Under certain conditions, pure dialogue could overcome our separation, making social constructs and categories like autism and even self disappear, at least momentarily. This is what I’ve believed for nearly 17 years. Maybe I was wrong.

In the archive, you’ll find my articles on definitions of autism and selfhood in modern contexts. So, the first thing to clarify now is what “separation” means and there are at least three different points to consider:

Functional separateness
You and I are obviously distinct organisms with different histories, perceptions, bodies, needs and limits. Dialogue does not dissolve this, nor should it. Boundaries, asymmetry, and opacity remain real.

Psychological alienation
The felt experience of being cut off, unseen, defended against, objectified, or trapped inside private consciousness. Dialogue can soften this - sometimes dramatically, which is really powerful for a lot of people.

Metaphysical non-separation
The deeper claim found in traditions like Buddhism, Sufism, Advaita, or certain phenomenological currents: that the self is not ultimately discrete and independent in the way modern consciousness imagines. Dialogue may gesture toward this but in modern societies where we apply dialogue to a certain field or context, it’s unlikely.

See the account of Rumi and Shams in 13th century Anatolia below, which addresses most of the above and the dangers of ascribing absolutes to this question.

What I’ve always found compelling, at least enough to invest so much time and energy into it, is that genuine dialogue destabilises the modern fantasy of the isolated self without requiring mystical belief. When two people remain present long enough, suspending performance, certainty, strategic positioning, identity maintenance — something weird and beautiful happens. The interaction ceases to feel like “two sealed interiors exchanging information.” Meaning begins arising between rather than from either participant individually. I’m fortunate to have experienced this several times, mostly in 1:1 coaching sessions. I find “coaching” is a strange but convenient word, and the strangeness between people and our meanings is what this Substack is all about.

Martin Buber (d.1965) was pointing toward a kind of union in his “I–Thou” relation - neither fusion or sameness, but a momentary collapse of objectification. As a counter-illustration, “I-it” would be like when we talk at someone rather than with them as another person. Many people monologue at each other. Social structures are designed to maintain (and influenced by) polarity. Buber said the “I” emerges differently depending on whether one encounters the world or people as “It” or “Thou.” So the relation itself is primary. I think that’s both incredible and ordinary. We all know love.

Similarly, David Bohm (d.1992) treated dialogue as a field process where thought itself becomes visible collectively. In Bohm Dialogue (and this is where you’ll see my application to autism), fragmentation is not merely personal pathology, but built into thought structures and social conditioning. The dialogue group begins to perceive the machinery of separation as it operates in real time - and perhaps paradoxically, engage in it.

Dialogue can also become another refined performance of separateness and one may perceive subtle egoic tendencies such as “I am the conscious facilitator.” “We are the awakened group”; “This is deep” and other subtle status hierarchies around attunement, vulnerability, insight.

Have you seen our new Autism Dialogue Approach Foundations course on Udemy?

Check it out

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I’m sitting behind the glass, not outside, but not fully inside either. It feels like a strange in-between place, where life keeps moving, but a bit out of sync. Everything on the street feels far too alive.

Light moves across the wet path in uneven patches, always changing. Shopfronts shoulder together, watching the buses and cars edge around each other. People walk through it all, as if the street guides them, changing shape as they go. A man crossing the road emits the gift of a deep, open laugh into his phone. Under an awning, a couple leans close, as if together they want to hold the whole world. A scooter slips through a gap, narrowly missing a head-scarved woman eating a bowl of pomegranate, and the street seems to adjust to it. It’s all part of the routine.

I’m looking out of a restaurant window, feeling grateful for the Persian Empire. We are in the bustling Wilmslow Road, Manchester, about to go to a Puressence concert, a band whose music I’ve never heard, and who, perhaps incidentally, used to be called Presence. I’m looking forward to the experience as a challenge.

I’m often more at home in Persian and Arabian culture than in English. Nothing in this street and these cultures ever really settles. Everything keeps finding new ways to make space for everything else.

Earlier in the evening, a quiet pub with a lot of space. There’s a bearded guy in farming clothes at the bar, keeping grounded by the pint at this fingers, and a wistful expression speaking of a long day’s work. I make small talk that lands with a bit too much precision, the emptiness following has no background noise to soften it, and it lands, clear and obvious, so we don’t know what to do. He shuffles his position. I stare forward, waiting for my drink. There’s an odd heaviness in these spaces, in the way presence just sits there, with nowhere to go.

Later at another bar, buzzing at full tilt, conversation barely belongs to anyone before being swept away again. I catch something behind me, already in motion.
“He was wearing women’s knickers!” Someone shouted.
The whole group suddenly has to work this out together in a quick, shared moment of adjusting.
“What, like hers, by accident?”
“No, no one wears them by accident.”
A burst of laughter and relief passes through. I want to turn around to see if ‘Debbie’ is there.
“Are we talking lace, or just—”
The question fizzles out.
“No, I mean, he chooses them. That’s what I’m saying.”
Suddenly, everything changes, and everyone tries to keep things from falling apart. The idea of intention makes it feel heavier, and I feel the group adjusting to it, almost without realising.
“How do you know?”
I feel my right ear flex. If there’s an answer, it isn’t discernible.

