The Neurodiversity Voices Podcast

Hello, my name is Paul Cruz. Welcome to the Neurodiversity Voices podcast, where we celebrate and amplify the unique perspectives and experiences of neurodiverse individuals. I'm thrilled to have you join us on this journey of exploration, advocacy, and celebration of neurodiversity.

I'm Gino Akbari, your co host. Together, we'll have meaningful conversation, share inspiring stories, and challenge misconception about neurodiversity.

This podcast is for everyone, whether you're neurodivergent yourself, an educator, a parent, or just someone curious to learn more. Our goal is to amplify voices, foster understanding, and spark change in the way we view and support neurodiversity.

We're so excited to have you with us as we celebrate the beauty of diverse minds and work toward a more inclusive future.

So sit back, relax, and let's get started. Welcome to the Neurodiversity Voices podcast.

Doctor. Craig Wells is a neurodivergent physician and educator specializing in empowering individuals to embrace their true selves and thrive. As a late diagnosed ADHD and autistic professional, he created programs like Connection Craft and Inner Essence Activation to help neurodivergent individuals heal, optimize the nervous system, and build meaningful connections. Doctor. Wells is passionate about fostering self acceptance and advocating for neurodivergent affirmation.

So without further ado, let's welcome Doctor. Craig Wells.

Hi, Geno. Hi, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here this afternoon.

How did your journey of self acceptance as a neurodivergent individual influence your ability to design a lifestyle that accommodates your needs?

So for me, I guess I'm always looking to strike a balance between high performance and achieving and doing the things that I want to do with what is reasonable for my nervous system. I mean, to really accepting my neurodivergence and prior to accepting who I was and what I needed, I pushed through. And I think that's what a lot of us do is we push through until we have a crash and then we deal with the crash. I kinda went through a phase where I would schedule the crashes. And I guess for me more, it's more now about scheduling rest and scheduling periods of intense focus because it's really where I'm most productive.

I'm I'm I can be wickedly productive for about two and a half hours. And then after that I want a nap. I'm and I think this is true of of a lot of autistics and a lot of ADHD people is I'm a sprinter. I get a lot done in a short amount of time. And then I want time for the brain to rewire.

So I have like different techniques for reading. Paul Shealy, that photo reading great system. And so I'll, you know, in an hour and a half, like I can digest two or three different books. But then that information has to go somewhere. So it's, you know, it's loaded into the hippocampus and then it's gotta be parceled out to the long term storage and it has to integrate with what I already know.

So I think kind of the biggest thing in terms of really performance and achieving is making sure that I have rest periods and making sure that I have the different rejuvenation rituals and things that I built. And some of it's just how I sleep. So like sleep architecture is like a big thing for ADHD individuals, autistic individuals, ADHD individuals. We tend to have disrupted sleep architecture. So what are things that I can do?

How can I eat? What diet can I have? One thing I use is binaural beats at night to actually stabilize for about four or five hours, deep slow wave sleep. Because I found that I was I was having really erratic sleep or I wasn't being in slow wave sleep enough. And I that out because I use an Oura rang and some other sleep trackers.

So that is fundamentally how really accepting who and what you are. Right? You can do anything but you can't do everything all at once. And you may need certain accommodations and scheduling and a different lifestyle that supports what your nervous system likes to do inherently.

You mentioned starting meditation and energy practices at a young age. How did these practices shape your ability to manage neurodivergence before your diagnosis?

So I recently have seen a lot of the things that they do in kind of PT and OT and some of the like primitive reflex type stuff with kids with autism and ADHD. And a lot of it's full body synchronized cross body motion, a lot of mirroring. And I mean I had a ton of martial arts training. And that's if you think about the different kicks and punches and moves and the forms and things. I mean in some ways it was a hyper focus but it was a hyper focus that actually integrated my body and my coordination.

And it really wired the brain stem and the cerebellum and the cortex together because there was also emotional control components and there's also focus components. I mean if you're sparring and you're in the ring and you start zoning off, then you're gonna get hit. You get a very potent reminder to pay attention. And I started doing basic energy work and mindfulness practices to augment my ability to perform in that arena. And it had a lot of spillover in the rest of my life.

One of the things that I don't think that we talk about from a Western medical perspective is actually the function of- or the energetic function of different chemicals. So if you look at a lot of the ADHD treatments from an energetic perspective, from a like a traditional Chinese medicine perspective, they actually draw energy into the central channel. So into the deep brain structures. And one thing that I've found is that even just bringing energy into the center of the brain or in the deep energy channels, it is very centering and it increases focus and it decreases scatter, very similar to how the stimulants do. So I think one of the more energetic drivers of autistic and ADHD symptoms is actually decreased energetic pressure and not enough energy in the deep channels of the body stimulating the deep structures of the brain.

I think we were meant for a more energy rich environment like you would get if you were living in nature. A little bit of an ADHD squirrel note, but there's also some evidence that the magnetic field of the earth has actually been decreasing. I mean that may be actually be driving some of the symptomatology because that was actually relatively recent evolutionarily. But basically, the martial arts and the meditation that I did gave a lot of energetic patterning and a lot of neurologic patterning that allowed me to prevent a lot of the neurologic fragmentation and disintegration that typically happens.

How has your experience as a neurodivergent parent influenced your approach to raising neurodivergent children?

So from a personal perspective, from a developmental perspective, I mean, you think you have your triggers out and you think you have your shit together until you're responsible for another little ADHD gremlin. And so it really tested my development. And sometimes I rose to the occasion and sometimes I did not rise to the occasion. But it did expose the weaknesses in my own nervous system and places where I needed to grow and integrate and heal. I mean, my parents did the best they could.

And I love them dearly. They've continued to become better people. But their upbringing wasn't the best and they came from a very sort of authoritarian model and that's what I got. And it just it doesn't work for anybody and it works for us least. So I found myself kind of running the authoritarian tapes, especially for the first couple of years where I was kinda having to remind myself, hey, maybe I should try to connect.

Maybe I should focus on nervous system regulation. A big problem that I see in a lot of the parenting coaching and a lot of the parenting education is it really needs to be parent first. You can't expect your child to learn emotional regulation and to learn nervous system integration and to learn all of these things if you were holding down all of the shit in your system and you're two crossed wires away from exploding. So the quickest way to make your parenting easier is to clean up your own brain, clean up your own energy. And from that place, it gets so much more easier to manage.

I know my wife and I, and this is unfortunately a vicious feedback loop, there is a direct correlation between how good we're feeling and how regulated our nervous system is and how the kids behave. And I mean they're just kind of bebopping around. They're responding to our energy. They're responding to our nervous system patterns. They're responding to our conscious and unconscious behavior.

And they're learning and patterning that. So the other thing that I think I've really tried to incorporate, just sort of emphasizing self improvement and emphasizing connection and nervous system regulation over punishment. I think the other big thing is, I mean I intellectually understand hierarchies. But at a core level I'm like, I'm a person, you're a person, you're not better than me. And I think that's a very autistic thing where there's an inherent sense of equality.

And my kids, even my 19 old has that. There is an inherent sort of equality of self and just a lack of internalization of hierarchy. And I think that's something they have to remember with ADHD kids or autistic kids that they they see themselves as equal to you. And you're gonna change it. And that's why basically the connection based parenting and giving respect and choice and having all of the hypnotic and the neurolinguistic tools to direct them.

Because they're not gonna take a heavy hand. They're gonna dig in their heels. They're gonna proverbially raise their middle fingers and get reactive.

What specific techniques or strategies have you found most effective in improving communication between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals?

So to answer that question, we have to think about the nature of communication and what's being communicated. And the number one thing that kind of fucks people up is they pay attention to the words and they over explain. So if you look at all of the different studies of communication, body language is number one. Tone and tonality is number two. And then the actual words that we say is a very small part of the communication.

So when we're communicating with another individual, how they are emotionally perceiving us, even if they are not conscious of it, is flavoring everything that we do. So the first thing is actually having your nervous system cleared out enough that you can get in sync with the person's nervous system that you are talking to, that you're connecting with, so that you can start to approximate their worldview and their filters at an unconscious level. And that also creates a, even if it's transient, a sense of liking that positively frames everything that we're saying. Because your communication has to go in their ear through all of their filters and then their response has to come up through all of their filters and out. So if they're- even if you say the same thing with the same exact tone, it can be completely different to someone based on the emotional state that they're in.

So the number one thing is because our nervous system is usually so frazzled as an autistic, if we don't have tools to manage our nervous system, we actually don't have the nervous system flexibility to really sync up with someone. Which means that the big main areas of communication are mismatching our words. So we're not getting a good connection at a body level, at a nervous system level. And then the other thing is actually softening language. So a lot of autistic or ADHD communication is it's blunt.

It's a little impulsive. It's why did you do that without a lot of tonality or connection. And if you're in rapport, if you're connected and you add softeners, just so that I understand, you know, what did you mean by this? Or just so I understand and create the best outcome, what is your expectation for this conversation? These things are incredibly useful.

But it actually comes from being able to synchronize at a neurologic, at a body based level. And then the language is amazing. Sometimes you don't even have to have the language if there's enough unconscious predisposition towards liking you. And this has been kind of a hot topic of study where there's been numerous studies that have shown that neurotypical people generally without realizing it don't like or have feelings of discomfort around neurodivergent individuals, especially autistic individuals.

You discussed the concept of complex PTSD in neurodivergent individuals. What steps can someone take to begin rewiring their brain and healing from emotional trauma?

So there's a number of recommendations that I would make. Unfortunately there's nothing that's sort of color by the numbers because we're all different individuals with different traumas and different triggers. The research is clear. If you're neurodivergent, especially autistic, you're better at one shot learning. You learn faster but you also learn trauma and fear better.

And the signal of that tends to be louder so it predisposes to the CPTSD. So the number one thing that I would really recommend is that you find someone who is using a neurologically based method that has a positive focus to work with. And once you've worked with someone for a period of time, it becomes much easier to apply the tools on yourself. But it is much less likely that you will actualize deep resolution by yourself without another person to anchor and hold your nervous system and to basically be the catalyst for you. So the other thing is having nervous system based tools, especially ones that create positive feelings at safety.

Some people can't use safety just because they've never internally felt safe. Everybody's felt some kind of pleasure. So pleasure derived techniques. I in a lot of the work that I do, I actually, before I really go tackling a lot of cooties, I actually build up a positive core. So I build up positive self image through using different hypnotic regressive and energy techniques to start putting together the neur- the positively anchored neural networks.

And once those are integrated and patched together, and sometimes that can happen in one session, you can actually start to bring in chunks of neural networks and neurology and memories and emotions that are less than positive and start discharging the emotional content and integrating those parts of the neurology so that you have access to it. So what I would say is especially for a neurodivergent, a lot of the re experiencing methods where you vividly re experience all of your shit are not gonna be all that effective and they're actually have a fairly high likelihood of re traumatizing you. Working from a positive place, working with safety, working with pleasure, and working on getting the nervous system a little bit more healthy before you tackle all the cooties, I think is super important. And that was one of the big criticisms of a lot of the old school hypnotic regression techniques where you fully immerse someone in a past event. It can be amazingly useful, But you can usually only do one of those in a session.

And for someone who is autistic, they have a bunch of micro traumas. They might have a gestalt of a trauma around talking to people that even from, you know, one lifetime, we're not talking about any weird spiritual past lifetime stuff. But one lifetime, they may have thousands of negative memories at an unconscious level of going up and doing a hi, how are you conversational approach. So you have to have things that sort of holographically generalize and write a new pattern and write a new expectation.

How can neurodivergent individuals consciously develop masks that fit both their personal identity and the environment they are in?

So the first thing really for that is becoming deeply aware of their core. So a lot of this come actually comes from some Russian psychology research. This is one of the things that they actually did for the 1970s Olympics where they like, the Russians just kinda swept everything and and won a bunch of gold medals. One of the things that they found is anything that you identify with controls your behavior, and is relatively fixed. And anything that you disidentify from that you don't accept as identity becomes much more malleable.

The first step is getting acquainted with something deeper than the mask and the personality. From that place, you can start recognizing that you're basically just wearing a bunch of clothes and most of them don't fit. It's basically psychologically all the masks that we acquire is like we rolled around in a goodwill dumpster and came out. Kinda like Dobby the hell self. So that's the first step.

