Autoethnographic research "challenges what counts as knowledge, making the case for first person knowledge and life experience as data" [(Morimoto, 2008). ...] Emphasis on the reflective and interpretive aspects of the writing process—the mindful engagement in the process of creative interpretation by which new insight and knowledge are produced—is a key element of autoethnographic research.

(Walker, 2019, p. 73)

Though norms are argued to be transient, framings of autism have endured for a significant period of time, having a tangible impact on how autistic people are treated, manifesting in negative outcomes such as underemployment (Finch et al., 2022), heightened risk of bullying (Libster et al., 2022) and victimisation (Weiss & Fardella, 2018), and higher suicide rates (Cassidy et al., 2018).

(Pearson & Rose, 2023, p. 120)

As Carolyn Miller suggests, rhetorical impulses are often imperialist impulses—whitening, converting, persuading, assimilating. [...] Rhetoric's lies are that its violences are not really violences.

(Yergeau, 2018, p. 81)

It is an essential part of the American myth that anyone who sets his mind to it can succeed, that diligence eventually pays off. It seems to follow, then, that people who do not succeed can be held responsible for their failure.

(Kohn, 1993, p. 20)

Applied behavior analysis, auditory-verbal therapy, and reparative therapies often share as their goal the performance of normalcy by means of behavioral overwriting. These [practices] have less to do with undoing autism, deafness, or queerness than they do with training subjects to behave as though they were neurotypical, hearing, cisgender, or straight.

(Yergeau, 2018, p. 209)

I do this work with the hope that it might offer a means of further understanding—and further contesting—the ways autism violence is normalized as reasonable and even necessary.

(McGuire, 2016, p. 9)

When autistics speak of rhetorical omissions, we often speak of [...] what Judy Endow, following Brenda Myles, has termed the "hidden curriculum." [...] The sticky point, as Endow notes, is the following: "Even though it is socially acceptable for NTs to point out hidden curriculum violations committed by autistics, it is NOT socially acceptable for autistics to point out hidden curriculum violations committed by NTs."

(Yergeau, 2018, p. 173)

[...] when autistic people enter rhetorical situations, we are often silenced, ignored, berated, infantilized, corrected, scolded, behavior-planned, extinguished, institutionalized, electroshocked, restrained, hog-tied, faux-praised, tasered, secluded, shamed, raped, shaken, hit, teased, studied, molested, laughed at, [stalked, drugged, excluded, discredited, robbed, gaslit, beaten] or murdered. In this list, I am not being hyperbolic.

(Yergeau, 2018, p. 83)

The asymmetrical flow of visibility secures the biomedical gaze as a way of seeing that is not required to see itself.

(McGuire, 2016, p. 92)

If, as a matter of principle, we would like to see disparities in power among people minimized whenever possible, we already have reason to turn away from applied behaviorism.

(Kohn, 1993, p. 54)

When you tell a person they are sick and ignore the larger context in which their symptoms make sense, not only do you miss leverage points that could lead to transformation, but you also produce a passive patient who feels defective. Fortunately, more people in the field are beginning to view psychiatric diagnosis as unhelpful and unscientific.

(Schwartz, R. C., 2021, p. 60)

[...] catatonia is defined as the presence of at least three of the following: catalepsy, waxy flexibility, stupor, posturing, agitation, mutism, negativism, mannerisms, stereotypies, grimacing, echolalia and echopraxia. [...] the latter 7 of the above 12 features [...] are established catatonic features which overlap with autistic features (Leary and Hill 1996; Wing and Gould 1979; Wing and Shah 2006).

(Shah, 2019, p. 21)

[Watermeyer & Swartz, 2016] describe the existential, psychological trauma that can arise [...] as a disabled person in a world not designed to facilitate your belonging: "[...] traumatic experience of disability may centre on the subjective meaning one makes of being starved of the means to take on the basic challenges and pleasures of life while surrounded by fellow citizens granted full access."

(Pearson & Rose, 2023, p. 138)

[...] autistic people are more likely to be perceived negatively by their non-autistic peers (Belcher et al., 2022). [...] (DeBrabander et al., 2019; Sasson et al., 2017) have shown that autistic people are judged more negatively by non-autistic observers, who display lower interest in future interactions based on thin-slice video clips including speech and movement [...].

(Pearson & Rose, 2023, p. 45)

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed?

(Freire, 1970, p. 55)

Psychotherapy is necessarily a moral discourse in which ethical commitments are always enacted and validated either covertly or overtly. Therapy and psychological theory cannot be neutral, objective, or divorced from cultural imperatives.

(Schwartz, H. L., 2000, p. xvii)

Nature is included as a partner in therapy, offering a wide variety of tools, interventions, and contexts. (Kamitsis & Simmonds, 2017; Revell & McLeod, 2016; Varanasi, 2020; Wolsko & Hoyt, 2012). Meanwhile, ecowellness describes the measurable relationship between humans and nature, as well as its impact on wellness (Reese & Myers, 2012; Reese et al., 2015).

(Cogburn, 2024, p. 15)

The varieties of transpersonal or peak experience reported by autistics include the following:

• flow states [...] total immersion in an autotelic activity [...]
• transcendent bliss brought on by attending to some manifestation of aesthetic beauty [...]
• experiences of profound attunement or spontaneous intuitive insight [...]
• a vividly experienced, perhaps shamanistic, sense of animism or panpsychism—of everything being alive, of being able to sense and relate to a life force, spiritual essence, or élan vital that suffuses or is inherent in all things [...]
• experiences of the state sometimes referred to in Zen Buddhism as wu-hsin, mushin, or no-mind (Suzuki, 1972), in which the mind is empty of thought and a person experiences “pure consciousness” [...]
• experiences of ego-transcendence or “being the divine Not-self” (Huxley, 1954/2009, p. 35), in which a sense of psychic merging [...] temporarily overrides and dissolves the sense of being a separate self [...]

(Walker, 2019, pp. 67-68)

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

(Freire, 1970, p. 54)