Update: my poster from the Summit, The Neurodivergent Spiral of Life, is now online.
The Stanford Neurodiversity Summit runs on September 19, 20 and 21, 2026, and I will be there presenting a poster. If you are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD, or you are partnered with someone who is, a neurodiversity research conference can feel like a room where you are the subject and not one of the people in the conversation. That feeling is worth taking seriously. It also points at something real about how autism research and relationship research get made, and about what tends to fall out of them somewhere between the study and a couple at their own kitchen table.
A woman I will call Zuzanna came to a first session carrying a folder. Printed studies, tabbed and highlighted, four years of reading about autistic adults done at her kitchen table after her husband had gone to bed. She could define alexithymia. She could explain executive function better than some clinicians I have worked with. And near the end of that first hour she said that none of it had told her what to do on a Tuesday night when he goes quiet after dinner and she cannot tell whether he is resting or leaving. The reading had given her a vocabulary. It had not given her a Tuesday.
In this blog post I want to describe what a poster session actually is, why a working couples therapist stands at one, and where the distance opens between what gets published and what gets lived. I will look at two places where autism research changed direction because autistic people insisted that it change. I will be straight with you about what a study can and cannot tell you about your own relationship. And I will say plainly what I am hoping to carry home from Stanford.
3 Key Takeaways
- A poster session is a conversation, not a lecture. It is the part of a research conference where the person who did the work stands beside it and answers questions, which makes it one of the few academic formats a non-researcher can walk into and use.
- Research describes groups. Your relationship is one particular pair of people on one particular evening. Both are real, and neither one replaces the other.
- Several of the most useful ideas in autism research began as things autistic people said about their own lives long before anyone measured them.
What a Poster Session Actually Is
If you have never been to an academic conference, the word “poster” is misleading. It is not a display board that people walk past. It is a format. A few square feet of printed argument, with the person who made it standing beside it for an hour, waiting to be asked about it.
Nobody presents from a stage. There is no slide deck and no question card. You stand there, and strangers stop, read for thirty seconds, and either walk on or start asking. Sometimes the person asking is a graduate student. Sometimes it is an autistic adult who is speaking at the summit themselves and wants to know why you framed something the way you did. Those are usually the most useful conversations of the day, and they are the ones that change how the work is written up afterwards.
This is the seventh annual Stanford Neurodiversity Summit, hosted by the Stanford Center for Neurodiversity and Human Potential and directed by Lawrence Fung, MD, PhD. The theme this year is “Building Strengths through Neurodiversity Innovation.” It runs as a hybrid event, in person at Stanford and online, and the room it sets out to assemble is deliberately mixed: neurodivergent individuals, employers, service agencies, educators and students, parents, and professionals from across the field. It is being planned with Universal Design in mind, which means accessibility is built into the structure rather than requested afterwards.
That structure matters more than it sounds. Most research conferences are built for researchers. This one is built on the premise that all of those people belong in the same rooms and that the exchange runs in every direction. Its stated priority this year is strengths-based, collaborative approaches between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, and it says plainly that the aim is action rather than discussion alone. Read that sentence again and it is a description of a couples session. Two people, wired differently, working out how to build something together rather than one of them being corrected into the shape of the other.
It is also explicit about how it wants people to talk to each other. It describes itself as a place where attendees listen to each other especially when their views are not the same, and it calls that active listening an act of growing together as a community rather than only a courtesy. Questions can be submitted to speakers before and during the sessions. And it says it will collect the community’s views on what research and community-based services should be prioritised, and on how they could be designed better. That last one is an open door, and it is why I am going with something to say and not only something to hear.
The keynote list shows what the mixing looks like in practice. Dr. Lynn Koegel is a clinical professor in Stanford’s own department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Dr. Eva Loth is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at King’s College London. Dr. Vikram Jaswal is a developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Hari Srinivasan is a PhD candidate in neuroscience and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. A clinician, a cognitive neuroscientist, a developmental psychologist and a doctoral researcher, on one programme, alongside employers and educators and parents, is not an accident of scheduling. It is the argument of this post arranged as a running order.
The Distance Between a Finding and a Tuesday Night
Here is the thing Zuzanna had run into, and it is not a failure of her reading.
Research describes groups. It says something about what tends to be true across a sample of people, measured on a particular instrument, compared against a particular comparison group. That is a real and valuable kind of knowledge. It is also, structurally, not about you. A finding that holds for most autistic adults in a study says nothing certain about the autistic adult sitting across the table from you, who is also a middle child, who was raised by a mother who never stopped talking, who has a job he cannot leave, and who is very tired on a Tuesday.
