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Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™
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The Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™
The Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™ is the synthesis of over 15 years of clinical experience, firsthand caregiver experience, knowledge, training, and neurodiversity research. The social justice movements of inclusion, anti-oppression, anti-racism, and mental health decolonization directly shape this Model. It integrates somatics, trauma-informed, interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, Synergetic Play Therapy, and traditional teachings.
The Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™ is more than a framework for working with neurodiversity. It is a paradigm shift. It challenges pre-existing models; it challenges preconceived and outdated frameworks and systems. The END Model™ is activism.
The Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™ is a 20-hour self-guided course open to mental health, neurodiversity, and disability service providers, therapists, counsellors, clinicians, and healers who want to learn how to provide safe, healing, and empowering services. By empowering the individuals and families, we are committed to helping, we empower ourselves, organizations, and broader communities.
Connection is the antithesis of trauma. Connection is what makes us human and what binds us to each other. Therapy should not only help connect us to ourselves; it has the power to heal communities and the world around us.
The END™ Model can apply to all but can be especially beneficial for the neurodivergent. It is a framework to foster unlearning racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, and colonial teachings to discover the beauty of viewing the world through a neurodiversity lens.
The END™ Model is a beginning. Ending systems of oppression empower us all.
The Empowering Neurodiversity (END) Model™ Tenents
1. Systems of support that strive to be anti-oppressive, anti-racist, anti-ableist, LGBTQIA2S+ affirming and aim to decolonize services honour the intersectionality of all folx.
2. Providing services for the neurodivergent through an inclusive, trauma-informed, and neurodiversity tailored lens is respectful and honours the unique needs of a person.
3. Trust forms by attuning to the felt sense and wisdom of a person. Trust only forms when there is a relationship of safety. Safety is necessary for healing and is a requirement for a therapeutic relationship.
4.. Therapeutic empowerment, defined within this model, is a social justice journey to wellness focusing on what a person can do: their strengths, capacity, and resilience and creating a community of care that works in solidarity and provides equitable opportunities.
5. Fostering co-regulation and interdependence within a community of care benefits neurodivergent folx and the community at large.
6. Connection is the antithesis of trauma. Healing flows through connection to creation, community, and others. That connection empowers us to discover who we are and ultimately connecting us back to ourselves.
7. Ending systems of racism, colourism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and all forms of oppression and marginalization are the beginning of decolonizing mental health and providing services that empower all.
Honouring my teachers
I have gratitude for the knowledge, wisdom, and expertise of all my teachers.
Thank you to the teachers I can name, and those I was not aware of at the time guided me. Thank you to my ancestors, whose wisdom I carry. The work that I do builds on the work of those who have come before me. The work will continue beyond me. It is directly shaped and informed by the experts: folx with FASD. I honour their request - "Nothing about us, without us."
Thank you:
The FASD Changemakers, Myles Himmelreich, RJ Formanek, Synergetic Play Therapy - Lisa Dion and Khris Rolfe, Elder Roberta Price, San’yas Cultural Safety Training, Samaya Jardey, Courtney Farrow-Lawrence, Sacha Médiciné, Resmaa Menakem, Talila A. Lewis, Shawna Murray Browne, Ibrahim X. Kendi, Mireille Cassandra Harper, Robin DiAngelo, Healing in Colour Collective, Gabor Maté, Brené Brown, Dan Siegel, Bruce Perry, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, Bonnie Badenoch, Ross Greene, Gary Landreth, Dan Dubovsky, Brenda Knight, Jacqueline Pei, Claire Coles, Peter W. Choate, Christine Loock, Diane Malbin, Philip May, Ed Riley, Dorothy Badry, Joanne Weinberg, Jan Lutke, Audrey Salahub, Kathleen Mitchell, Lori Vitale Cox, Wanda Pelletier, Rod Densmore, Steve Silberman, Judy Singer, The Windle family, TP, my husband and his family, my parents, my brothers, my children, and all my clients.
