There’s a phrase we hear a lot right now: neuro-affirming practice. It shows up in training brochures, on websites, in job descriptions, and anyone reading this will know how passionate I am about this! However, somewhere in the journey from community knowledge to professional adoption, something important can get lost.
At it’s core, being neuro-affirming is about being human. It is about being kind, compassionate, and genuinely empathic. It is about letting go of assumptions, recognising our own privilege, and truly accepting people as they are — not as we think they should be, or as a framework suggests they might become.
It isn’t a checklist, a certified approach, or a set of strategies you can just implement once the training is done; it is a journey. It requires you to unlearn deficit-based narratives and reorient yourself, which can’t happen overnight; it is an ongoing process. It is a commitment to being genuinely present with another person, meeting them where they are, and letting that presence shape everything that follows. I am still learning and re-learning with every single person I connect with.
Neuro-affirming practice is a relational orientation; you have to dig deep into yourself, question your own presumptions and the sources of your knowledge, value the lived experience of others who share their stories, and really work with the people you are caring for.
When Any Approach Can Become Harmful
Almost any framework or approach, however well-intentioned, can be applied in ways that cause harm if the underlying goal is to bring someone into alignment with neuronormative expectations.
For example if we take the idea of always presuming competence, as I explored in my piece on presuming competence (2025), the principle feels like it has genuinely liberatory roots, it may sound fabulous on the surface. However, if it is applied without nuance — without the right accommodations, without attuned communication support, without attending to whether someone feels physically and emotionally safe in their own body — it can become a new form of pressure: a demand dressed in affirming language and that takes away autonomy and agency.
The same is true of Intensive Interaction, of low-demand approaches, of sensory orientated frameworks, of any relational model you care to name. I wrote more about this in my co-authored article with Dr Joanna Grace; Intensive Interaction as neuro-affirming relational practice (Edgar & Grace, 2026). Reducing any deeply relational approach to a step-by-step procedure and to work towards neuronormative goals undermines practice across the board and can be harmful. The philosophical foundations we build on are everything; it is our orientation which is important.
What Data Cannot Reach
Research matters, but data alone cannot capture what it means to truly be with someone — and the pressure to produce data-legible outcomes can actively exclude everyone, especially the people who need genuine relational presence most, those with profound and multiple learning disabilities.
For those with profound and multiple learning disabilities, a subtle shift in breathing, a change in eye movement, a change in muscle tone, a moment of stillness that feels different from the stillness before may all carry meaning, or it may just be a reflex response; when you really know some one you will be able to judge this and know when to respond and when to pause. As Firth (2025) reminds us, progress lives in the relationship; it cannot be reduced to a checklist or a developmental stage, and trying to do so risks missing the point entirely.
When systems demand measurable proof, we risk building practice that is legible to funders and inspectors, but invisible and harmful to the people it is supposed to serve. The meaning in relationships can’t be measured; it is something felt, because we are human and have developed a connection with someone.
Being Human Is the Practice
So what does neuro-affirming practice actually look like?
Neuro-affirming practice is about being human with others, with empathy and attunement.
I think it looks like arriving without an agenda, following someone’s lead, not strategically, but out of genuine curiosity about their inner world. It looks like understanding that every person is already a meaning-maker: that meaning lives in bodyminds, in rhythm, in sensation, in a turning towards or a turning away — long before it lives in words or can be communicated through any other means.
As Milton’s Double Empathy Problem helps to clarify (2012), the difficulty in communication arises in the relational space between people with different lived experiences. For those with intellectual disabilities and profound and multiple learning disabilities, this places responsibility on the practitioner; it is something that needs to be held with humility and an awareness of privilege and power.
There is no qualification or training that gives you the right to say you are neuro-affirming. There isn’t a framework you can just adopt and say that because you are using this framework it means you are neuro-affirming. Even the most wonderful frameworks out there, created by Autistic-led, deeply passionate, affirming teams, can be manipulated if the practitioner isn’t really in tune and has the person’s well-being at the core of what they do. To be neuro-affirming requires a willingness to show up, slow down, and stay — not because a support plan says so, but because every person, regardless of how they communicate, how their body moves, or what they can or cannot do, deserves to be genuinely met.
Being neuro-affirming is about being human, it is about being kind, compassionate, having empathy, letting go of presumed competence, recognising your privilege, and really being with people and accepting them as they are.
“Belonging is never an individual achievement. It is something created in the spaces between us.”
Related post from Ann Memmott on LinkedIn (1st May 2026)
