding something entirely different. Or a memory will come back, not as a memory, but as a pattern that suddenly connects to something I’m writing now.
So, when you see repetition in my work, it’s not because I’ve run out of things to say.
It’s because something has come back, and this time I can hear it differently.
4. I’m a gestalt processor, and this is what that looks like in the open.
A lot of descriptions of gestalt processing stop at childhood.
They describe how language is acquired, how scripts are used, how things are pieced together over time. But they don’t often show what it looks like when that process continues into adulthood.
This is that.
You’re not hearing something that’s been translated into analytic steps. You’re hearing the pattern as it forms—sometimes mid-formation.
That means it won’t always be linear. It won’t always resolve cleanly. Sometimes it will circle, or return, or layer.
But it will hold together.
And part of what I’m doing here is making that visible—so that it’s not only recognised in children, but understood as a lifelong way of being.
5. I don’t start with ideas—I start with something felt.
Most pieces don’t begin with a concept.
They begin with a sensation. A pull. Something that doesn’t quite have words yet, but insists on being followed.
And I don’t always know where it’s going.
The writing is the process of finding out what that thing was. Of staying with it long enough that it reveals its structure.
Sometimes that becomes something recognisable as theory. Sometimes it stays closer to the original feeling.
But the direction is always the same:
Not from idea to expression.
From experience to understanding.
6. Recursion isn’t a quirk of my work. It’s the method.
I come back to things.
Not once or twice—but over and over, across months, across years. The same moment, the same phrase, the same question.
And each time, something different becomes visible.
That’s recursion.
It’s not going backwards. It’s not being stuck.
It’s a way of turning something, slowly, until you can see more of it.
And for me, that’s how depth happens. Not by moving on quickly—but by staying long enough that the thing begins to open.
7. My past isn’t behind me.
There’s a strong expectation, culturally, that we move on. That we leave things behind. That the past becomes something resolved, or at least contained.
That’s not how this works for me.
My past is active. It’s material. It’s something I return to—not to relive it, but to understand it differently as I change.
So, when I write about earlier parts of my life, I’m not stepping away from the present.
I’m bringing those parts into relation with now.
And that’s where a lot of the meaning emerges.
8. The split between my Substacks isn’t a split in me.
I know some people encounter The AutSide and Sensual Residue as two different spaces—and they are, in terms of tone and entry point.
But they’re not two different selves.
They’re two ways of approaching the same underlying pattern.
One might feel more recognisable as “theory,” the other more obviously embodied. But the coherence—the thing that holds them together—is the same.
And if you read them in relation to each other, that becomes clearer.
9. I’m not trying to make this legible on demand.
There’s often an expectation that writing should be immediately clear, immediately accessible, immediately useful.
That’s not always how this works.
Some pieces take time to land. Some don’t land at all until something else comes along later.
And I’m okay with that.
Because forcing immediate legibility would mean simplifying something that isn’t simple.
So, if something doesn’t make full sense right away, that doesn’t mean it’s failed.
It might just not be ready yet.
10. I live in a place and time that is openly hostile to people like me.
That’s part of the context for all of this.
I’m not writing from a neutral position. I’m writing as someone who exists in a system that doesn’t readily make space for the way I am.
That affects what I write, how I write, and why I write.
This isn’t just exploration—it’s also a way of staying intact.
Of maintaining coherence in an environment that would prefer fragmentation.
11. I don’t separate intellect from body.
For me, understanding doesn’t come from abstraction alone.
It comes from how something is felt, remembered, carried physically as well as cognitively.
So, when I write, those things aren’t separate streams.
They’re part of the same process.
And that’s why some pieces move between registers—between analysis and sensation.
They’re not switching modes.
They’re following the same thread through different forms.
12. I’m not interested in presenting a cleaned-up self.
There’s a version of writing—especially in academic or professional spaces—that involves presenting only the parts that are considered appropriate.
That’s not what I’m doing here.
Not because I’m trying to provoke—but because removing parts breaks the coherence.
The understanding comes from holding things in relation, not from isolating the acceptable pieces.
So, what you see here is not curated for safety.
It’s held for truth.
13. I’m not writing for an audience.
This might sound strange, given that people are here.
But the writing doesn’t begin with an imagined reader. It begins with the need to write.
That said—I am aware that people read, and respond, and share.
And I don’t take that lightly.
There’s a responsibility there, even if it’s not the driver.
So, I hold both things:
I write for me.
And I respect that others are here.
14. If something here resonates, I trust that.
Not everything will resonate with everyone.
But when something does—when there’s that sense of recognition, even if it’s not fully articulated yet—I take that seriously.
That’s often how understanding begins.
Not with clarity, but with familiarity.
So, if you feel that, I would trust it.
Even if you don’t yet have the words for why.
15. This is me, as I am, in motion.
None of this is a final statement.
It’s not a fixed position, or a completed framework.
It’s something that’s continuing.
What you’re seeing is a process unfolding over time.
So, this isn’t an introduction in the traditional sense.
It’s more like a point of entry.
Into something that is still moving.
Closing — Gathering / Forward motion
So those are fifteen ways of placing what I’m doing here.
Not the whole of it—but enough, I think, to give you a sense of the shape.
If you’ve been here for a while, some of that will feel familiar. If you’re new, some of it might not fully land yet—and that’s okay. This isn’t something that has to be understood all at once.
It’s something you come into over time.
I’m genuinely grateful that people are finding their way here—whether through a conference, or a quote, or someone sharing a piece that meant something to them.
I don’t take that lightly.
At the same time, I want to be clear about what this space is and isn’t.
It’s not curated to be neat. It’s not structured to be easily consumed. It’s not designed to present a single, stable version of me.
It’s a place where language is placed, revisited, reshaped. Where patterns emerge slowly. Where things that didn’t make sense before sometimes start to.
And there isn’t just one way to engage with it.
Some people move through it in the Substack app, following along as new pieces arrive. Others come in through the web, where you can search the archive—by word, by idea, by something you’re trying to find language for in a particular moment.
That can be useful, if you’re looking for a script—for something that meets you where you are, rather than starting at the beginning.
Both ways are valid. You don’t have to take it in linearly. You don’t have to do it all.
You can dip in. You can follow threads. You can leave and come back later.
The work holds that.
And if something here resonates with you—if there’s that sense of recognition, even before full understanding—then you’re in the right place.
The work will still be here, continuing. It remains open, free to access, something you can return to as you need.
And I’ll say this simply—as a wee school teacher doing this alongside everything else—if you choose to support it through a subscription, it’s deeply appreciated. It helps keep the space open, and it helps me keep doing the work.
Because that’s what it does.
And that’s what I’m doing.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe