Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026
Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026 Poster: The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life
A Cyclical, Neurodiversity-Affirming Framework for Growth and Well-Being Presented at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026
Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788
Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026 poster presentation · Saturday, September 19, 2026, 11:35 am–12:35 pm ·
Li Ka Shing Learning and Knowledge Center, Stanford University Campus
The full poster as presented at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit, September 2026.
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An Introduction to the Framework
Why healing was never a straight line, and what changes when you stop measuring distance from the problem and start noticing how your relationship to it has shifted.
Introducing The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life: Why Neurodivergent Love Is Often Misunderstood. From the Love on the Autism Spectrum channel.
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Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026 at Stanford University Campus
The Stanford Neurodiversity Summit 2026 runs Saturday, September 19 through Monday, September 21, 8:30 am to 7:00 pm each day, at the Li Ka Shing Learning and Knowledge Center, 291 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305.
The poster session was on Saturday, September 19, from 11:35 am to 12:35 pm.
Before the Summit, I also wrote about what neurodiversity research tends to miss about real relationships.
Hoover Tower and the Stanford campus.
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Abstract for The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life
Background:
Neurodivergent adults are frequently guided toward growth through linear, deficit-based models that prioritize conformity, independence, and outward functioning. Clinical, educational, and workplace settings often treat progress as a sequence of stages to be cleared, and treat any return to an earlier difficulty as regression. Such approaches can overlook sensory needs, nervous-system capacity, masking, identity, relational safety, and systemic barriers, leaving individuals to interpret ordinary fluctuation as personal failure. The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life (Spiral) offers a neurodiversity-affirming alternative in which growth is understood as cyclical: returning to an earlier area of need is an adaptive part of healing, not evidence of failure or regression. I was also inspired by the many people who came before me, including Sue Johnson, Dan Siegel, Stephen Porges, Nick Walker, and my former Supervisor, Harry Motro, PsyD.
Methods:
This practice-informed conceptual framework was developed over five years of clinical work with neurodivergent adults and couples. It organizes development and well-being into seven interconnected layers, named rather than sequenced: Body and Senses; Emotional and Energy Patterns; Identity and Awareness; Supports, Habits, and Environment; Relationships and Communication; Personal Pathways and Flourishing; and Collective Belonging and Contribution. Each layer describes a domain of need and capacity rather than a level of achievement, and the layers do not constitute a severity scale. The model integrates neurodiversity-affirming, trauma-informed, nervous-system-aware, relational, and intersectional perspectives. Individuals may enter at any layer and move among layers as capacity, context, and lived experience change.
Results:
The framework is designed to locate where greater safety, understanding, accommodation, or support is needed, and to reinterpret sensory differences, emotional responses, energy limits, executive-function challenges, masking, and relational difficulty as meaningful information rather than personal flaws. A woman thriving at work who returns to sensory regulation after her office is restructured is not relapsing; she is responding accurately to changed conditions. Used this way, the Spiral supports self-awareness, agency, authentic communication, interdependence, and sustainable rather than performative growth. Its central move
is to shift attention from individual adjustment toward environmental fit, shared responsibility, and collective care, locating part of the work in the settings that surround a person rather than solely in the person. The Spiral itself is a conceptual model; empirical evaluation has not yet been conducted and is a planned next step, beginning with structured practitioner feedback and pilot use in clinical settings.
Conclusion:
The Spiral offers a non-hierarchical alternative to stage-based models of personal development. Flourishing does not require completing one layer before entering another, or progressing toward a final level. Instead, well-being emerges through ongoing attention to safety, capacity, identity, relationships, autonomy, joy, and belonging. The framework is intended to structure both therapeutic, clinical, and coaching conversations, support reflection and self-advocacy, and guide the design of more responsive neurodivergent-affirming environments.
The Framework
The Seven Layers
Each layer describes a domain of need and capacity, not a level of achievement. The layers are named rather than sequenced, and they do not make a severity scale. People move among them as capacity, context, and lived experience change.
01
Safety & Believability
Body & Senses
Your body knows what isn't safe before your mind has words for it.
Sensory awareness across all eight senses. Nervous system states, including fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, understood as protective responses rather than problems to eliminate. Environmental fit and accommodation as part of care, not as special treatment.
My body is my compass.
02
Capacity & Signals
Emotional & Energy Patterns
Your nervous system has been speaking. This is how to start listening.
Interoception, the body-based cues for hunger, fatigue, emotion, and stress that often get overridden. Emotional regulation without pressure to resolve or fix, including anger, RSD, and PDA. Energy awareness and pacing. Trauma-informed understanding. And shame, the invisible weight underneath burnout, masking, and chronic self-criticism.