I’m just as interested in what happens between words. Meaning never just comes all at once, but it’s put together slowly. We might not even notice we’re doing this thing together. But somehow, it’s enough for the conversation to keep going. It can stay unresolved, but holds together, just.

Behind the glass, it all shifts again.

The street is full of half-formed moments. A laugh starts, then falters. A sideways twist to avoid collision. Cyclists in their own lane wear smug determination and joy. An old man rests momentarily on the glass by my side. A sentence is cut off by the roar of an exhaust. Little black sports cars with number plates like ‘DR1LL3R’ and “555SUBS”. Inside, tables come to life. Waiters come and go, and the place is slowly filling. Someone looks at me in a way that I know is a cultural thing, and I don’t mind. Glances and gestures can mean something or nothing, then fade, as if deciding not to exist.

Like being inside a slightly broken kaleidoscope. Patterns begin, crystals fall, patterns fail and begin again – near-repetitions, each one slightly misaligned with the last. Meaning doesn’t settle but refracts and scatters into adjacent versions of itself, each one briefly convincing, none of them final. Things are always in the act of becoming visible, but never quite agree on how to stay that way. A world of unresolved contacts. And underneath all of it, something else is happening.

I’ve chosen the Walnut restaurant’s namesake dish, Fesenjoon. The deliciously spicy walnut sauce thickens at the edges as it cools, and pomegranate seeds insist with their sharp interruptions. My accomplice has a different meal, a different view and a totally different life, even though we live together. I suddenly realise every human has a completely different history, perspective and trajectory, and all of our ways are true. At that moment, my wife looks up and says to me in a playful observation, “There are so many people in the world.”

Outside, a young woman, I am thinking, stares at me but is using the glass for her reflection, and another laugh rises, this time a child. For a moment, everything feels whole and almost warm, and then it scatters, as if it never meant to stay in one place long enough to belong.

And I find myself noticing something I don’t fully want to notice. That this is not just how the street works now, but how it all always works, once you start looking closely enough. Most of what passes between us doesn’t arrive because it was never really travelling in one separate piece to begin with.

We’re always a little out of step with each other, adjusting, guessing, intuiting, knowing, and catching fragments as they come, calling it understanding.

And sometimes what holds the whole thing together isn’t understanding at all.

It’s just that we keep answering each other anyway, even as it’s already starting to disappear.

During an hour of meditation, staring out the upstairs window at the Derbyshire hills, pulsing with spring greens in a soft dawn light, I brought to mind my mother’s last days, then began to recall my childhood. Early memories and insights came clearly, accompanied by a feeling of swimming in warm, clear water. A fresh and unsettling perspective then began to emerge. Something below was shifting.

Today marks a year since my mother died. It feels like it was last week. I’ve declared today a day of mourning. The morning was emotionally tough and took me by surprise, but it also held a hidden gift.

As I got my breakfast ready, I wondered whether to post a memory somewhere online. A momentary waft of deep gratitude and more clarity. Then emotion. Then the phrase came, uninvited.

“Paradise is at the feet of the mother.”

I wasn’t ready for what that might mean.

I was a disciple of a Sufi order for over twenty years. It was where I found the deepest meanings and lifestyle, to contain some of what I was going through at the time. I’d just finished five years of intense partying and, before that, a youth consisting mostly of wild abandon and intense searching for meaning and satisfaction. I’m still aligned with Sufism inwardly and am now familiar with several ancient traditions too, such as Taoism and Advaita. The full-time practices of the Sufi Order were extremely difficult, and without drink or drugs to hide behind, I was often a teetotal turban in a mental crisis. Leaving that life was harder still; when the scaffolding collapsed while wrestling with an art degree and a citywide music and arts project, my marriage with 5 kids went with it—and yet a new life opened up.

For some years, I struggled with business, finding my place in the world of work, seeing my kids, and navigating a new marriage, amid more existential crises. For all intents and purposes (and with the benefit of hindsight), I appeared stuck in what the great 13th-century Sufi saint Ibn al-Arabi called the barzakh, or, in English, the Isthmus — the intermediate realm that separates yet brings together two things, ultimately, spirit and matter. The barzakh is the ontological bridge that allows communication between opposites, acting as a "third thing" without which existence would cease. It’s also what’s always between us — our participation mystique.

I recognised it immediately, though I had other names for it back then. Someone once said I looked like I was “going through something”. I was lost for years on the inner metro.

My mother knew my Sufi world very well. Between the ages of 22 and my forties, she witnessed much of it, including the births and raising of my children in that fold. She even came to meet my Turkish sheikh. A deeply spiritual and private person herself, I saw her reciting the Arabic ‘Alhamdulillah’ (all praise is for God) as she slowly slipped away into her own final barzakh, and what Rumi referred to as his "Wedding night”.

