The AutSide Podcast

Today’s episode examines an article, “When Writing Breaks Down,” which acts as a guide for teachers on understanding struggles related to writing and communication. The author, Jaime Hoerricks, PhD, argues that difficulties in student writing, which often involve structural, mechanical, and integrative barriers, are frequently mislabeled as simple behavioural problems rather than symptoms of underlying issues. Dr. Hoerricks specifically highlights that many adolescents arrive in high school with unmet needs—such as those related to speech-language therapy (SLT) or occupational therapy (OT)—that were ignored in earlier grades. The system’s failure to identify these needs early leads to students being blamed and punished for struggles they cannot control, perpetuating a “quiet violence” within the educational pipeline. Ultimately, she aims to help educators properly distinguish these barriers so that students receive the appropriate classroom and therapeutic supports.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/when-writing-breaks-down-a-teachersLet 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

Today’s episode offers a personal and critical reflection on Gestalt Language Processing (GLP), trauma, and memory from an autistic perspective. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, details a temporal collapse that led to a meltdown, where multiple “nows” (past and present moments) layered together, an event she argues is not adequately explained by existing psychological literature. Dr. Hoerricks critiques the academic and clinical establishment for dismissing or negating the lived experiences of autistic GLPs, framing this exclusion as “institutional gaslighting.” She presents a series of writings that emerged after this temporal event, explaining how recursion and repeated narration function as necessary mechanisms for survival and coherence in a gestalt system, directly challenging therapeutic frameworks that demand linearity and “moving on.”Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/when-time-refuses-sequence-livingLet 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

Today’s episode explores the function of speech for gestalt language processors (GLPs), arguing that talking is primarily a form of memory integrity and maintenance, rather than mere recall or rumination. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, posits that speaking aloud helps keep complex, atmospheric, and relational memories whole over time, preventing them from hardening or fracturing, especially following trauma or narcissistic abuse. Furthermore, the act of talking together provides mutual verification, which anchors internal coherence to external reality, acting as a crucial structural support against gaslighting and isolation. This continued speech is reframed as resistance to erasure and an ethical act of repair, challenging the common therapeutic misreading that views repetition as a sign of being stuck.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/talking-as-a-form-of-memory-integrityLet 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

Today’s episode presents a careful examination of the perceived binary between trauma and gestalt cognition, arguing that choosing between these two explanations for a mind’s functioning is a “trap” that fails to capture complexity, especially in AuDHD GLPs. The author of the source article, Jaime Hoerricks, PhD, who is an AuDHD gestalt processor and parent, asserts that gestalt cognition is the fundamental “architecture” of the GLP mind, which exists first, whilst trauma acts as “weather” that strains or shapes that existing structure without creating it. She grants parents “permission” to trust coherence and respond with “relational steadiness” rather than seeking a definitive, single cause or pathologising difference simply because it does not fit linear, analytic models. Ultimately, Dr. Hoerricks advocates for shifting from seeking “origin stories” to understanding the “interaction” between innate cognitive structure and lived experience.Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/is-this-traumaor-is-this-how-my-mindLet 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

In this week’s episode, Cathy and I explore how autistic gestalt language processors experience memory not as recall, but as whole return. Drawing on recent writing and lived experience, we examine why past experiences can arrive all at once, how safety governs integration, and why talking is not rumination—but memory integrity.Across these two essays and this week’s conversation with Cathy, I’m circling a single correction—one that feels increasingly urgent the more I watch autistic experience get misread. What returns for me is never a fragment in need of completion. It is a whole in search of conditions. My memory does not move by chronology or narrative recall; it moves by pattern. The body recognises the geometry of a situation long before language is invited to comment. When something arrives “all at once,” it is not because I am overwhelmed or dysregulated, but because fidelity has been triggered—my system honouring what it has already lived.In When the Past Arrives All at Once, I tried to show how this recognition happens before consent, before explanation. The past does not intrude—it recognises. A present moment rhymes too closely with an old configuration, and the whole of that earlier knowing steps forward intact. From the outside, this can look like panic. From the inside, it is coherence. The body is not malfunctioning; it is issuing a warning in the only temporal grammar it trusts. Language comes later, if it comes at all.Whole-Memory Processing gave me the language to name what that “whole” is made of. My memories are not filed as scenes or facts but held as dense ecologies—sensation, affect, posture, relational weather, meaning—bound together and stored intact. When they return, they cannot be drip-fed into speech. They arrive pressurised. The work is not calming down or breaking things apart, but translation: stretching simultaneity into sequence without tearing the fabric of the experience. When I talk, I am not venting. I am decompressing. Each sentence releases just enough pressure to keep coherence intact.The podcast conversation makes something else unmistakably clear to me: safety governs everything. These whole returns are not random, and they are not a sign that something is “coming back” because it wasn’t dealt with. They arrive because conditions have finally stabilised enough to allow them. Housing security. Professional tenure. Relational trust. When survival is no longer on the line, the system risks integration. Only then does memory step forward and say, here—this too needs to be carried into the present.Taken together, this work is my refusal of the dominant story about intensity, repetition, and delay. What psychiatry calls rumination, I recognise as maintenance. What others call overreaction, I experience as temporal congestion—multiple intact nows competing for the same present moment. There is nothing broken in this. Coherence does not emerge through force, neatness, or speed. It emerges when safety is real, when talking is allowed to be slow and circular, and when memory is permitted to remain whole long enough to soften into words.Referenced articles: * Whole-Memory Processing: When the Past Arrives All at Once: https://autside.substack.com/p/whole-memory-processing-when-the* When the Past Arrives All at Once: Autistic Memory, Pattern Recognition, and the Myth of “Overreaction”: https://autside.substack.com/p/when-the-past-arrives-all-at-onceSee you next week.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