My emotions and energy are signals, not flaws.
03
Self-Understanding
Identity & Awareness
The version of you that wasn't allowed to exist is the one you're meeting now.
Claiming a neurodivergent identity, where pride and grief get to coexist. Late identification as its own distinct life event, a reorganization of personal history rather than simply a diagnosis. Masking and authenticity. Grief and integration. Strengths and passions reclaimed as real capacities. Intersectional awareness of how neurodivergence meets gender, race, sexuality, disability, and culture.
I'm not broken. My wiring carries wisdom.
04
Supports, Habits & Environments
Daily Living
Your life needs to fit you. Not the other way around.
Supportive structures built to work with neurodivergent wiring rather than against it. Executive function support without shame. Working memory and time blindness treated as genuine differences in how the brain tracks time, not as poor effort. Systemic awareness that names ableism and structural barriers. Agency and autonomy.
Support is a strength.
05
Connection
Relationships & Communication
Two nervous systems, wired differently, learning to find each other.
Relational navigation that moves past "social skills" toward mutual understanding and shared pacing. Authentic communication and repair that respect nervous systems. Intimacy and sexuality, rarely addressed in neurodivergent frameworks and among the most common concerns couples bring. Interdependence over the myth of total independence. Community healing.
Relationships thrive through shared responsibility.
06
Living What Fits
Personal Pathways & Flourishing
Rest, play, and pleasure aren't rewards. They're how you stay yourself.
Self-defined direction, where what you move toward is yours rather than inherited. Burnout recovery, understood as a collapse of capacity following sustained masking and over-functioning, not ordinary tiredness. Rest, play, and pleasure as practice. Sustainable growth, which is deepening rather than acceleration.
My life gets to fit me.
07
Beyond Achievement
Collective Belonging & Contribution
Belonging isn't something you earn. It's something you build together.
Collective thriving in neurodivergent-led spaces built on mutual support. Shared joy as communal practice rather than private reward. Offering to others, contributing what you carry to something larger than yourself. And a liberation lens that moves from individual survival toward collective care.
We rise together.
This layer is always named Beyond Achievement. Not a peak. Not mastery. A wider belonging—to community, to purpose, to something larger than productivity or performance.
Where It Started
How the Spiral Came to Be
I didn't set out to create a new model.
I was trying to understand why so many neurodivergent adults- people with autism, ADHD, and complex trauma, including myself- were doing everything "right" and still feeling exhausted, ashamed, or perpetually behind.
Like many therapists, my early training was shaped by traditional developmental frameworks. One of the most influential was Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the idea that we progress upward from basic survival toward self-actualization. Maslow gave us something real. Safety matters. We cannot leap into growth with our foundational needs unmet. I was also inspired by the many people who came before me, including Sue Johnson, Dan Siegel, Stephen Porges, Nick Walker, and my former Supervisor, Harry Motro, PsyD.
But over time I noticed something, especially with neurodivergent people. Life didn't actually move upward. People didn't complete one level and move on forever. They revisited needs. They returned to safety. They cycled through connection, collapse, repair, and meaning again and again.
Not because they failed. Because life happens.
The problem wasn't the people. The problem was the map.
A spiral does something a straight line can't. It lets you return without shame, revisit without failure, and integrate without erasing who you've been. You may meet the same themes, safety, identity, connection, grief, meaning, but each time from a different vantage point. You're not starting over. You're arriving with more context, more language, and often more compassion.
Returning to an earlier layer isn't regression—it's the Spiral doing what it was designed to do, meeting you where you actually are.
Holding Complexity
A Note on Co-Occurring Conditions
Many neurodivergent adults carry more than one diagnosis. Anxiety, depression, OCD, complex trauma, PTSD, or chronic health conditions alongside autism, ADHD, or AuDHD.
The Spiral is built to hold this. Co-occurring conditions are not separate from neurodivergent identity. They are often deeply intertwined with it, shaped by years of masking, misdiagnosis, or living in environments that did not fit.
In practice this may mean returning to earlier layers more often, moving more slowly, or needing additional clinical support alongside the framework. That is not a limitation of the Spiral. That is the Spiral working as it was designed to work.
At the Poster
Questions People Ask
These came up at the poster, including the hard ones. The answers here are the same ones I gave in person.
How has this been validated?
It hasn't yet, and I want to be straight about that. This is a practice-informed conceptual framework, not a validated instrument, and the abstract says so plainly. Empirical evaluation is a planned next step, beginning with structured practitioner feedback and pilot use in clinical settings.