So there I was, trying to eat my toast, contemplating the six decades of unconditional love from my mother, now looking at a photo of her at my age. I contemplated my formative years when I absorbed undue trouble and strife into my young nervous system. During my first decade on Earth, I witnessed two young parents in their early twenties arguing and fighting like cats. There are many happy memories, and we kids were lucky in many ways. What I recall, though, is that my parents’ relationship was mostly extremely problematic. Then my father left.

Now sitting on the grass in the warming sun, I realised I was deeply parentified by these experiences.

I had been standing guard for years without knowing it.
Watching. Adjusting. Anticipating. Barzakh.

It felt like love at the time.

Slowly but surely pressed into an odd shape, I became a protector — of myself, my siblings, and my mother. And I’ve been seeing the world through these eyes of protection. Within this, a persistent sense of unease and failure. I was seemingly locked into an idea of myself for many years, searching in the dark, anywhere, for what I thought was true love, while my inner child waited for the coast to clear.

As an adult, my father told me I “might be on the spectrum”. I had no idea what he meant. He added that when he was in a mental hospital for being suicidal (I briefly tried to help him recover but felt rather out of my depth), a nurse had told him that he might be “on the spectrum.”

Off I toddled to the GP surgery armed with a typed-out list of sensitivities, quirks and habits, spells of confusion and some mild depression behind me, and a history of what I actually thought were all my own failings, I asked the NHS if they thought I was “on the spectrum”.

Yep. I was told I met the criteria for Asperger's and ADHD. I don't fully align with these paradigms, as I’ve already written about. They helped, of course. They gave me somewhere to stand. And an unusual career. But I sometimes wonder what, exactly, I agreed to become in that moment.

Autism. Autos. The self. It sounds too easy. A name that folds everything back in on itself. A self explaining the self to itself.

I’ve spent years trying to understand that, circling it, defending it and organising my life around it. And then it slips.

Because if this is the self, then whose grief is this? Whose love?

And our deepest love is yearning to know.

I sat there, holding all of it — her, me, the past rearranging itself in real time. It was difficult to tell what was memory and what was love, or whether there was any difference.

And underneath it all, a quiet sense that this too was an offering.

“Paradise is at the feet of the mother.” - Prophet Muhammad

The well-known saying is a metaphor that indicates that humbling oneself before a mother and treating her with kindness and love is an act of worship that earns God’s pleasure. It highlights the immense sacrifices a mother makes (pregnancy, nursing, and raising) and commands that children treat her with the highest honour. While it is specifically addressed to one’s own mother, it is often interpreted as encouraging respect for all women and the role of motherhood.

So you know:

This is a personal piece written a year after my mother’s death. I’m not aiming to resolve anything, just stay close to it.

Thanks for reading.

Well, hello.

Yeah, this is the first time I’m just going to read out passages from my book. Totally impromptu, no mucking about with microphones, Bluetooth, USB, whatever, or any flashy camera setups. This is me sat on my desk and I’m going to just open this at random.

My book came out exactly a year ago. So, we’re kind of in a way celebrating. Yay.

‘‘An Introduction to Mindfulness.’

Modern mindfulness-based programs are based on the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness meditation and adjusted to mental health care based on the western science of psychology. It’s become so widespread in the west that I recently heard Buddhist monks in Tibet are now learning from western books on meditation.

Mindfulness is described as present moment non-judgmental awareness. present moment non-judgmental awareness and may or may not use body or breath awareness as an anchor to present moment experience.

Meditation is natural, it’s resting in who you are

So with that intention, we are resetting the dial for our real self, which can be described as calm and confidently perceptive.

(Is your real self calm? Think about it. Right now, I don’t feel that calm. Perceptive, they really go together, don’t they? Soon as we make that intention, am I calm? Am I perceptive? It feels like that’s the default, although I’m rarely there.)

Mindfulness is a process, a practice to live by. So it might be difficult and feel like it’s not working at first, but it is.

(There’s an interesting thing to talk about.)

You can see it as practice where the more you do it, the better you get. If you can persist, the results may be subtle at first, perhaps with the occasional glimpses of deeper clarity or satisfaction. This might even be puzzling.

And after years of practice, I’ll still sometimes forget why I might be feeling strangely elevated. Even though I may have just been to a new meditation group the day before, for example (this really just happened).

The benefits are physiological in that regular practice strengthens the immune system, helps relieve stress and anxiety, reduces chronic pain, alleviates depression, and improves sleep.

On the mental, emotional and spiritual levels, there are improved moods and fewer swings, improved empowerment, enhanced creativity, more peace of mind, more fun and happiness, and crucially for dialogue, better relationships.

So meditation together in groups or alone can be an antidote to stresses and strains, isolation, confusion, and fragmentation.

Framing the search for deeper meaning in our lives with a thing we’ve called mindfulness can be extremely helpful and satisfying and can complement any life, spiritual or not.

