Executive functioning isn’t a deficit—it’s a clash of clocks. In today’s chat, we explore Chronos vs Kairos, why behaviourist “time training” harms gestalt minds, and how safety, language, and relational ecology change everything.
From my point of view, this conversation with Cathy felt like a continuation of a thread I’ve been pulling all week—unmasking, executive functioning, non-speaking, the paper, the Field Guide—all of it circling the same centre. What I was really trying to articulate is that “executive functioning” has been colonised by Chronos. The dominant discourse assumes that linear clock time is neutral, inevitable, superior. But for many of us—especially gestalt processors—our primary orientation is Kairos: meaning-time, relational time, the moment that ripens rather than the minute that ticks.
When I read memes or therapy advice about “training children to the clock,” my whole system recoils. It feels behaviourist, extractive, as though the solution to difference is conditioning. What I wanted to do instead was let Kairos speak first—hence the poems before the explanations. Whole before part. Experience before taxonomy. If a Field Guide is going to exist, it cannot simply adopt the academy’s definitions; it has to frame them, re-situate them, reclaim the terms from inside lived cognition.
The conversation moved naturally into parenting and ecology. In my family, we’ve tried to resist commandment-style living. We model, we discuss, we allow agency. That is not naïve; it’s deliberate. I know what it is to grow up without safety, to gather scripts in silence because there was no room to develop them aloud. When safety finally arrived, development accelerated. That personal history sits behind everything I say about children and time. A child who “doesn’t start” or “doesn’t finish” may not have a deficit of will or skill; they may not have a linguistic or relational place to hang the task. Without the right language architecture, no amount of Chronos pressure will fix it.
Cathy’s reflections on Marge Blanc’s framework resonated deeply. The Natural Language Acquisition framework, as lived rather than proceduralised, is profoundly Kairos-oriented—space, safety, connection, readiness. That contrast between “just get this in” therapy and relational attunement maps exactly onto the Chronos/Kairos divide. And it’s not just clinical—it’s cultural, even colonial. When one system insists its language, its timing, its standards are inherently superior, it repeats the same logic used to overwrite Gaelic, Indigenous languages, and family epistemologies. Executive functioning, then, becomes not merely a skill set but a site of power.
By the end of the chat, what felt clearest to me is that all these strands—unmasking, non-speaking, executive function, decolonising language, my paper, the conversations with Barry Prizant—are not separate projects. They are building a relational field sturdy enough to hold the Field Guide when it comes. I’m not trying to overthrow Chronos; I’m trying to insist that Kairos is not disordered. It is a clock of its own.
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