Once we recognize that, we can begin to shed things. One of the big issues that people have with unmasking is a lot of our neurology, our skills, our memories, our abilities are architecturally tied to those neural networks that the masks associate with or that are associated with the mask. So that basically is what causes the skill regression is when you move into your identity, there's your core self. There's so little of you that's actually associated neurologically with that, that people are like, I don't know how to tie my shoes. And I actually I actually remember doing this when I started unmasking.

I basically I kept my doctor mask active but like I had trouble tying my shoes. I couldn't cook. Like, it was like real basic stuff. And I was, like, struggling with it for two or three weeks until I figured out how to actually take the information out of the masks and and and wire it back in. And that's a really common problem that that people have.

So once you learn how to basically reclaim the neural networks and the energy and the information from the masks, you start using them like blank cloth. And you start actually developing the ability to take them on and take them off in different contexts and not have them be randomly triggered. For me a lot of it's actually tied to clothes because I wear different styles of clothes in different venues. And that's kind of a big psychologic trigger for me. So I actually think about all of the different behaviors and thought processes and things that are tied to wearing a bow tie, that are tied to wearing a suit jacket, that are tied to, you know, the polo shirt and jeans and dad shoes.

So the first part is touching- the first step really is touching something deeper. The second step is starting- is simultaneously shedding and reclaiming. And then the third step really is conscious crafting. And a lot of that is done via mimicry because it works very well. You can actually- there's a bunch of different technique- technique names for deep trench identification, the Rykov technique.

You're using the Russian versions of it, where you're actually embodying a persona that you have seen or perceived, even if it's fictional. Your other than conscious mind will fill in details and if you give yourself the right prompts around it about, you know, being useful for you, only taking the good parts, you can actually pretty rapidly craft something that's really elegant and fits well with you, fits well with your core and still lets you do the things that you need to do without kind of having kind of the weird, I saw a red dog or I saw a dog with a red collar. I get happy and I saw a Doberman retriever and I get scared. And every time I eat ice cream, my left footages and like other weird kind of wiring that we get.

I'm going to ask a question with regards to all this. For somebody like me, let's say, does have no idea about all this, can you explain what masking is and why is it necessary to have that for neurodivergence?

So neurotypicals kind of have a more fluid mask that they just call their personality. So I think the best definition of mask that I can think of is a selective presentation of self. So we are selectively presenting a part of ourself. We are selectively activating a neurology. Mhmm.

So the mask in and of itself isn't bad. You wouldn't wear a tuxedo in the rainforest. You wouldn't wear a parka in the Sahara. And we, especially autistics, they tend to become stuck in the mask.

And Is the purpose of it to fit into society, is that the idea behind it?

The purpose is survival. It seems to be a survival trait. Survival adaptation. Watching my children and watching other children of people that I know are either autistic or ADHD, I see wildly varying amounts of behavior at a young age, as young as eight months, between someone that they know is safe versus someone that they know is not safe. Right.

So it's occurring very, very young. And that's one of the reasons why I think some of the major divisions of mask in a person are so commonly unconscious.

So I suppose part of what you do with your patients is to consolidate those masks into a more healthy approach.

Right. Right. Because there's bits of memory and there's bits of mask and things that are healthy, that are already functioning. So that is what I use with their intuition and their inner wisdom. I basically hopscotch through those, connect them together, and then connect them into their core sense of self beyond the personality.

And then I'm building and crafting from there.

What are some practical steps neurodivergent individuals can take to recover from burnout without needing extended periods of rest?

And that one's kind of a tricky concept. It depends on how far they are in a burnout. Because what happens is most people will get into kind of a functional burnout where they're kind of kick starting themselves in the morning. They're going into a hyper sympathetic sort of stressed out state and they kinda use dopamine and norepinephrine and adrenaline and stuff to get through. And then they'll crash at some point usually after they come home and the brawl and the social mask come off.

You know, they take their normal people suit off and they just go and they're basically a lump on the couch and then they're in like a functional freeze. So that is kind of the hovering cycle that a lot of neurodivergence get into. At that point, they're already in a they're already in burnout or pre burnout. So from that place, implementing sleep quality is huge, scheduling recovery periods is huge, and actually wiring the brain together and making the neurologic processes more efficient. So one of the things that tends to happen with the nerve divergence because the brain circuitry fragments and the volume gets really loud because we make more glutamate and we actually have more excitatory receptors than neurotypicals.