Of course, there are always there have always been many kinds of meditation everywhere. It’s just that in the modern age, especially in the west, we appear to have lost our spiritual communal roots to instead focus on information accumulation, positive knowledge, reductionist scientist, sciences, space travel, entertainment, escapism, individualism, and consumerism.

Let me say that again. In the west, we appear to have lost our spiritual communal roots to instead focus on information accumulation, positive knowledge, reductionist sciences, space travel, entertainment, escapism, individualism, and consumerism.

If that sounds bleak or exaggerated, take a moment to think about the modern cities we live in.

I live in the countryside and I’m very grateful for that.

Much of the negative impacts upon autistic people is because of the fast-paced desensitised modern environments and the hegemony of the predominant neurotype. It seems like there’s a problem with real communication.’

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Well, that was me trying to fit quite a lot into about a page of writing.

And what that brings up for me right now is quite a lot because I’m writing the next book for Routledge on that very subject. It’s going to be called ‘Radical Autistic Awareness; strengths-focused mindfulness strategies for autistic people’ ..along those lines.

And, the whole thing about mindful awareness, I prefer to call it, in relation to autism is the notion which I realised after a couple of years working in autism that knowledge, self-knowledge is empowerment and healing for people.

So my encouragement is to increase your self-awareness however you can if you’re autistic and that means learning about autism from reliable sources.

And if I can grab a couple right here, apart from my book, of course, two I would highly recommend by my old tutor, on my my ex-tutor. Not old, he’s not that old, Luke from Sheffield Hallam University on the MA Autism. Two fabulous books. Highly recommended. Learn about yourself from these powerful very powerful for self-knowledge and empowering and healing.

And the other thing (forthcoming book) is mindfulness for autism.

So we’re talking about awareness and autism from the word self, isn’t it? Autos.

Autism is from the root of the of the word self. Autotos, automatic, all those derivatives. ‘‘Aut’.

So when it comes down to it, what mindfulness for autism really means, and it’s not it’s not a cure for an ill, is it? At all. It’s me using the terminology of Western society for self-awareness.

And that’s what really interests me because it’s what drove me to seek out a diagnosis of autism in the first place. I couldn’t get self-aware. And I thought it was me.

So, I went to the NHS and asked them what the heck is up with my head because I was getting confused. And I’ve got some interesting quirks. Autistic traits, you might say, and they told me I was autistic. I met the criteria.

I don’t like to use the word diagnosis because I don’t think they ever said that. This ‘here’s your diagnosis’. When I got a letter, it just said you met the criteria for Asperger syndrome, it was known at that time, and ADHD.

Yeah. Well, that’s all another story.

Mindful awareness, self-awareness, autism awareness, mindfulness for autism. It’s all going in the new book.

So, enough for today and, sorry for the waffling nature. But yeah, I’ll be reading some more out of my book soon. Hopefully try and stick to this book and not some other stuff. I might get some of The Upanishads if you’re lucky. Just kidding.

See you.

Ref

Drury, J (2025). The Autism Dialogue Approach Handbook: Transforming Communication in Neurodiversity. Routledge.

How’s it going? I know — daft question.

I’ve been working on something over the past few months that I wanted to share with you.

It’s called The Autism Dialogue Approach Foundations Course and will be launched on Udemy next Friday! It’s a unique autism & neurodiversity professional communication and dialogue training. Katie (my incredible better half) has been helping me organise things, and we are both really excited about the launch!

The short foundational course is designed for therapists, coaches, and health professionals who want to improve their communication and build trust with autistic, neurodivergent and highly sensitive clients.

If it’s not for you, you probably know someone who would benefit!

We are hoping that the course will change people, not only in the way we engage, but also in how we become more comfortable with our own vulnerabilities and even our built-in prejudices (we all have them).

There are some refreshing, robust theories from autistic social scientists, inner-work reflections, and ready-to-use applications to help you understand and respond to the autistic experience in a relational way, in order to truly benefit all around.

I’ve put together a simple page here:
https://dialogica.uk/autism-dialogue-udemy-certified-foundations-training-course/

If it sounds relevant to your work, please leave your email on the waitlist.

I’ll let you know when it goes live with the exclusive launch offers.

No pressure at all — just wanted to share it.

Staying calm….

Jonny & Katie

“This approach has great potential to reduce harmful societal misunderstandings of autism. The Autism Dialogue Approach needs to be embraced.”

~ Megan Freeth, Professor of Neurodevelopmental Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK.

SIGN UP

For the last thirteen years, since the NHS told me I met the criteria for autism and ADHD, I never fully trusted it because I’ve always known that society itself is broken. As a kid, I used to call most adults “normals” - I knew there was a dominant world out there that mistook itself for real, or was hiding something, and expected everyone to get behind it. These days one might call that neuronormative, neurotypical or the predominant neurotype. Anyway, I was different, yes, and that was part of my strength, which I loved myself in. I had a wild faith in my own difference (and loving younger siblings to support it) and I instinctively spent a lot of time hiding in the woods. As a refuge. A way of not letting the whole messed-up arrangement get to me.