In my practice, I often see people arrive holding an enormous amount of accurate general information and almost no traction. They know the concepts. They cannot yet do anything with them at 9pm. The gap between those two states is not a knowledge gap, and reading more rarely closes it.
What closes it, usually, is specificity. Not “autistic people often need recovery time after social demand,” but “when you come home from the office you need forty minutes before you can be spoken to, and she needs to know that the forty minutes is not about her.” The general finding is the raw material. The particular arrangement — in a particular house, between two particular nervous systems — is the work.
I go to research conferences because the raw material matters and I want it to be good. I go to a poster session in particular because it is where the raw material gets argued with, up close, by the people it describes.
When the Research Described the Room I Was Already Sitting In
For a long time, the standard framing of autistic social difficulty put the deficit in one person. One partner was described as having impaired social communication, and the other was, by implication, communicating fine.
That framing does not survive contact with a couples room. What I watch happen, week after week, is two people who are each making entirely coherent sense within their own frame of reference and are each landing wide of the other. He answers the question she asked rather than the one she meant. She reads his flat delivery as indifference. He reads her tears as an accusation. Neither of them is failing at communication in general. They are failing at each other, specifically, and in both directions.
Milton (2012) named this the double empathy problem: a mismatch between two people with different ways of experiencing the world, where the breakdown in understanding runs both ways rather than sitting inside one person. It is a theoretical paper, not a trial, and it was written by an autistic academic describing something autistic people had been saying for years.
I remember reading it and recognizing my own consulting room in it. It was not that I learned something new. I was handed language for a pattern I had been watching for years and describing badly. That is what a good idea does. It does not tell you something you have never seen. It tells you what you have been looking at.
The practical consequence in the room is large. If the problem sits in one person, the work is remediation, and one partner becomes the project. If the problem sits between two people, the work is translation, and both of them have something to learn and something to be understood about. Almost everything I do with couples follows from that second reading.
What Gets Counted, and What Does Not
A study can only find what its design allows it to see. This is not a criticism; it is simply how measurement works. But it has a consequence worth understanding, because it explains a lot of the strangeness in the older literature.
For decades, autistic social ability was measured in mixed pairs: an autistic person interacting with a non-autistic person, with the non-autistic person’s comprehension treated as the standard. Under that design, autistic communication looks impaired more or less by definition, because the design has already decided whose understanding counts.
Crompton and colleagues (2020) changed the design. They used a chain task, passing information from person to person, and compared three kinds of chains: all autistic, all non-autistic, and mixed. Information passed along the all-autistic chains as effectively as along the all-non-autistic chains. It was the mixed chains that lost detail.
That finding does not say autistic people communicate better, and it does not say the difficulty is imaginary. It says the difficulty is located in the crossing, not in one of the two sides. That is close to what Zuzanna’s husband had been trying to tell her for years. It is also the thing the older designs were built in a way that could not see.
I find this useful to say out loud to couples, because it moves the question from “which of us is doing this wrong” to “what happens at the join.” The second question has answers. The first one mostly produces defensiveness.
How to Read Research About Yourself Without Disappearing Into It
Most of the people I work with have already read a great deal before they arrive, and a fair amount of it has done them harm. Not because the studies were bad, but because of what happens when a person reads a description of a group and files themselves inside it wholesale.
A few things I say fairly often, offered here as options rather than instructions.
Notice the comparison group
When a paper reports a rate, ask what it was compared against and who was in the sample. A figure drawn from clinic-based studies of adults says nothing reliable about children, or about people who never reached a clinic. Rates travel badly, and they get quoted far outside the population they came from.
Separate the finding from the frame
The measurement can be sound and the interpretation still carry an old assumption. It is entirely reasonable to accept what a study found and decline the sentence the discussion section wrapped around it.
Let a description be partial
Recognising yourself in something is not the same as being fully accounted for by it. You are allowed to say “that is three-quarters right and the last quarter is not me at all.” In my experience that sentence is a sign of good reading rather than resistance.
Keep hold of where you actually are
The map I use with couples, the Neurodivergent Spiral of Life, exists partly for this reason. A person can enter it at any layer, and knowing which layer you are standing on tends to be more useful than knowing everything about all seven. Reading widely without knowing where you are is how people end up exhausted and no clearer.
