Adina Docter: Neuroqueer Somanaut

a very spirally conversation with my dear friend and somatic practitioner, Adina Docter || links to a FREE conversation with Dr. Nick Walker on 26 June || my workshops are back by popular request!

By popular request, I am offering encore sessions of my Shame and Spiral Time workshops, plus a new version of Mise en Place: When Getting Started is the Hardest Part! Details and tickets here.

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Adina Docter, a neuroqueer somatic practitioner & trauma therapist, is one of the founding members of Divergent Design Studios and has been integral to building the neuroqueer culture that holds our community. She hosts Peer Support once each week and offers an Authentic Movement workshop once each month. She also offers individual and group sessions in a variety of flexible modalities interpreted for each client, including The MELT Method, Authentic Movement, Continuum-based inquiry, Brainspotting, and more. All the deets on her website, Adina Docter Somatics.

Adina is organizing an upcoming free online event featuring Dr. Nick Walker¹ entitled Neuroqueering Somatics: A conversation at the intersection of neurodivergence and somatic practice. This 90-minute conversation and Q&A are FREE and open to the public. Register here.

Katy Higgins Lee² will interview Dr. Nick Walker, a leading thinker on the neurodiversity paradigm, to discuss the creative possibilities that emerge when we practice neuroqueering somatics. The concept of neuroqueering was coined by Dr. Walker and refers to a practice of intentionally subverting normativity and embracing neurocognitive diversity. This conversation aims to explore the creative possibilities that emerge when we can subvert normative paradigms and neuroqueer our practices—not just as an afterthought but as a central, generative framework.

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Adina Docter: Neuroqueer Somanaut

I recently had a delightful conversation with Adina. In DDS Peer Support, one of our guiding values is that "there is a weekly topic that serves as a starting point for shares. From there, we spiral out, and the conversation evolves naturally. Tangents and sidetracks are welcome and encouraged."

This conversation is very much in that spirit! It is also quite heavily edited, with Adina's permission.

I began by asking Adina about her work and what somatics means to her.

ADINA: Somatics is the study of the bodymind. In somatic practice, we create generative spaces where we explore perception, human embodiment, and consciousness. Healing and liberation can ensue!

It’s important to neuroqueer all of this. For example, human embodiment must be queered so that people don't think they have to be "in their bodies" in any particular way.

I really see myself as an explorer, and for me, somatics is about asking questions. I kind of live by Richard Feynman's quote, "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

I have transformed my body, psyche, and mind through various practices over the course of several decades. But the essence of it has been asking questions and not needing fixity or rigid rules. I do sometimes use [various somatic] methods [and modalities]. Still, it's always a portal to exploration and listening to myself.

And that's what I aim to deliver in my work with others: to give them the tools to begin listening to their own bodies and psyches so that they can create their own ways of working with and being with themselves. I spent a lifetime unlocking myself. I want to help others do the same.

MARTA: When you said bodymind, I've started using that term as well because I think it's such a false dichotomy, the body, and the mind—not just in sort of philosophical or theoretical terms, but literally: our minds are our body.

ADINA: Exactly! There is no separation. And so much of somatic practice is about helping people to come out of that trance [of separation] and into an understanding that everything is connected. For example, you can't separate the brain from the nervous system that innervates the entire body; it's all one thing. And, energetically, we are connected to everything—to the earth, to the sky, to all living things … we're connected to each other; we're connected to nature. It's just that we're in a kind of cultural trance that makes us think we're separate and disconnected.

ADINA: Do you have something else? 'Cause I'm about to spiral.

MARTA: No, no, please spiral!

ADINA: Okay. So, Divergent Design Studios is also a generative space. Being in DDS has been a process of unlearning and being with myself as I actually am, without shame. Being in DDS & other neurodivergent spaces has also allowed me to iterate, making up processes and practices that work for me and my community.

In a way, the generative container of DDS becomes a witness, allowing us to see ourselves outside the neurotypical gaze. We begin to take ourselves seriously on our own terms. We can start to figure out what works for us and what doesn't.

For example, I say I'm dyslexic because it is a close metaphor to describe how my brain works. And, as Autistic educator and advocate Kristy Forbes often says, if you spend your whole life wondering if you're autistic, you're probably autistic.

MARTA & ADINA: [knowing laughter]

ADINA: Well, I spent my whole fucking life wondering if I was dyslexic. I reversed letters. I still struggle with spelling. As a child, it took me a long time to learn basic tasks like tying my shoes and distinguishing left from right. The list goes on.

Later, my husband, Lawrence, noticed how this affected my writing because he was always my first editor. He would say, Your ideas are powerful, but your grammar is inverted.

Basically, the way I write is a reflection of how my brain recognizes language. That has caused me a lot of pain and trauma as I tried to navigate the education system because I could not portray my thoughts in writing in the typical way. I also did not know at the time that I had learning disabilities.

There were two times in high school when I was asked to do something creative, and those were the times I completely blossomed.