After decades hiding and surviving in many different, often very colourful and exciting ways, I went to the NHS for a possible answer to my life, unaware I was about to become entangled in a massive systemic problem. (I’ve told this story several times elsewhere - I asked the interviewing neurologist if she had any knowledge of non-dual awareness. No she didn’t.) Anyway, they eventually told me I met the criteria, and it didn’t come gift-wrapped. It came with mixed feelings, and stranger ones. There was a subtle sense of giving in, if I’m really honest, of buying into something, and underneath that, a sense of pretence or betraying myself. A label can be useful and still feel like a theft. It can offer recognition and ask for surrender in the same gesture. In my case, it sometimes felt as though something stolen from me long ago was being handed back under institutional management, renamed by them, repackaged as insight, and presented as though I should be grateful. It’s odd but one doctor said I should be referred to mental health. But I was fine! Even as recently as last month at a general health check-up, I was surprised to be told that my record says I have a learning disability. How did that sneak on to their system? The nurse agreed with me it was nonsense and applied for it to be removed.

As I get back to writing about my genuine struggles, excuse me while I remind myself that we men have been told it’s good to talk about mental health. I’m fine though, honestly. Mostly.

Then I went further in. I studied autism at postgraduate level, which made it all more academically concrete while confusing me almost as much as it informed me. It gave the category more theories, warnings, attachments, diagrams, language, and more authority, but not necessarily more truth. If anything, it thickened the air of what I wanted more clarity on.

And then there was the work. A lot of it. I built things inside it from the gut. I worked hard, facilitating dialogues, conferences and events. I searched. I tried to make something humane and useful out of what I had seen in myself and in others. And I wanted community too. Most of that work was good and real and still matters to me. But there was also a discomfort running underneath it, and I can see now that part of the intensity came from trying to wrestle with something I’d not yet fully admitted, nor ever would, it turns out. At times, I had the uneasy feeling that I was helping to perpetuate a myth, or at least helping to stabilise a category that had started to carry far more weight than it could honestly bear. I also saw that informed spaces could still be psychologically unsafe, and that the category somehow gave us a right to know who someone was, rather than serve as a window or frame around a picture.

That is why I need to say I no longer believe autism is the whole truth. I don’t mean that difference is unreal, or that some people don’t suffer very particular forms of misattunement, overload, exclusion and confusion. Nor do I mean that practical recognition and accommodation don’t matter. They do. But autism has come to mean too much in the wrong way. It’s swollen into one of those modern little empires: a category that begins by naming something and ends up trying to explain the person. It can reveal something real, yes, but it can also distort, flatten, and overtake the life it claims to illuminate.

I think there are people out there who need to know this. People who don’t want the label. People who accept it because it’s convenient or helpful, but find it clinging. People who sense that it explains something but not enough, or worse, explains too much. People who would like to be free of the strange pressure to organise their entire existence around a framework that only ever describes part of their picture. I suspect some are frightened even to think this, because the culture around autism is now so overinvested that any loosening of the category gets treated like betrayal. I’ve met and supported people, and there must be many more, who know, deep down, that they are larger than the thing that names them.

That was certainly part of my own journey. During my unravelling period, looking back over my life, and still occasionally now, there are moments where the word autistic can be convenient and helpful. It can explain something, but convenience is not the same as truth and the truth is the word is wearing thin. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it is pointless, and sometimes it becomes a story that starts explaining away the very mystery and difficulty of being alive. There comes a point where you don’t need yet another backwards-glance interpretation of your childhood, the social confusion, intensity and so-called deficits. There comes a point where the category starts replacing life rather than helping you meet it.

I hear people say, with relief in their voice, “everything makes sense now.” I get you, but no, it doesn’t. Believe me, none of this makes sense. Life is wonder and mystery and contradiction, and tragedy too. Tragic. Things are taken from people. Personalities are warped. Ways of being are forced into defensive and even scary shapes. Children learn to protect what’s alive in them because the world has no proper place for it, and then later institutions arrive with a label and tell them what they are. Modern society has almost no provision for spiritual awakening. That is one of its great tragedies. It knows what to do with symptoms, traits, categories, presentations and support needs, but not what to do with the shock of a person waking up to ask far deeper questions than our culture is prepared to answer.

This is where autism begins to feel too small for me. Not because it never refers to anything real, but because it can’t hold the depth of the human problem. Neurodiversity as well, for all its value, ultimately points to something so broad that it becomes obvious: everybody is different anyway. True, but hardly enough. The problem is not merely difference. The problem is what gets pathologised, what gets monetised, what gets moralised, what gets normalised, and who gets to decide.

This is also why I want to be clear that what I call Autism Dialogue, and all the training, courses, writing and thought around it, was never really about autism as a fixed explanation. It may have grown in that territory, and it may still be especially useful there, but the deeper impulse was always elsewhere. It was always about what happens when people are reduced, rushed, over-interpreted, managed, normalised, or spoken over. It was always about whether genuine contact is possible when one side assumes it already knows what the other is. It was always about dialogue, mutuality, pace, power, and the possibility of meeting someone without first pinning them to a board. In that sense, autism was never the whole subject. It was one place where the failure of the wider culture became impossible to ignore.

I can see now that the diagnosis was, in part, a bridge to understanding. I don’t deny that. It opened certain doors and helped shape certain questions. It helped me build a body of work. But a bridge is not the landscape nor a home. There is something poignant, and frankly a bit absurd, in the fact that I am writing this on the eve of releasing my first on-demand Autism Dialogue course, having exposed myself one last time in video lectures about autism and about dialogue, offering myself up again to a field that has never been neutral for me. That exposure is a risk. Then again, that is what the last thirteen years now feels like: a kind of sacrificial devotion to understanding the self, and perhaps more strangely, to understanding whether there is a self at all. I don’t believe there is. Which makes the whole thing more curious still, given that the root of the word autism spins on the self.

So, no, I am no longer interested in living under the label's authority. I don’t need to spend the rest of my life hiding in the woods from society, nor kneeling before one of its categories, either. The woods are real, and I honour the wild me that went there, but I’m not there now. I’m here. And I want to say that autism is not the whole truth of a person. Sure, it might matter practically and politically and even be merciful as shorthand. But it doesn’t get to become a little metaphysics. It doesn’t get to tell the whole story of a life.

So, right here is freedom from the idea that a diagnosis is the deepest thing that can be said about you. Freedom from the pressure to line your life up nicely with a story. Freedom from the false holiness that now gathers around certain labels. Freedom, perhaps, to come back into contact with something older, wilder and less obedient in you.

After thirteen years of defiance, buy-in, study, work, confusion, exposure and sacrifice, I find myself with a question I can’t answer for you. Has it been worth it? Has this long offering to understanding, through category and beyond, been worth the sacrifice?

Thank you for reading.

Here’s a poem I wrote last night.

‘No New Messages.’

I am the wind and the air,
a wild, despairing gait,
a troubled donkey.

We’re all beautiful losers.
We win some, lose some,
but mostly lose.

Everybody knows a blow,
that hardens,
or strengthens.
Bows legs.
Knocks knees.

A machine my people built
replaced the teller’s gift.

I stumble towards it
like a fool,
a monkey,
a donkey,

to win a chained moment.

Alas.
No new messages.

I am the wind and the air.

Read by me, Jonny Drury.

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Family, kinship, and small local groups matter so much. They are training grounds for better societies. Democracy starts in kitchens, living rooms, community centres, parks and neighbours’ gardens. Sometimes it happens in awkward groups of people who’ve come together, such as colleagues or neighbours, where we can’t just unfollow each other…

Last night as I got ready for bed, I looked out of the window across the way to see a different light I didn’t recognise. “Huh?” I thought. “Is that smoke? Chimney fire!” I rushed round to see that the fire service was already on the roof trying to douse it, under the fire engine’s spotlights. I asked for permission and went through the open front door.

After more than a year and only meeting her twice over the garden wall, I was thrust into this lady’s life. She lives mostly on her own, and I was the only other person present, apart from three more fire personnel in the lounge wearing masks. It took nearly two hours trying to locate the fire and put it out. There were tears and a little awkwardness as we got to know each other in the difficult circumstances. This morning, smoke lingered heavily, the carpet ruined by burnt coal and water, and a hole in the wall where they’d tried to locate the source. We had a little more opportunity to catch up on a year of missed conversations, and turns out we have a lot in common — an interesting and talkative soul, interesting and genuinely interested. Alas, the house recently sold, and she’ll be moving on. I came home with a renewed sense of what deeply matters.

There are places where reaching out and staying have to be learned, where conflict has consequences, and where dialogue isn’t optional because the relationship continues every day. Life will redress the balance in one way or another. Eventually, it shows us we are one.

Large-scale democratic fantasies often skip this layer entirely. They imagine institutions can substitute for culture.

When was the last time you had an actual dialogue with someone?

Don’t sit on your own too long, or you’ll risk becoming victim to the curse of individualism.

In my meditation earlier this morning, I suddenly burst out laughing when I realised how seriously I take myself, sitting there. Truly relieving and reminded me of a quote from Sylvia Boorstein;

“Meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart's capacity to accept life as it is.”

Dialogue as a practice is easy. If you want a simple container, take a risk with this fun exercise. Go and sit with a friend or neighbour. Pick up the phone or walk into the other room where someone is. Set a timer. You each have five minutes each - one speaks while the other listens. Same time tomorrow? You bet.

Historically, dialogue practices first emerged within the smallest social units—through elders, councils, stories, rituals, and shared responsibility. People learned how to speak and listen before they learned how to govern.

And here’s the irony.

In Indigenous cultures, dialogue is central. As relational maintenance. Councils, talking circles, and consensus-oriented decision-making are survival technologies, not idealistic add-ons. Not for debate or persuasion. They existed precisely because people understood that fragmentation, exit, and unchecked individualism were existential threats to the collective whole.

Modern culture inherited almost none of that—and in many cases actively erased it. America’s settler project privileged speed, conquest, property, and individual sovereignty over relational continuity. Dialogue was replaced with law. Kinship with contracts. Belonging with rights. Efficient, scalable systems took precedence over slow, communal sense-making.

So when I talk about us having more dialogue, it’s firstly about recovering or re-learning what once held communities together, long before democracy was formalised as a political system. The tragedy is that this wisdom survives mostly at the margins—while the dominant culture struggles with polarisation, withdrawal, and the inability to stay in relationship under pressure.

Working within families and small local groups isn’t a soft option. It’s the hard work democracy depends on but rarely rewards. Dialogue at that scale creates the habits institutions can’t enforce: patience, accountability, humility, and endurance. Without those, democracy remains a myth performed at scale by people who have never learned how to live it up close.

If dialogue is returned to the centre, daily, local, embodied, it doesn’t just strengthen resistance. It changes what resistance is.

Less spectacle. More staying. Less myth. More practice.

Announcement:

I’ve devoted many years to Cross-Neurological Dialogue, and I’m about to launch my first official on-demand course on Udemy; ‘The Autism Dialogue Approach Foundations Course’. Out on May 1st, with 2.5 hours of video lectures over 25 topics and many resources and reflection prompts included.

I’m offering a chance for YOU to take part and support me in the launch. If you’re interested in a free spot (value £24.99), please drop me a comment below or a quick line to jonathan@dialogica.uk

Also - if you can share this email that would really help. Tell people to sign up for my Substack where you’ll always get the latest articles or announcements in your email.

Here’s to more dialogue.

Jonny

I was lucky enough to meet Steve in England, after this was released.

The interview, recorded in April 2019, starts with a friendly exchange around common creative interests and alternative art forms. The conversation then moves to examine a perceived autism culture shift, from the wide systemic damage caused by the medical model of disability and Kanner’s default pathologising, to the ever-present fractiousness in the autism community. Extreme imbalances in research outlay and general ignorance are explored, and finally, the growing strengths-based perspectives and looking forward to more harmonious, productive dialogue in the autism community... perhaps as Neurotribes!

Steve Silberman was an award-winning investigative reporter and covered science and cultural affairs for Wired and other national magazines for more than twenty years. His writing appeared in The New Yorker, TIME, Nature and Salon. His ground-breaking book on autism, NEUROTRIBES: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2015 and is a worldwide bestseller. In 2001, he published "The Geek Syndrome," one of the first articles in the mainstream press to probe the complex relationship between autism and genius. The article was praised by experts in the field like neurologist Oliver Sacks and author Temple Grandin. Steve Silberman is a former teaching assistant for the poet Allen Ginsberg, has won numerous awards over the years for his science coverage in the New Yorker, Nature and many other national and international magazines. Steve passed away from illness in August 2024.

Below is an article I wrote about this last year.

I’m absolutely fascinated by conflict. It’s what drove me to train as a victim-offender mediator, and study autism at university. Autism — complex, nuanced, and full of paradoxes. A spectrum — the more you dive into it, the more the edges blur. Some embrace the identity fully, others wrestle with it because of societal expectations or stigma. There’s tension between celebrating neurodivergence and navigating a world built for neurotypicals. People push for acceptance, even as those seeking support face a world that isn’t accommodating.

Fly me to the moon.

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June this year brings something I’m excited to share. We’re launching a new short course for therapists and counsellors on Counselling Tutor, the best-known and probably the largest training platform in the UK for counselling training. It’s around fifty minutes long (+ reflection exercises) and gives a tidy, practical and fairly robust introduction to the Autism Dialogue Approach, with enough immediate application to change the feel of your work straight away (rather than just add another idea to the toolbox).

Around the same time, Counselling Tutor will also be releasing a podcast interview with me about the course, the wider framework behind it, and the Routledge book, The Autism Dialogue Approach Handbook. This work is now touching ten years, and a lot of therapy still misreads autistic experience because the frame is wrong. We are still too quick to interpret difference as deficit, too quick to assume that a “good” client looks verbally fluid, emot…

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Modern language hands us dead words then asks us to live inside them. Influencer conjures performance, visibility, a managed surface, something curated rather than lived. I’m reclaiming the word, because influence isn’t about reach. It’s about consequence. Our perception alters what happens around us - what we notice, what we ignore, what we soften or sharpen. This shapes conversations, decisions, relationships, teams and organisations. You may have no audience at all and still be exerting influence, and in fact many of the most influential people I know have no interest in display. Their influence sits in how they see, and how that seeing quietly reorganises the field they are part of.