I'd rather describe it accurately at this stage than overstate what I have.
How is this different from Maslow, or from other stage models?
Maslow gave us something real: safety matters, and you can't leap into growth with your foundations unmet.
What I kept noticing clinically is that lives don't move upward. People revisit safety, connection, and meaning again and again, not because they failed but because conditions change. Stage models treat that return as regression. The Spiral treats it as the framework working as designed.
Is seven empirically derived, or clinically observed?
Clinically observed. The seven layers came out of five years of pattern recognition in my own practice with neurodivergent couples and individuals, not from a factor analysis. I'm not going to dress that up as something it isn't.
The honest claim is that seven layers organize what I kept seeing usefully enough to be worth testing, and testing it is the work ahead.
If the layers aren't sequenced, why layers at all? Isn't this just a list of domains?
Fair challenge. What makes it more than a list is the relationship between the layers. They're interconnected, a person can enter at any of them, and movement among them is expected as capacity and context shift.
The layers give you a place to look, not an order to follow. The organizing claim is about how people move, not about what the categories are.
What stops a clinician from using the seven layers as a severity scale?
Nothing structural, which is a real risk and one I take seriously. So I state it explicitly: each layer describes a domain of need and capacity, not a level of achievement, and the layers do not constitute a severity scale.
I also name the seventh layer Beyond Achievement rather than mastery or success, precisely so it doesn't read as a summit. If someone charts a client's "layer" like a score, they're using something other than this framework.
Does this apply to people with higher support needs, or to non-speaking autistic people?
The clinical work it came from was with neurodivergent couples and individuals in my practice, so that's the population I can speak to honestly.
The structure of the framework, entering anywhere and returning without that meaning failure, isn't limited to speaking or lower-support-needs people by design. But whether it holds up across support profiles is an empirical question I haven't answered, and it belongs in the evaluation work.
Doesn't "returning isn't regression" risk minimizing when someone is genuinely declining?
No, and this is the distinction I care most about. The Spiral doesn't say nothing is wrong. It says look at what changed.
If a person's capacity drops, that is real and it deserves attention, sometimes urgent clinical attention. The reframe is about where we locate the cause. I'm asking clinicians to check the conditions around a person before concluding the person has slid backward. That is not the same as saying it doesn't matter.
I'm autistic, or a partner, or a parent. What would I actually do with this?
No, and this is the distinction I care most about. The Spiral doesn't say nothing is wrong. It says look at what changed.
If a person's capacity drops, that is real and it deserves attention, sometimes urgent clinical attention. The reframe is about where we locate the cause. I'm asking clinicians to check the conditions around a person before concluding the person has slid backward. That is not the same as saying it doesn't matter.
About the Presenter
Hi, I'm Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT
Barbara "Blaze" Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and a coach working with clients worldwide. She is the founder of Love on the Autism Spectrum and host of the podcast of the same name.
Blaze is the creator of the Neurodivergent Spiral of Life, a seven-layer, strengths-based framework for understanding growth, healing, and emotional patterns through a neurodivergent lens. She is known for her work helping neurodivergent couples and individuals move out of patterns of exhaustion and disconnection and into relationships that are more intentional, regulated, and sustainable.
Her approach integrates nervous system awareness, relational pattern recognition, and practical structure, offering a clear and compassionate alternative to traditional models that often miss the lived realities of neurodivergent people.
LoveOnTheAutismSpectrum.com
Substack
All links
Theoretical Foundations
Where It Come From
The framework draws on four bodies of work:
- Attachment science (Sue Johnson), for how bonds are formed, ruptured, and repaired.
- Interpersonal neurobiology (Dan Siegel), for how relationships shape the brain over time.
- Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges), for what the nervous system is doing beneath behavior.
- The neurodiversity paradigm (Nick Walker), for the shift away from deficit-based models entirely.
References
Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown Spark.
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396.
Motro, H. (2024). Couples Topics.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
The sensory funnel: Why you shouldn't teach social skills first. Asperger Experts. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2022, from https://www.aspergerexperts.com/topics/common-mistakes/videos/the-sensory-funnel-why-you-shouldnt-teach-social-skills-first
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Working Together
Where You'll Meet It
The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life is woven into both couples and individual work at Love on the Autism Spectrum, and it is available as a standalone offering through workshops and courses. Each layer carries reflective processes and practical tools that can be used in therapy, in coaching, or on your own.
It is not something to complete. It is something you return to, again and again, as your capacity, context, and truth evolve. There is no correct pace. There is no final level. There is only honesty, safety, and the next right layer for you.
You don't need to become someone new to be worthy of support.