The AutSide Podcast

A conversation about flat affect, language access, relational safety, and the tools that let thought cross—asking what changes when support begins not with demands for words, but with a world in which words are not required.
This morning’s conversation with Cathy kept returning to one central recognition: what is often described as autistic “flat affect” may not be an absence of feeling at all, but evidence that access to language and prosody has narrowed under pressure. I can be an “intonation baby”—someone whose scripts retain rhythm, emotional contour, and relational force—and still arrive, in an unsafe or overwhelming moment, with one word spoken in a voice that no longer sounds like mine. The contradiction dissolves once affect is understood relationally. When I sound flat, I am not empty. Something has happened to my access.
From there, the conversation moved toward safety—not as a therapeutic preliminary before the “real work” begins, but as the condition that makes language possible. Stage 3 was not simply something I passed through decades ago. It remains available to me, sometimes abruptly, when I am ill, flooded, unfamiliar with a setting, or unsure whether I am permitted to get language wrong. Stage 4 requires more than vocabulary. It requires enough relational freedom to attempt an original sentence, discover halfway through that it has failed, and begin again without humiliation. Language grows where error is survivable.
That changes what support looks like. When I am overwhelmed, questions such as “What is wrong?” or “What do you need?” do not necessarily help; they demand the very access that has already gone missing. What helps is someone who can remain without extraction—someone able to say, in effect, I am here, you are safe, nothing is required from you yet. Cathy connected this to her own clinical work: connection before outcomes, presence before prompting, relationship before speech. Not a technique for producing language. A way of becoming safe enough that language may return.
We also found the same structure underneath the conversation about technology. A slide rule, a calculator, modern voice-to-text systems trained through correction—each becomes suspicious only when independence is imagined as performing every intermediate step unaided. For me, the hand can be a bottleneck whilst speech moves at two hundred words per minute. Technology does not replace the thought. It allows the thought to cross. The insistence that disabled people prove authorship by accepting unnecessary friction is not a defence of authenticity; it is a demand that access remain visibly difficult.
The classroom example brought all of this down into practice. Relational safety can be built into the environment before a crisis occurs: period products placed beside the bathroom pass, a discreet bag, a known protocol, no public question required. The student does not have to generate language whilst embarrassed, frightened, or physically uncomfortable. She already knows what to do. That may be the clearest theme of the whole conversation—the best support is often not teaching someone to produce the right words under pressure, but creating a world in which the most personal, delicate, emergent needs can be met without words at all.
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Adoption, conflicting histories, autism, queerness, and language arriving late all converged in one unexpected courtroom hearing. This is the story of how coherence finally became something the law could acknowledge.
Yesterday wasn’t the beginning of my story. It was the moment nearly forty years of searching finally became coherent in the eyes of the law. What began as an adopted child trying to understand where she came from gradually became a search for language, identity, and a way of living that no longer required me to hold contradictory versions of myself at once. The courtroom hearing was only the last visible step in a journey that had already transformed me.
This video is my attempt to tell that story. It is about adoption and autism, queerness and language, panic and persistence—but above all, it is about coherence. About what happens when the life you’ve slowly assembled over decades is finally reflected back to you by the documents you carry. Yesterday I left the courthouse with signed orders. This morning I woke up with something much quieter: the feeling that, for the first time, the foundation beneath my feet and the name I answer to belong to the same person.
– Jaime Rowan Hoerricks


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A spoken poem about living for decades at Stage 3—building a career, raising children, and carrying a whole life through one dependable word at a time—until friendship made language inhabitable.
For most of my life, I lived at what Marge Blanc’s Natural Language Acquisition framework would describe as Stage 3. That sentence is almost impossible for many people to hear because Stage 3 has become associated with toddlers and young children. Yet school happened there. Adolescence happened there. A career happened there. Travel happened there. Parenthood happened there. An entire adult life unfolded inside a developmental stage that most people assume should last months or a few years.
This video is my attempt to describe what that actually felt like from the inside. Not as a clinical account and not as an inspirational story, but as lived architecture. What does conversation become when language arrives one dependable word at a time? What does “flat affect” look like when every available part of the body is already occupied simply keeping the conversation together? What happens when success itself becomes the reason nobody recognises the labour required to achieve it?
The poem is about something I have become increasingly convinced matters far beyond autism. Developmental frameworks tend to measure the language that emerges into the world. They rarely ask what structure of meaning already exists before language can reliably carry it. We mistake the opening for the landscape behind it. We mistake delayed access for absent thought. We mistake successful compensation for evidence that no accommodation was ever needed.