You wanna make sure the energy consumption is very efficient. And you wanna avoid energy consuming things. So sometimes that can be allowed and it's different for different people. So if you're in a functional space and you start and you still have the resources to start to actually bring things together and to create a core and to start lessening the amount of random emotional discharge and excitation that you have and basically tuning up the machine and making it more helpful. That in addition to limiting stressors.

So if you can try to find a job that has flexible work, you know, work from home, gig work, anything where somebody really owns your time, there is I don't know if it's conscious, I don't know if it's unconscious, but there's a bias in the Western workforce to exploit neurodivergence because we do so well at stress under pressure for the most part, especially ADHD individuals. You put a little heat under us and we will perform. And there's a lot of rhetoric and things about, you know, doing your 100% and really giving your all for a work and job. That's part of the western mythos and the western worth ethic and that kind of thing. And a neurotypical nervous system interprets that as about 65 of your maximum effort.

Whereas we will interpret that as a 110% of maximum effort and we will work ourselves to death. So some of that's actually recalibrating expectations. Now everybody else is actually working to about 65%. They're working till they feel it a little bit and then, you know, that's it. If someone is in a deeper state, if someone is catatonic, that's very hard to come out of yourself unless you already have the skill set for it.

So once you're to the point where you can't kick start your system, you actually have to have somebody to work with where you're where they're actually building resources for you and you're gonna need a little bit more time for recovery. And not an official recommendation. A lot of neurodivergent individuals have found a lot of use in either microdosing or macrodosing psychedelics. And we can have like a whole two hour discussion on that. As an emergency measure, I'm not condoning anyone do anything illegal, it's something to think about.

So Doctor. Wells, you've created a program called Connection Craft. What has been the most rewarding feedback or outcome you've seen from individuals who have participated in that program?

Kinda close to home. But the- what became Inneressence Activation and Connection Craft in a lot of my materials is actually how my wife and I recovered from our burnout and from our childhood trauma and medical training trauma. And so that has set the stage for us to have a really amazing juicy life and juicy relationship. And yeah, sometimes we have bad days and sometimes we get in bad loops. But very selfishly, I created it to kind of maximize our joy and our pleasure and kind of all the good parts of our relationship.

The other thing that I find really rewarding is the transformation. We were actually talking about this a little bit before the interview. One of the big problems that I have in marketing is I really have to titrate to not what I can actually do and achieve with people but what they think is possible, which is usually much much lower. One, I guess the moment that I love the most is really when somebody hits that point where they're not just trying to get out of suffering. They're not just trying to be remedial.

They're not trying to make their life suck less. But they're actually making- they actually get into the mindset of the space of where they're trying to create more passion, more joy, more pleasure. They're trying to connect more with people. They're trying to connect more with their kids. They're trying to bring the warm fuzzies back into their relationship.

A lot of individuals, a lot of audiologists actually, it's pretty much everybody. Once the phenylethylalanine from a new relationship wears off, that's kind of the puppy love, feel good, obsessive chemical that kick starts long term neurologically based oxytocin bonding. Once the phenylalanine wears off in two to six months, most people's relationship quality kind of plummets. And getting people in the mindset where they're really in a juicy way like enjoying food, enjoying sensory experiences, enjoying relationship experiences. That's really what I've found to be the most rewarding.

And sometimes it's kinda surprising because people come to me for, you know, because they wanna be better in business or they wanna connect with their kids a little bit more. Then suddenly they're not pounding six cups of coffee a day or they're not having to smoke weed all the time or they realized that they started to socialize. I mean, are all really wonderful things.

How can neurodivergent individuals balance the process of unmasking with the need to adapt to societal expectations?

Say, ideally this is done in a setting where you have flexible work that doesn't require a lot of social interaction. And that's kind of the ideal. So there's a lot of different strategies and elements that would be important to it. And one is just having a efficient process. So if you look at a lot of the unmasking materials, it's like find your true self, let go of all the mask which is great.

