Earlier this year, I came across a post on Mastodon in which someone was attempting to invalidate someone else’s neurodivergence. The author of the post believes that if a person is exhibiting undesirable behavior, that it’s “nurture, not nature” with the claim being that it’s not how an individual’s brain functions, but being raised in a toxic environment that causes them to act a certain way. They said you need only look to their family members to understand the origin of someone’s behavior.
Now I don’t know who the person was talking about, their level of self-awareness, or what kinds of behaviors they were exhibiting to prompt such a post. What I do know, however, is that we can never know what all is going on in someone else’s head or the motivation behind their behavior. Even if someone shares every experience they have ever had, and every thought inside their head, which would be impossible, it’s still no one else’s place to invalidate them or their experience. They know themselves better than anyone ever could, and if they are using supposed diagnoses as an excuse for bad behavior, that speaks to them and their character alone. Disabilities and traumatic experiences do not give anyone a free pass to hurt other people. What they can do, however, is provide context, and potentially more understanding.
In most cases, it’s not nature or nurture, it’s both. To illustrate this point, I am going to use my own life and family as an example.
I was born with an eye condition, Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, which has other comorbidities including “brain differences.” One way this has manifested for me is that I cannot see out of both eyes at the same time. When I was a toddler, doctors believed I had a “lazy eye” so they forced me to wear an eye patch over my right eye for several weeks. This didn’t magically improve the visual acuity in my left eye, but I did learn to consciously switch between seeing nothing through my covered right eye and the usable vision in my left. I did not realize until recently that the inability to see out of both eyes at the same time wasn’t normal. Many people with my eye condition, myself included, are also Autistic. Although I was identified as a teenager, I did not learn this until my mid-30s. Therefore, I have decades of additional trauma from trying and failing to be normal that could have been avoided. This trauma has changed the way my brain functions and how I relate to other people, and that is with a relatively decent support system. Without that support, my mental health could have been much worse. Some people develop conditions like Borderline Personality Disorder, for example, from going undiagnosed and being chronically invalidated. PTSD and CPTSD are very common, and also impact how the brain functions.
My older brother, who died in 2012, had multiple diagnosed disabilities and mental health conditions. Some relevant conditions related to this post include ADHD, OCD, Anxiety, and Depression. My sister was diagnosed with ADD, and her son is diagnosed with ADHD and they attempted to label him with ODD as well. I do not know the status of diagnosis of other family members, but when you’ve been learning as much as I have for as long as I have, the signs are pretty easy to spot.
ADHD goes hand-in-hand with other conditions which run in my family, such as Anxiety, Depression, and OCD. Additionally, ADHD commonly co-occurs with Autism. The latest figures I’ve seen suggest that about 30-50% of people with ADHD have Autism, and about 50-70% of Autistic people also have ADHD. These numbers are changing now that both ADHD and Autism can be diagnosed in the same person and access to diagnosis for different groups of people is improving. ADHD is still much less stigmatized and the preferred diagnosis for professionals since it is treatable with medication. About 1 in 10 people have diagnosed ADHD and until recently, Autism diagnosis was increasing as well. This is of course among children, so there are many adults who live their lives having know idea about their disabilities until life completely overwhelms them and knocks them on their ass. Many people never get diagnosed, and simply struggle through life.
This causes people to develop coping mechanisms to survive, some of which may be destructive. Some examples include the inability to integrate into society and ending up addicted to drugs, relying on alcohol to socialize or to transition to being at home and calm the nervous system every night after work, shaming your child for emotional reactions in public because you’ve learned to mask and you’re trying to protect them, extreme sensory issues that cause you to fly off the handle when your children are making noise, rigid thinking and anger when your children aren’t able to follow the list of verbal commands you’ve given them due to executive dysfunction, throwing yourself into work and higher education to limit the amount of time you’re required to spend with your children, and manipulating other family members through different types of pressure, judgment, and gossip in order to meet needs you don’t realize you have.
These coping mechanisms not only harm the person who relies on them, but they may harm or even traumatize others, especially young children and those with more sensitive nervous systems.
The author of the post is right about looking to family members for clues about someone’s behavior, but not for the reason they think. People can be both neurodivergent and toxic. Neurodivergence runs in families, so they likely did get it from their parents. Also, undiagnosed family members’ toxic behavior and harmful coping mechanisms influence others. This absolutely impacts the development and behavior of anyone growing up in that environment. It’s not nature vs. nurture, it’s both.