In English class, I was asked to write a short story, and the teacher didn't give any specific directions; yay! The typical way of learning to write did not work for me. For example, trying to teach me to write, by telling me to: write a topic sentence, and then three more sentences explaining the topic sentence, and then write a concluding sentence. Please don't give me that kind of direction! It's going to give me conniptions and make me think I'm stupid.

So, when I was asked to write a short story with no rules to follow, I did, and it was easy for me to do, except that my teacher didn't believe I had written it! She made me sign an affidavit, swearing that I wrote the story. Once I signed the affidavit, she turned around and asked me to submit my short story to a writing contest!

MARTA: I wanna ask you about that short story. Before you even told me about the story that your teacher didn't believe you wrote—when you were telling me about what Lawrence was saying about your grammar being inverted—it sounds like what some of the most interesting, experimental, avant garde, modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were doing. Like what they were doing is playing around with English syntax. And poets—like that's what poetry is: you play around with the syntax of things.

And the reason that those writers are brilliant is because they were just translating what is in their brain. And you were trying to do the same thing too, but nobody recognized it as avant garde literature. They were recognizing it as broken or a problem. Not following the rules of English grammar. Yeah. So that's just a perfect example of how creativity gets pathologized.

ADINA: So imagine an education system that didn't try to force norms on people, but instead tried to understand their bodyminds and followed the blossoming of those bodyminds.

I'm going on a ramble, but I also gotta show you this. The other creative assignment was in ceramics class. Generally, in that class, I didn't do so well either, lol. I could not learn to make a bowl on a spinning pottery wheel to save my life. (laughs)

But then we got an assignment to interpret a dream. That I could do.

Actually, I queered the assignment. I described a dreamlike feeling I was having instead of a literal dream. The feeling was that there was never enough time.

I just found the ceramic sculpture I made in storage. Your whole thing is Spiral Time and we talked so much about time in DDS, and when I found this, I was like, oh my God, I gotta show it to Marta!

So this is from having to wake up at 6:30 in the morning to catch the bus to get to school, to go from class to class where I was struggling, you know? Even though nobody knew it. So this is my piece.

MARTA: Oh my goodness. I love it. I can't believe that you made that when you were in high school.

ADINA: I made this in fucking high school.

MARTA: You're already anticipating everything!

ADINA: Yeah, like I was so stressed out. I was highly verbal and I quote unquote, did okay. But did my intelligence, did my gifts ever get to blossom? No, they did not.

Dr. Nick Walker has this beautiful way of explaining autism that is backed up now by research, which is that there's a kind of blooming, a neural plenum, a cacophony of sensory experience in the neurodivergent brain. The pruning that might happen in a so-called "neurotypical" brain doesn't happen, or happens differently. But there's just, there is a kind of blooming and buzzing that Dr. Walker describes. A buzzing of neural input. Of sensory informing. And, if that experience is not met with attunement, a great deal of harm can be done to a person who is experiencing such intensity. So I kind of consider it a fascinating inquiry: how to sit with that blooming to be with it so that it can find its own coherence in its own way. This type of embodied, compassionate attunement is particularly essential for neurodivergent individuals.

MARTA: So Lizzy [another dear friend in DDS] suggested I ask you about silence. Just that: ask Adina about silence.

ADINA: I love that Lizzie asked about silence. Dear Liminal Lizzie.

Spending time in silence has been among the most powerful experiences in my life. And it started in Continuum Movement [a somatic modality]. They totally queer the idea of spending time in silence. It's not like a structured Zen Buddhist kind of experience. Instead, in that [Continuum] kind of silence, all you're doing is dropping out of words, and into a wordless, somatic inquiry.

The space is set up with various altars of meaning that set a stage for the experience.

And what happened for me was this whole blooming, like this sensory blooming of all the other realities that had been submerged by only staying within the confines of spoken language. Suddenly, everything felt mysterious in the best way, and so much more coherent. Emilie Contrad, the founder of Continuum used to say spending time in silence was "essential for our sanity." For me, it is a time for getting sane in the deepest, most coherent sense.

The world through silence becomes palpable in a sensory way that feels like home to me. Silence is home for me.

It's the place where everything feels connected, and the spaces in between emerge and blossom. There's a quote by Isak Denison aka Karen Blixen that says, "Who has a tale finer than all of your stories? Silence does."

Our stories are really valuable, but the stories that emerge in silence are dimensional in a way that words can not always reach.

And it's not a rule, like the space that I'm talking about is not a coercive silence—it's a very deeply liberating silence that is about emergence and blossoming and connection.

This brings it back to the somatics of introducing people—ways that work with and for them — to their felt sense, where an unspoken intelligence emerges. If you can get to know it, it becomes a container for your experience. It can hold and support you. You know what you know because you can sense it. It validates you. IYKYK.

The felt sense can become a tableau for our emergence.

Of course, for some people, the felt sense is gonna be something they want to run 5,000 miles away from. And for those people, it's not the way in. So there are other ways. For some, it's going to be entirely energetic… or something else. It's about listening for what works.

