Ep 53: Defying Neuronormativity Ft. Lived Experience Educator
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Who is Sonny Jane Wise and what is their mission on the Making the Shift podcast?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift.
We're an SLP couple from California with three boys and a passion for finding better ways to support autistic kids.
I'm Chris. You might know me as speech dude. I'm a Neurodivergent High School SLP and the creator of the Dynamic Assessment of Social Emotional Learning, and I specialize in crafting neurodiversity affirming IEPs through my online course.
And I'm Jesse, a sensory integration trained SLP, owner of a top-rated clinic in Los Angeles, and the creator of the Inside Out Sensory Communication Programs for Parents and Therapists. Join us weekly to learn neurodiversity affirming ways to support social, emotional development, and regulation in autistic kids.
Are you ready to make the shift?
Hello everyone and welcome to Making the Shift. As you can see, we have a little baby special guest here with us who is a is up past this bedtime. And we also have a very exciting guest here today, Sunny Jane Wise. Who you know as lived experience educator. And a little bit about Sunny, you won't hear a lot more, but Sunny is a multiply neurodivergent person. Autism ADHD or bipolar. Did I hit did I hit it?
There's a few others, but those are the main three.
All right. And we're just so excited. You are an internationally known speaker, author, advocate. Just the list goes on and we've been really like watching you and just super excited, big fans of all your content for so long. So we're just feel like this conversation's overdue. We're so happy to have you.
Thank you for having me. Yeah, definitely. So I I have been following you for quite some time and I have learned just so much. One of the you had shared some information a long time ago that's still very common and relevant in the current day. And I don't know if our audience or listeners know much about this. the actual definitions and things, but one of them was uh and I see it quite often, which is the use of the word neurodiverse versus neurodivergent. So I will hear people say, you know, I work with a lot of neurodiverse students. And can you kind of talk to us a little bit about What? neurodivergent means. Like what's the what's the kind of idea behind that? Because For Jesse and I, we come from a background of working.
Um kind of learning through like a medical model, to be honest with you. That's what speech pathology is. And so that term is not really a term in the medical world. So um that would be great if that we we could start there.
Okay, so with neurodivergent, I mean, like what you just said before, how it's not a term in the medical world. I mean, that's exactly it. And it's because neurodivergent, it's an identity. It's it's a cultural social term, it's a social identity. So, you know, we're not going to find any, you know, medical definition or clinical definition of the term is and that's because it's not Clinical term, it's not a medical term. Um, so fun fact about the term neurodivergent, um, in the late 1990s when neurodiversity was, you know, becoming a thing, um, Cassane, who is the creator of the term neurodivergent, was a big uh advocate within the neurodiversity space. And they were finding that people were kind of using neurodiversity to only refer to autism and
ADHD. And what Kassane found is Kassane wanted a term that described all of her brain, all her, all of her diagnoses, all of her mental health diagnoses, not just autism and ADHD. You know, it was a term to move like to describe everything. And for me, that really resonates because I'm autistic and ADHD.
How does Sonny define “neurodivergent” and why isn’t it a medical term?
So obviously I'm neurodivergent, but I also have bipolar, um uh, you know, also OCD, uh, Tourette's and a history, a whole history of other things. And for me, it does not make sense to refer to some parts of my brain or some of my traits as neurodivergent and other parts of my traits or other parts of my brains as disordered. And that's the whole point of neurodivergent. is to move away from calling people disordered or having a disorder and instead recognize people aren't disordered, people aren't unwell, they diverge.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Sonny Jane Wise and what is their mission on the Making the Shift podcast?
0:08–4:25
2
How does Sonny define “neurodivergent” and why isn’t it a medical term?
4:25–8:29
3
What is neuronormativity and how does it shape society’s view of neurodivergent people?
8:29–13:29
4
Why does Sonny “defy neuronormativity” and what does that look like in practice?
13:29–17:25
5
How did the Neurodivergent‑Friendly DBT Skills Workbook come to be and what makes it different?
17:25–20:43
6
What is the Drop‑In Care Space and how does it support neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, and disabled communities?
20:43–24:47
7
What can listeners expect from the upcoming book “We’re All Neurodiverse”?
24:47–29:42
8
What final thoughts and calls to action do the hosts share with listeners?
29:42–32:36
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
Ep. 125 How to Run Successful Social Groups
Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)