My interest is in people whose perception has consequences. Thinkers and movers, then. People who shape patterns, without necessarily naming them. There is a difficulty here, though. The more perceptive someone is, the easier it can be to overestimate the freedom of th…

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“A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.” - G.I Gurdjieff

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I’ve just spent three days in a large converted shed in North London with 11 people I’d never met in-person before. I’m on the 8-month ‘Systemic Leadership Coaching with Constellations’ course with TWP. On the first afternoon, I was taking part in a constellation exercise, in the role of “client” (holding a half-formed future of my work), and was looking at three others — one in the role of my “coach” and the others representing my “potential” and “resources” respectively. I initially thought it was too soon in the programme for my cogs to be engaging at this level. However, even in carpet slippers, I felt safe, and I felt comfortable after a morning of mindfulness, talks, tea, and gentle but rigorous sharing exercises.

At some point during said exercise, however, I realised I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing because I suddenly wasn’t thinking, analysing, solving a problem, or applying anything at all. Standing in the middle of the room with all my baggage and a load of ne…

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I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on how I want to share my Substack work as I move into the final, intensive stages of writing my upcoming book for Routledge.

A Strengths-based Guide for Autism-informed Mindfulness Practices

I am inviting your support as a subscriber.

The insights I share about the Autism Dialogue Approach —rooted in neurodiversity-affirming communication and mindful awareness—are too important to keep behind a paywall. I want this dialogue to be open to everyone who needs it.

Why I’m asking for your support

While the posts will remain free, the work required to produce them and the new book is significant. To complete the manuscript and maintain my advocacy, I need to “buy back” my time from other consultancy work.

If you value the perspective I offer and want to help me reach the finish line, please consider a Paid Subscription.

A subscription is Digital Patronage. Your support directly funds the “deep work” hours I n…

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In 1988 autistic self-advocate and founder of Autism Network International (ANI) Jim Sinclair referred to the “two-way street” nature of communication challenges. The philosopher Ian Hacking wrote about the “looping effect” in 2009, touching upon the reciprocal, two-way effects of interaction and understanding between society and individuals. Damian Milton coined the “ Double Empathy Problem in 2012. And research is increasingly recognising that these misunderstandings run both ways. (Williams et al., 2021)

Evidence shows that a vast majority of autistic adults reported negative experiences in therapy, with experiences often stemming from a lack of therapist knowledge about autism, the application of inappropriate therapeutic models, and an emphasis on masking. (Jubenville-Wood et al, 2023).

It’s nearly 40 years since Sinclair suggested understanding across neurotypes goes two ways.

Both autistic and non-autistic people can struggle to see t…

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In 2024, I was a guest on Jessica Ball’s Lost in Language podcast. Jessica is a specialist facilitator, author, and educator, and like me, has a deep interest in Bohm Dialogue, a transformative, non-hierarchical communication method originally developed by quantum physicist David Bohm. I’m grateful for the conversation as it clarified one tiny idea I’ve been circling for years. What follows is my attempt to explain this more clearly.

Bohm believed that society breaks down when we focus too much on surface-level divisions and lose sight of the deeper connections that unite us. Bohm described the explicate order as the world of separate objects, identities, constructs and fragments, while the implicate order is the deeper pattern from which those fragments come. For Bohm, fragmentation wasn’t just political— but also cognitive. When we treat the explicate order as most important, we mistake parts for wholes and try to defend them.

This distinction has illu…

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This is a note on how my thinking has changed over the years and it sits alongside today’s change into a free publication. Both come from the same place for me - wanting to loosen what enclosed the space, and return things to shared ground.

When I wrote The Autism Dialogue Approach, the culmination of about eight years of sessions, notes and thinking, I was working inside a language that, at the time, felt both necessary and limiting. Necessary because it was the language that opened doors to care, recognition, funding, and community. Limiting because, even then, I sensed that what I was really trying to speak about was not a “condition” located inside individuals, but something living and relational that happens between people, bodies, histories, and the worlds we grow up inside.

In that sense, the book, like a good Dialogue session (as many of you will attest) was a kind of Trojan horse. After my own categorising (of what’s now referred to as AuDHD) and studying it …

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Facilitating the first autism dialogue groups nearly ten years ago, I had an acute sense of “perpetuating the myth” — precarious stuff. The paradox of working in the autism field is that the more I realise it’s relational, the more individualised things feel.

In our progressive societies, we claim to be moving beyond deficit models but autism work is still organised around diagnosing, supporting, categorising and identifying the person, including ourselves. Institutions need stable nouns, of course - people need support. Forms need boxes. Funding needs a problem it can point to. And people need identities and explanations, which at a later age, often comes as a mixture of relief and confusion, followed by a few years of unravelling.

Yet, somehow, the relational view dissolves the very units the system is designed to manage. What exactly is the neurodiversity movement diversifying from anyway?

I’ve always tended to see in patterns rather than in parts. …

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In my previous piece, I wrote about the types of minds that hold many things at once, that stay oriented through breadth, depth and movement, rather than narrowing. I didn’t mean multitasking, but the internal workings of the mind. If awareness itself can be broad and mobile, can stillness still be considered a universal approach? For many autistic and ADHD people, it simply isn’t, and seeing it that way creates unnecessary confusion and self-doubt.

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