I'm all for that. The problem is they let go of all of their neurology and their skills and abilities that are associated with the mask. And they don't have tools to basically make it efficient. The other than conscious mind only has two speeds when it comes to change work. So it has warp drive and it has turtle.

And basically the turtle is making micro changes at warp speed because the other than conscious mind gets bored. It does. So if you have an efficient effective process where you're moving from one sort of phase of stability through the instability of change to another stable place within a short amount of time, you know, a few hours. And then, you know, a few more hours for recovery or a good night's sleep for recovery. That's how you can make pretty massive incremental changes while still being able to kind of reforge or reshape a personality mask to go out and do the things that you need to do.

I mean it would be lovely if every gender identity and neurotype and way of thinking was supported and everybody made an effort to accept and communicate with everybody. But by and large the masks are necessary because how people feel about us and how they perceive us directly affect our income. They directly affect what opportunities they have. They directly affect pretty much every quality of aspect of our life. So the more skill that we can bring to the mask, the better for us.

And the more that we can actually- and the more that we can create opportunities to work less, to have more time to ourself. I mean, you're working sixty, seventy hours a week at a public facing job, you're spending most of your time in your mask. So you have kind of a few hours each day where you're not masked unless you have to wear the mask of a parent or caregiver which is kind of the sandwich generation. And parenting is a mask. So you may end up with a very small amount of unmask time.

And one of the things that I've noticed especially about autistics, and I don't think this is true of ADHD, but when autistics unmask, a lot of times their facial expressions go like completely flat. And there's a very little movement around the eyes, very little movement around a lot of the facial muscles. And I think that expression in the face, I think a lot of that's learned. So the big thing is have a good method. If you can, plan for space in the life to do it.

Plan for extra rest. Plan for integration periods. Take as much demand off of you as you can. And then mean, the other thing is then do whatever amount of change and transformation that you can do in a sitting, do it fast. The other than conscious mind likes fast.

The body always has to play catch up. The brain, the wiring, the nervous system has to play catch up. But the change itself actually happens pretty quickly.

How can neurodivergent individuals use spirituality to strengthen their sense of self and navigate suicidal challenges?

Suicidal or societal? Societal. Both of those would be big topics. And there's a lot of research on sort of the suicidal challenges thing. I'm just gonna kinda let that go.

Maybe you can hand me back for another podcast. Yeah. But I think it's important to have a deeper sense of identity that's beyond the personality that's beyond our neurology. Because I don't feel like there's autistic souls or un autistic souls. Just like I don't think there's gendered souls.

At some level there is a universality of polarity and spectrum. And being able to feel that, I think it connects you with people that are different. Tends to give you more grace, more compassion not only with yourself but also with other people. There's something very practical about being able to feel a deepness to your humanity that's beyond your shape and form and neurology and being able to feel and perceive that in other people. And also part of my spirituality is inherently tied up into the flow of energy through nature and myself.

And I mean there's direct correlations between neurologic function and the amount of energy flow and the awareness in different energy channels and energy centers. So that's one of the earliest ways that I actually learned how to shift gears in my own brain was by directing energy in these different locations. Kind of at a basic level, you want a basic example, is if you bring awareness and energy from the tip of your tongue down to your perineum, kind of in between the genitals and the anus, and you let that space expand and breathe, that is your conception vessel that's tied in with the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the rest and digest setting. And really relaxing that helps you enter into a vegetative slow state.

And if you bring awareness from kind of the roof of your mouth up around the head to the back and you let that breathe, expand and energize and maybe even cone forward a little bit, that's your active channel. That's aware of the environment. That's processing. That's moving forward. And I didn't learn at it as the Hakalau state, that's what they call it in Huna.

But kind of the other thing that's real big is it's really hard to be inside your head and hearing voices and beating yourself up if you have a diffuse open focus awareness where your visual information and your proprioceptive information are kind of synesthetically blending And you're very aware of the environment. In NLP, call it the uptime trance. I learned it I learned it from my martial arts instructor when I was young because it's what he taught us to fight in. I've heard that they teach police this. So that's those are all spiritual techniques that have been really useful.

