Regulation Is Not the Price of Admission to Belonging

By Mandy Parida, MA, LMHC

september 23, 2026

There is an epistemology to relationship. We are always deciding whose account becomes real. Whose pain is legible. Whose version gets believed. Whose interpretation becomes the shared reality of a family, a classroom, a therapy room, a community. Most of the time, we do this without noticing.

A person speaks calmly, coherently, chronologically, and with what we consider the appropriate amount of emotion, and we call them credible. Another person is crying too hard, talking too fast, contradicting themselves, pacing, shutting down, dissociating, repeating themselves, or making connections we cannot easily follow.

Suddenly, we are no longer only listening to what they are telling us. We are deciding whether they are a reliable person to tell it.

This matters particularly for neurodivergent people, whose ways of communicating, regulating, remembering, sequencing, sensing, and making meaning are routinely measured against somebody else’s nervous system.

It raises a more difficult question: What kinds of knowing become possible when we stop requiring people to become regulated, coherent, and legible before we believe they belong?

Regulation is not the price of admission

We talk constantly about regulation. Self-regulation. Co-regulation. Emotional regulation. Nervous system regulation.

Much of that language is useful. I use it too. But regulation can quietly shift from something we support into something we require.

You can participate as long as you are regulated enough. You can stay in the classroom as long as your distress does not disrupt anyone else. You can remain in the group as long as your body behaves in ways the group knows how to interpret. You can belong to the family as long as your anger arrives at an acceptable volume.

And in therapy, you can be believed as long as your story arrives in an order your therapist recognizes.

Even spaces that describe themselves as inclusive can operate this way. We say everyone belongs, but what we sometimes mean is that everyone belongs once they can tolerate being here in a way that makes the rest of us comfortable.

That is not belonging. That is conditional access.

Belonging has to be capable of containing pain—not only tidy pain, processed pain, or pain that can sit in a chair and explain itself clearly. It has to contain the person whose grief has spilled out of its designated container, the person who is difficult to read, the person who is overwhelmed, and the person whose nervous system is doing something inconvenient.

Regulation may emerge from belonging.

But regulation cannot be the entrance fee.

What regulation means in neurodivergent therapy

For neurodivergent people, being perceived as “regulated” is often tangled up with masking.

A person may look composed while using enormous internal effort to remain still, maintain eye contact, suppress sensory distress, organize language, remember the sequence of events, and anticipate how another person expects them to respond.

Conversely, a person may look visibly dysregulated while still communicating something important and meaningful.

This is one reason neurodivergent-affirming therapy cannot rely only on appearance, tone, eye contact, linear storytelling, or conventional emotional expression as evidence of what is happening internally.

The goal is not to reward the most socially legible nervous system. It is to become more curious about what the nervous system is communicating.

Coherence is not the price of admission to credibility

I made a decision early in my career as a therapist that I would believe my clients unless I had a compelling reason not to.

That does not mean assuming that every statement a person makes is objectively factual. Those are not the same thing.

If someone is experiencing psychosis, for example, I do not have to confirm that what they are describing is occurring in shared external reality in order to recognize that the experience itself is real to them.

The fear is real. The meaning is real. The nervous system responding to it is real. Often, the literal content is not even the most interesting part.

It matters why the story is being told in this particular way. It matters what the telling is attempting to communicate, protect, survive, or make legible.

People distort. People embellish. People omit. People contradict themselves. People perform. Sometimes people tell the version of the truth they can survive telling.

Neurodivergent people know something about this because masking itself can require a kind of everyday fiction:

No, I’m fine.

No, that didn’t bother me.

Yes, I understood what you meant.

Of course I can do that.

No, I’m not overwhelmed.

The words may be inaccurate while pointing directly toward something true. Catching someone in an inconsistency is not necessarily the same thing as understanding them.

Sometimes the more useful question is: What is this version of the story making possible?

Belonging does not require epistemic agreement

This is where belief becomes more complicated, because belief cannot mean abandoning discernment.

Understanding someone’s reasons does not require allowing them to deceive you. A lie does not become harmless simply because it came from trauma. Self-deception can still injure the people living inside its consequences.

Compassion does not require surrendering your own reality. Belonging does not require epistemic agreement.

I do not have to share your interpretation of reality in order to remain in relationship with you. I can believe that your experience matters without deciding that every conclusion you have drawn from it is correct.

I can say, I do not understand what you are describing in the same way you do, without saying, Therefore you are no longer credible to me.

I can disagree with your meaning and still believe your pain. I can maintain my own perception without demanding that yours disappear.

That may be one of the hardest forms of intimacy.

We make the knowing together

Martin Buber gave us I and Thou: the possibility of encountering another person as a subject rather than an object.

Eugene Gendlin taught us to stay close to what is not yet fully articulated—to follow the felt sense rather than rushing to impose explanation.

Paolo Knill’s expressive arts work invites us, in different ways, to step into the art rather than remain outside it interpreting from a distance.

And enactive theories of participatory sense-making suggest that meaning does not always exist entirely inside one individual or another. Sometimes meaning emerges through interaction itself.

I am interested in what happens when we bring these ideas into neuroqueer relational practice.

Not: I observe you accurately.

Not: You explain yourself correctly.

Not even: I understand you.

But: We make the knowing together.

That requires permeability. I have to be able to enter your experiential world far enough that something becomes intelligible to me from inside it.

But I cannot disappear into it. I have to remain sufficiently grounded in my own experience to notice difference, contradiction, uncertainty, danger, and the limits of what I know.

This is not fusion. It is not agreement. It is not unconditional affirmation. It is relational participation without epistemic surrender.

The closer we are, the more this matters

The closer the relationship, the more consequential these epistemic choices become.

If I am not close to you, a rupture may hurt, but I can often move around it. I can change the relationship and continue.

When I love someone, I am more open inside the system we have made together. There is more history. More trust. More expectation. More of myself already living in the space between us.

Rupture lands differently because the relationship matters more. What happens becomes part of the history of us.

The systems we care about most are often the ones capable of wounding us most deeply, precisely because we are more open inside them.

That means the stories we accept about one another matter.

People do not only relate directly. We also relate to versions of one another carried through other people’s stories.

Someone tells us what happened. We believe them, or we do not. We ask the other person, or we do not. We remain curious, or we accept the account that creates the least discomfort for us.

Neutrality becomes complicated here.

Choosing not to ask is still a choice. Refusing to look closely can preserve one person’s narrative over another’s. Avoiding conflict can become a form of allegiance without anyone ever saying, I choose this side.

There is an epistemology to relationship and there is an ethics to how we participate in it.

What if belonging came first?

What would change if we stopped treating regulation as proof that someone was ready to belong?

What if the person who was dysregulated was not understood as disrupting the community, but as someone currently being held by it?

What if someone could be incoherent without becoming disposable?

What if a person could hold a different reality without being expelled from ours?

What if credibility were not granted only to people who communicate in forms we already know how to recognize?

What if belonging came first?

Perhaps regulation sometimes happens because the nervous system discovers that nobody is asking it to leave. Perhaps coherence sometimes emerges because there is finally enough safety to stop performing it. Perhaps people become more legible when we stop demanding translation as the price of relationship. And perhaps there are forms of knowing that become available only when two people are willing to stand at the edges of their separate realities and make something together.

Not certainty.

Not agreement.

Something more relational than that.

Recognition.

Regulation is not the price of admission to belonging. Coherence is not the price of admission to credibility. Epistemic agreement is not the price of admission to relationship.

We make the knowing together.