For example, sometimes I think we pathologize dissociation. Or, rather, sometimes we misunderstand what is happening and call it dissociation. Everyone processes differently, especially those who are neurodivergent. So it can look like dissociation, when it is something else entirely. For example, some people are more tuned in to the energetic space around them, instead of what is happening "inside" their corporeal bodies. If you thought of us as an energy body, as a larger body, maybe our conscious presence or awareness is located somewhere else.

MARTA: That's so interesting, because I've often described this experience I've had that has been a very "aha" and healing experience, but when I describe it, it sounds a lot like dissociation. It is this sort of becoming a meta version of myself, becoming the omniscient narrator of my life. Where I can look down at myself with kindness and compassion and wisdom. But when I say it out loud, it sounds an awful lot like dissociation.

ADINA: Absolutely. The metaphor I would use, and this comes from my teacher, Susan Harper, is that you're learning to live in a larger body, your perception of your body is larger. Yes. You are just with a more expanded sense of yourself, which is actually more accurate.

Of course, actual dissociation is a trauma response where we leave the corporal sense because we've been thrown out of our bodies. That is a different experience that requires care and tending.

Marta: You've talked a lot about blossoming, but also about containers and witnessing, and I know you do a lot of work with the fascia, which, if I understand it correctly, can be a way into all of that.

ADINA: Yes! I really love to work with the fascia. Fascia is the matrix that holds us together; it is both the space in-between and the container. Most people are unaware of what goes on in the fascial matrix.

I love Joan Avison's description: She describes fascia as a continuous, intelligent, and responsive web of connective tissue that shapes us, senses us, and connects every part of us — from the cellular level to our whole-body movement.

The fascia is a sensory organ; it's threaded through with 250 million sensory nerves. The beautiful thing is that you can work directly with your nervous system through your connective tissue. And, I find that to be incredibly liberating and transformative. And for neurodivergent people who maybe don't like to be told what to do or certainly don't want people's hands on them all the time, they control the pressure and learn to work with themselves. And it's just a very easy, powerful way to self-soothe and to heal.

You can use these soft tools – like the soft balls and rollers we use in the MELT Method—that help you slowly come into yourself in a new way. Using soft tools like we do in MELT has been the single most important practice for me in terms of helping me to be calmer and heal. It's also great for chronic pain. You learn to do bodywork, on yourself.

So why not try to follow bodymind as best as you can by tuning to it and seeing what it needs to do in order to restore and regain homeostasis, which is just coherence.

And to bring it back to Divergent Design Studios, I feel like you've created a space where people can come in and out of, where they can be transparent with where they are. They can be vulnerable and real about exactly where they are. Nobody's gonna shame them. We're gonna actually celebrate them just as they are.

They just come forward as they are, rather than through cultural contrivances. So what we're doing in spaces like DDS is we're finding our own somatic homeostasis.

You can find Adina and her various offerings on her website Adina Docter Somatics, and also on Instagram, @adinadocter. You can also sign up for Adina's newsletter, Somanotes for Somanauts.

1. Dr. Nick Walker, who currently uses he/him pronouns in professional settings [see below], has been continually engaged in various forms of transformative somatic work throughout his life, including four and a half decades (and counting) as a practitioner and teacher of aikido and two decades as a core member of the experimental physical theatre group Paratheatrical Research. He is a professor at California Institute of Integral Studies, where he currently teaches in the undergraduate Psychology program and the Somatic Psychology master’s program, as well as being one of the principal architects of the institute’s new Bachelor of Science degree program in Psychedelic Studies. Dr. Walker has been a leading thinker on neurodiversity for more than 20 years, and is best known for his foundational work on Neuroqueer Theory and his influential essay collection Neuroqueer Heresies. Much of his scholarly work explores the edges and intersections of somatics, depth psychology, neurodivergence, consciousness, and creativity. He also writes speculative fiction, including the urban fantasy webcomic Weird Luck. He holds a seventh-degree black belt in aikido and serves as senior instructor at the Aiki Arts Center dojo in Berkeley, California.

From a Facebook post by Dr. Nick Walker:

“I'm going back to using he/him pronouns in my professional life.

I read as a cis man to most people, I'm not planning on physical transition, and the folks who matter to me recognize my femme nature. In the present political climate I'll be more useful to the trans community as an undercover agent.

Continuing to use feminine pronouns in my professional life at this point, instead of using my cis-passing privilege to fly under the radar and be an ally to more vulnerable non-cis-passing members of the trans community, currently feels like a selfish indulgence, at least for me.

I'm not suggesting that anyone else should make such a change. I'm uniquely positioned to make this sort of adaptation because, although I use words well, I don't naturally THINK in words, so words have such a superficial impact on me that when people use pronouns for me that don't match my sense of my own gender, it doesn't trigger any gender dysphoria.”

2. Katy Higgins Lee (she/her) is a multiply neurodivergent somatic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and continuing education provider. Katy also provides psychoeducation and advocacy through social media and is a homeschooling/unschooling parent, writer, and gardener.