And it was something that I kind of I realized when I was growing up that I needed to stay in this state because otherwise I would get kind of off into internal monologues and head loops and stuff that wasn't healthy. And it also helped me pay attention to people. So it increased my sensory acuity and my observational ability of people significantly. The paper that we were talking about before, one of the really interesting conclusions that the authors came to, and this is the Intense World Theory review paper from December 2010. One of the things that they actually concluded is that a lot of the communication difficulties that autistics face is they hyper attend to a very small amount of signals that come from people and then usually associate positive or usually associate less than positive connotations to them.

So instead of actually being aware of all the body language, all the gestures, all the energy, they focus on one element and then decide that it's bad. They might like focus on somebody's eyebrows or they might focus on and become reactive to certain pitches and tones of voice and that kind of thing.

So you've had an opportunity obviously to go to clinics and interact with medical staff. Do you find they're equipped to deal with neurodivergent or No. Okay. What would you recommend? How would we bring about that change or that awareness in there?

Is that something they have to include in the programs or how would you approach it?

So this is a big thing that I would actually like the business of Connection Craft to do is actually to at some point move into physician training. I have kind of been met with a lot of resistance to it. But basically, there's I think two big factors that are really preventing good communication between providers and neurodivergent individuals. And this is also true of healthcare providers and queer individuals and other people that are very different from healthcare provider. Is number one, they don't have a model of connecting nervous system to nervous system.

They don't have good high quality language. So they they don't get into rapport with people. And it's gotten worse since we've gotten computers and kind of gone into paper charts and everything is there's very little orientation and attention to the patient when you're in the room. And I think that is that is the biggest thing, is actually being able to attend to the person that's there, synchronize with them, and ask the right questions in the right way to get connection, to get safety, to get the information that you need. The big, big thing that I'm seeing is basically just in general a lack of connection.

It's also coupled with the fact that when we're in medical school, I mean, it wasn't until 2014, the medical community accepted that you could have both autism and ADHD. They thought that those were diagnoses of exclusion. So the predominant model of medical education, and I mean this is some of the reason why I couldn't accept that I was autistic for a long time, is it's basically we look at the disruptive white male child in the back of a classroom. That is most providers' model of autism. So poor eye contact, muted voice, frequent outbursts, behavioral issues.

And those things might be common in that population But it doesn't really take into account all of the expression of the nonpathologic manifestations of an autistic genetic brain and core. Women seem to have less of a problem with neural fragmentation than their male counterparts. So they're better at masking. And it may be because there's kind of a boys will be boys and there's a more tolerant attitude. Women, if they are societally disruptive, get a lot worse treatment than men.

And that's true also in the West of people of color as well. So a white kid's more likely to be diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder whereas a black kid is more likely to be diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder or any sort of sociopath associated disorders even if the behavior is completely the same.

What are your long term goals for expanding programs like Connection Craft and Inner Essence Activation to reach more neurodivergent individuals?

Basically, I I have really four different areas of training that I want to roll roll out with people. And I really wanna focus on working with individuals who want to move past just a remedial state. I really wanna work with people that are not just not just want to suffer less, but actually want to generate positive things in their life. So I have the empowerment track and I have a relationship track up now that are two of my main areas of focus. And and basically the empowerment one is more or less how you wire your brain up.

How you dissolve your masks. How you integrate all of that material. How you consciously create the mask. And then what language and social skills do you need to move skillfully throughout the world. And then kind of depending on how many people I get and how far they wanna go, there's always more that I can teach with that.

The other things that are important to me are relationships and family and kids. So taking those skills into those contexts of being able to meld with people, being able to reprogram your thoughts, your beliefs, your neurology, so that you can be a more cohesive family unit. And ex you know, within the setting of more of the adult relationship education, how do you maximize pleasure? How do you maximize connection? I don't know that anyone can give their child a completely trauma free upbringing.

But how do you be the least traumatic parent possible? How do you really craft an experience for your children where their neurology is blossoming on their agenda, not just yours, but they're still getting the skills and the abilities that they need to survive the world? So that's probably the next thing is more of a family edition of connection craft and interaction activation that I wanna roll out. And the other thing is healthcare providers. Being able to train healthcare providers about the nature of the autistic mind.