What I Am Bringing to Stanford, and What I Hope to Carry Home
I am a clinician, not a laboratory researcher. What I have is a great many hours in rooms with neurodivergent adults and neurodiverse couples, and a stubborn interest as a neurodivergent person myself, in the part of the picture that the literature has less to say about: not diagnosis, not childhood, but two adults trying to stay in contact with each other over years.
The summit names where it wants neurodivergent strengths applied: education, employment, technology, healthcare, and entrepreneurship. Every one of those is a place a person goes. None of them is the person waiting at home when they get back. I do not offer that as a complaint about the programme, and it would be a strange complaint to bring to a summit that asks its attendees what ought to be prioritised next. I offer it because they asked. A great deal of the cost of being chronically misread lands in a marriage, and that room gets less attention in these conversations than the workplace does.
That is what I want to put in front of people at a poster board. Not because clinical observation outranks a controlled study. It does not. But it sees different things, and it sees them earlier. Patterns show up in a caseload well before anyone has an instrument for them. If nobody carries those patterns into the room where the instruments get designed, the gap between the literature and the kitchen table stays where it is.
One of this year’s keynotes is Janet Lawson, an LMFT and the co-founder and CEO of Autistry Studios. I notice that because it is the same license I hold. A marriage and family therapist on the keynote list at a summit like this one is, in itself, a small version of the argument I am making.
What I hope to carry home is the other half of that exchange. Researchers who can tell me where my thinking is loose. Autistic and ADHD attendees who will tell me, without much ceremony, where a framing lands badly. Three days of listening to people who are working on this from angles I do not have.
I will write about what I learn there. Some of it will change how I explain things in sessions, which is the only real test of whether a conference was worth attending.
Holding Both Things at Once
The research is not going to describe your marriage. It was never going to. It describes tendencies across groups of people, most of whom are not you, measured in ways that could not have captured a Tuesday night in your kitchen.
And it still matters, because the frame the research uses becomes the frame your therapist uses, and your doctor, and eventually your mother-in-law. When Milton wrote that the misunderstanding runs both ways, that sentence eventually reaches a couples room and changes who gets treated as the problem in it. Ideas travel. It is worth caring which ones do.
So both things are true. Nothing published this year is going to tell you what to do when he goes quiet after dinner. And it is still worth having people in the room where those ideas are argued about who have sat with a thousand Tuesdays.
If you would like to talk about what any of this looks like in your own relationship, you can Book a FREE 20-minute “Clarity & Connection” Zoom session. It is a conversation, not an intake, and there is no obligation attached to it.
If you have been the one reading everything, quietly, after everyone else has gone to bed, there is a free guide written for exactly that.
Get the free guide: You’re Not Too Much. You’re Just Alone in the Repair. Eight pages, sent straight to your inbox. Read it here.
I work with neurodivergent adults and neurodiverse couples, and I will be at the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit this September with a poster and a great many questions. Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788.
Client stories referenced in this post are composites, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to be a researcher or a clinician to attend the Stanford Neurodiversity Summit?
No. This is the seventh annual summit and it is built for a deliberately mixed audience: neurodivergent individuals, employers, service agencies, educators and students, parents, and professionals from across the field. The organisers are planning it with Universal Design in mind, so accessibility is part of the structure rather than something you have to ask for. If you have wanted to see how this field talks about itself, it is an unusually accessible place to do it.
What is a poster session, in plain terms?
It is a set of printed research summaries on boards in a large room, each with its author standing beside it for a couple of hours. You read what interests you and ask the person questions directly. There is no audience, no microphone and no formal Q&A, which for a lot of people makes it far easier than a lecture hall.
Is the summit only in person?
No. It runs as a hybrid event across September 19, 20 and 21, 2026, in person at Stanford and online, with a virtual registration tier alongside the in-person and professional ones. The virtual option exists so that cost and travel are not the thing that decides who gets to be in the conversation.
Does autism research apply to me if I am self-identified rather than formally diagnosed?
Largely yes, with a caveat worth knowing. Most published samples are made up of formally diagnosed people, which skews towards those who had the access, money and recognisable presentation to reach a clinic. That means the literature under-describes late-identified adults, women, and people of colour in particular. Read it as partial rather than as not about you.
Why does it matter that some findings started with autistic people rather than researchers?
Because it changes what gets studied at all. Autistic burnout is the clearest example: Raymaker and colleagues (2020) built their definition from autistic adults’ own accounts, and it entered the literature as a community-defined concept rather than a clinical one. It is not a formal diagnosis, and autistic people consistently describe it as distinct from depression. Without the community naming it first, there would have been nothing for anyone to measure.
References
Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V. M., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M. L., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
