When Systems Live in Us: Embodiment, Internalisation, and the Invisible Weight of Misrecognition.

About This Series: The New Normal by Dr Miriam

This ongoing series—The New Normal—explores how neurodivergence is recognised, misrecognised, and framed within systems of power. Drawing on personal, clinical, and cultural insight, it interrogates who gets to be seen, who gets missed, and what happens when diagnostic and social frameworks fail to hold the full complexity of human experience.

Each entry follows a three-part structure:Reckoning. Disruption. Reframing.

This arc is both conceptual and political—it invites readers to engage not just in critique, but in transformation.

Reckoning calls us to name historical and ongoing exclusions: the people left out, the assumptions left unchallenged.
Disruption challenges the systems—clinical, cultural, and internal—that reinforce narrow definitions of difference.
Reframing offers new ways to understand, relate to, and honour neurodivergence—on our terms, in our language, with our rhythm.

The series centres those who have been historically overlooked in both mental health discourse and diagnostic practice: Black, neurodivergent, gender-diverse, and working-class individuals whose experiences do not conform to dominant narratives or checklists.

Rather than asking for inclusion into flawed systems, The New Normal asks:

What if the diagnostic model was never built to see us?
What would it mean to rebuild it from the margins inward?
What becomes possible when we stop waiting to be validated and start trusting our own knowing?

This is not just about visibility. It is about justice. It is about re-authoring our stories—and reshaping the frameworks that were never made with us in mind.

Understanding the Structure: Why This Blog is Framed in Three Parts.

Like the previous entries in this series, this piece follows a three-part arc: Reckoning, Disruption, and Reframing.

Reckoning explores how external misrecognition becomes internalised—how systems shape not just how we are seen, but how we see ourselves.
Disruption challenges the psychological and embodied effects of being perpetually misread, especially for those who have learned to over-function, mask, or doubt their reality.
Reframing looks at how we begin to reclaim our narratives, unlearn internalised shame, and build a grounded sense of self that doesn’t require external validation to be real.

This structure reflects the journey from system to self—and back again.

Introduction: What Happens When You’re Always Almost Seen?

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from almost being recognised. From sitting across from a professional, telling your story, and hearing:

“You’re managing so well.”
“You seem very self-aware—are you sure this is neurodivergence?”
“You’re describing trauma, not a neurodivergence.”

It’s not just the absence of support that hurts. It’s the suggestion that your insight disqualifies you. That your ability to describe your distress somehow proves it’s not real. That your survival strategies make you ineligible for recognition.

Eventually, the system’s silence becomes your own.The uncertainty becomes chronic.The masking becomes identity.

This is what happens when misrecognition becomes embodied.

Part I: Reckoning—The Inward Turn of Systemic Dismissal

To be missed is not only a bureaucratic failure. It’s a psychological wound. It tells you, implicitly and repeatedly: Your pain isn’t real. Your difference isn’t credible. Your needs are too subtle—or too complex—to be valid.

For those of us who grew up adapting before we had language, this dismissal began early. We were praised for our composure, rewarded for our performance, and disciplined for our overwhelm. And when we sought answers later—as adults, as professionals, as survivors—we often encountered a new version of the same message: You don’t fit.

The result is a kind of internalised diagnostic doubt. You start asking:

Am I exaggerating?
Am I making this up?
Is it really neurodivergence, or just personal failure?

This doubt doesn’t come from nowhere. It is shaped by years of misreading. And it lives in the body—in tight shoulders, in perfectionism, in burnout, in the constant calculation of how much is too much to show.

This is the reckoning: systems don’t just fail to see us. They teach us not to see ourselves.

Part II: Disruption—The Cost of Chronic Adaptation

Adaptation is often framed as resilience. But for many neurodivergent people—especially those racialised, gendered, or marginalised in other ways—adaptation is a survival strategy born from necessity, not choice.

We became fluent in other people’s expectations. We memorised emotional scripts. We learned to translate our distress into palatable language.

And while these strategies kept us safe, they came at a cost.

When you are constantly performing neurotypicality, it becomes harder to locate your real self underneath. Your body becomes both armour and stage. Even rest starts to feel dangerous—because letting go of the mask might expose you to scrutiny you’ve spent years avoiding.

This is particularly acute for those who are racialised. Because the mask is not just emotional—it is cultural, economic, ancestral. The consequences of not masking are not theoretical. They’re lived.

The disruption here is this: what we often call “functioning” is actually coping. And the longer we conflate the two, the more we invisibilise the people doing the most work to be believed.

Part III: Reframing—Reclaiming the Self Beneath the System

To reframe is to rebuild. And rebuilding begins with naming what was never wrong in the first place.

You were not too sensitive. You were absorbing too much.
You were not too intense. You were uncontained in a world that rewards numbness.
You were not faking it. You were performing safety.

Reframing starts when we stop requiring systems to validate our experience in order to trust it. When we unlearn the belief that our insight invalidates our struggle. When we recognise that self-doubt is often a trauma response to misattunement, not a sign that we were never neurodivergent in the first place.

This kind of reframing doesn’t require a formal diagnosis, though for some it can be deeply affirming. What it does require is a return to the body—a listening to the internal signals we were taught to mute.

It also requires community. Because while the system may have taught us to question ourselves, it is often through relational witnessing—through language shared, mirrored, and echoed—that we begin to reassemble who we are.

We find ourselves in others. Not because they define us, but because they remind us:You are not too much. You were just too rarely understood.

Closing: The New Normal Lives Inside You

The idea of the “new normal” is not just structural—it’s internal. It’s not only about changing diagnostic frameworks. It’s about reclaiming the inner frameworks we’ve built to survive misrecognition—and choosing, slowly, to replace them with self-trust, relational safety, and embodied knowing. When systems live in us, they shape how we move through the world. But so can healing. So can truth. So can a reframing that begins not with being diagnosed, but with being believed.