And being able to train them in ways of improving their own neurology, helping with a lot of their medical training trauma because we all have it, every single one of us. And bringing their neurology back into a state of wholeness and flexibility so that they can dynamically with the people that are in front of them. And there are unfortunately there are a lot of societal and structural barriers to that in place because in medicine we've really started to take a very production driven model, a very factory. It's a weird hybrid of sort of patient satisfaction, customer service, and productivity where we're trying to make people as happy as we can as quickly as they can and shove them out the door. And that's not really compatible with good communication or good care.

To wrap things up, we have introduced a new segment in our podcast called the Neurodiversity Myth Busting Segment. We hope to encourage our listeners to submit their responses to the six myths found on our website at neurodiversityvoices.com and we may feature you on our next podcast episode. And so we will ask our guest speaker to give us his thoughts on one of the myths as well. So Doctor. Wells, the first myth is neurodiverse individuals are less intelligent.

Second, it's neurodiverse individuals cannot succeed in the workplace. Third, it's neurodiverse individuals lack social skills. Fourth, neurodiversity is a disorder that needs to be cured. Fifth, neurodiverse individuals are all the same. And sixth is neurodiverse individuals are always introverted and prefer to be alone.

I feel like I could talk about all of those. I think probably the one that I'm the most passionate about is neurodiversity is a disorder that needs to be cured. And if we look at just the rates of genetics of neurodiversity in different populations, it's too high to not have been a survival function and good for tribal units and good for the community at some point. This is a little bit dated of a book but there was a ADHD researcher that actually proposed that ADHD individuals would make great hunters. Their senses are hyper attuned, easily able to and impulsively follow small bits of information.

They can suppress their own hunger signals. They tend to be very hyper focused and can go for hours and hours and hours. And these are all things that would be great to have a population in a tribal community that would do that. I think the autistics were usually the shamans and the medicine people and the people that studied the stars and the seasons and recorded the information and smoothed and regulated the community. Because we do have inherent justice, we try to make things good for everyone.

So I haven't found the paper for this. It makes sense. But they were actually looking at correlations between the amounts of autism in different populations and kind of what genetic markers of neurodiversity were in populations. And populations that were heavily fundamentalist and had a high rate of burning witches or burning or basically killing people that were different, they tended to have lower rates of neurodiversity genetics. They tended to have higher rates of neuro typical genetics.

And I think fundamentally that neurodiversity and especially autism and maybe even some of the associated ones, having people in your population with those genetics actually was a survival advantage for the tribe because they bring different powers of consciousness and awareness and processing to the community. And they also tend to also have different chronotypes. So the ADHD tend to be your night owls. Your autistics can go either way where they either stay up super late or they're up super early. And there is a survival advantage even just in that and just having different chronotypes in a tribal setting where there's always somebody awake paying attention to stuff.

So I guess probably the thing that I am most adamant about expressing is that there is strong and compelling evidence that a lot of the pathology that neurodivergent individuals experience is a direct result of Western culture. And neurodiversity ain't broke. Our culture is. And it's even causing neurotypical problem. It's even causing neurotypicals issues at this point.

Thank you, Doctor. Wells, for sharing your story and expertise with us today. Before we leave you, is there anything you want to leave your audience with?

So my number one thing would be don't settle. You are wonderful. You are brilliant. There's something amazing inside you and you can do so much more than even you believe in. And you just have to give that person a chance.

Thank you.

That was beautiful.

Thank you. Doctor. Wells. Thank you for joining us and gaining insight from Doctor. Craig Wells, a dedicated advocate for the neurodivergent community.

Through his expertise and innovative programs like Connection Craft and Inner Essence Doctor. Wells continues to inspire individuals to embrace their true selves, optimize their potential and build meaningful connections. His work reminds us all to never settle and to craft lives that are truly extraordinary.

That's all for today's episode of Neurodiversity Voices podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in and being part of this important conversation.

We hope you found today's discussion insightful and inspiring. Remember, every voice matters and together we can create a more inclusive and understanding world for neurodivergent individuals.

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If you have any questions, ideas, or stories you'd like to share, please feel free to fill out our listener survey form or even apply to be our guest speaker on our website. We'd love to hear from you.

Well, until next time, take care, stay curious, and keep celebrating the beauty of diverse minds.

Thanks for listening to the Neurodiversity Voices podcast.