For me, the most important moment in this story is not moving beyond Stage 3. It is discovering that language changes most profoundly when another person is willing to remain alongside unfinished language without treating it as failure. I wasn’t taught into the next stage. I was befriended into the conditions where it became possible.
This is Living at Stage 3. Not a story about overcoming a developmental stage, but about reclaiming a life that was always there—whole, thinking, feeling, and profoundly human—long before the sentences became large enough to carry it.
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A conversation with Cathy about attention, ecology, trust, routines, and the scripts adults build before language appears—asking what classrooms and clinics uphold, and whether they make a child’s own meaning fully possible.
Today’s conversation with Cathy felt less like revisiting Thursday’s GLP conference presentation and more like distilling the principles that seem to sit underneath almost everything I have been writing lately. We used Cathy’s structure of “Give Me 5,” but the conversation kept returning to a much older question: what is it that our classrooms, clinics, and relationships actually uphold? I found myself speaking less about techniques than about conditions—the ecology that exists before any explicit teaching begins. Child-led practice, for me, is not primarily about following preferences. It is about treating attention itself as legitimate knowledge. Before a child has words, before they can explain themselves, they are already orienting toward what matters, and that orientation deserves to be read as information rather than as distraction.
From there we moved naturally into the ecology of the room. I kept coming back to the idea that the room teaches just as much as the lesson does. Lighting, pace, transitions, the way mistakes are received, whether uncertainty is tolerated, whether an adult can adapt instead of insisting on their own plan—all of these become part of what the child is actually learning. I realised again that I don’t think regulation sits outside language, preparing the child for the “real work.” The conditions themselves become part of what language comes to mean. A classroom or clinic is always teaching, even when nobody is consciously trying to teach.
Trust became the third thread, but not in the usual sense of simply being warm or kind. I realised that what I am really trying to build is the experience of being remembered accurately. Learning names matters because it says, “I know who you are.” Remembering interests, preferences, strengths, and struggles says, “Your world continues to exist for me even when you are not here.” That becomes the foundation from which I can personalise mathematics, relax arbitrary deadlines, embrace mastery over speed, and let students remain unfinished without making them feel incomplete. Progress becomes something we notice across years, not simply across assessment windows.
We also spent a long time talking about routines and scripts. I found myself arguing that scripts begin long before anyone enters a therapy room or classroom. They begin at breakfast, on the drive over, in the predictable sequence of getting ready, arriving, leaving, and returning home. For a gestalt processor, those surrounding experiences are not peripheral to the session—they are part of the session. The clinic or classroom participates in a much larger relational whole. Every repeated interaction is quietly building expectations about safety, participation, communication, and belonging. Whether we intend it or not, we are always building scripts.
By the end, it felt as though all five ideas had folded back into one another. Attention, ecology, trust, routines, and relationships are not separate principles but different surfaces of the same underlying question: what does this uphold? Cathy reflected that this question had already begun changing how she thinks about her own work, particularly the importance of everything that happens before and after a session. I left feeling grateful that the conversation wasn’t really about methods at all. It was about a way of being with people that recognises development as something relational, ecological, and profoundly whole—a way of thinking that extends far beyond the clinic or classroom and into life itself.
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Looking back at Holistic Language Instruction, I don't see mistakes so much as quarter turns still waiting to happen. Every book becomes a conversation with the person who wrote it—and the person still becoming.
When I began this series, I thought I was responding to a small moment of embarrassment. By the end, I found myself returning to one of my own books, Holistic Language Instruction, and recognising something much more hopeful. The ideas were still there. The questions were still there. But another quarter turn had quietly become possible. The book had not become wrong. It had simply become incomplete in the way all living ideas are incomplete.
This epilogue reflects on that experience and on what it means to write recursively. I increasingly think of my books not as finished destinations but as temporary settlements along a much longer journey. Each captures the best understanding I could reach at that moment in my life. Then life continues. Readers respond. Students ask unexpected questions. Another small incident opens another door. The conversation deepens.
It is also a reflection on why I have come to love writing here on Substack. Books ask for coherence. They ask for confidence. They ask us to draw a line beneath a body of work and call it complete. Substack allows something different. It allows ideas to remain alive. It allows quarter turns to happen in public. It allows readers to become collaborators in ways traditional publishing rarely permits.
As always, these essays are first and foremost my digital delayed echolalia—small bundles of language left for my future self, knowing that recursion will come again. If, along the way, they also help another writer, another teacher, another autistic person, or another parent recognise something in their own journey, then that remains one of the greatest unexpected gifts this work has given me.
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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