Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation · Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw

116 Neurodiversity and Attachment: Bridging the Gap (with Barbara Grant)

·41 min·2 clips

Alexithymia can leave someone with feelings they cannot name, or emotions they cannot read in others.

1. Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation episode 116, “Neurodiversity and Attachment: Bridging the Gap,” focuses on how neurodivergence affects attachment with God and with other people. 2. Jeff Holzclaw hosts with Sid Holzclaw, and Barbara Grant joins as a marriage and family therapist, autism specialist, neurodiverse couples coach, editor of Uniquely Us, and co-host of the Neurodiverse Couples Coaches podcast. 3. The central question is how secure attachment practices change when traditional emotional or relational approaches do not fit a neurodivergent brain. 4. Barbara defines neurodivergence with examples that include level one autism, level two or three autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette's syndrome, and other developmental learning differences. 5. She says neurodivergence is a neurological difference in how the brain is wired, functions, processes thinking, stores information, and retrieves information. 6. Barbara rejects the language of disorder and says some of the most successful people in history have been neurodivergent. 7. She says many families recognize autism or ADHD only after a child is diagnosed and parents notice similar traits in themselves or a spouse. 8. Barbara says autism is often genetic and gives her own family example involving her son, who was diagnosed with high-functioning autism and ADHD, and later his father was also recognized as neurodivergent. 9. She describes neurodiverse relationships as relationships where one person is neurotypical and the other is neurodivergent. 10. Barbara explains that neurodivergent children often focus on patterns, systems, analytics, and rules rather than social bonding cues like eye contact, voice tone, facial expression, or shared emotional feedback. 11. She says sensory sensitivity can include too much light, sound, touch, or information, while ADHD can involve dopamine-seeking, fast shifting attention, and weak executive function. 12. Barbara says these traits can create a private rulebook, especially for autistic children, who may think everyone else is also tracking transactions and rules. 13. Jeff connects this to attachment by asking whether a rule broken by an important person could feel like a transaction breaking, not just a mistake. 14. Barbara says neurodivergent people can become dysregulated quickly, and she references enemy mode from Stephanie Holmes, Dan A. P. Holmes, and Jim Wilder's language. 15. She says structured practices help, including active listening with listen-mirror-speak and a four-part problem-solving format covering the problem, feelings or values, ideas, and timeframe or budget. 16. Barbara says many couples benefit when each person puts four pieces on the table, writes things down, and avoids long unstructured talk. 17. The tone is conversational and exploratory, with Jeff and Sid asking follow-up questions and testing Barbara's framework against their own attachment language. 18. Barbara uses repeated analogies, including playbooks, trees and forest, and colorblindness, to make emotional differences concrete. 19. People working with neurodivergent spouses, children, or clients will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a quick devotional without clinical detail may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation