NEUROQUEERing shared reality

The Ethics of knowing ourselves in relationship

By Mandy Parida, MA, LMHC

July 25, 2026

Relationships do not require two people to experience the world in exactly the same way.

That would be impossible.

Every person brings a nervous system, a body, a history, a set of assumptions, fears, desires, memories, meanings, and ways of perceiving the world into relationship. No two people will understand the same moment in precisely the same way.

Difference is not the problem.

The ethical problem begins when one person mistakes their own unexamined internal reality for the reality they share with others.

I think of relationships as systems of shared reality.

Shared reality is not agreement. It is not sameness. It is not a requirement that everyone see things identically. It is the portion of relational life that has been made visible enough for everyone involved to understand what they are actually participating in.

What do I believe is happening here?

What do you believe is happening here?

What have we actually said to one another?

What have we merely assumed?

What do I need?

What can I offer?

Where are my limits?

Where are yours?

What responsibilities have we actually agreed to carry?

And where have private expectations quietly become relational obligations?

A relationship can tolerate enormous difference when those differences are known. What becomes destabilizing is hidden difference presented as shared understanding.

Self-Knowledge Is Relational

We often talk about self-awareness as though it were primarily an individual therapeutic achievement.

Know your triggers, your attachment style, your needs. Know your boundaries. Understand your history.

But self-knowledge does not remain inside the self. If I do not know that I am overwhelmed, I may agree to something I cannot sustainably offer. If I cannot identify fear, I may experience that fear as certainty about someone else’s intentions. If I cannot recognize resentment, I may silently accumulate evidence that another person is failing a test they do not know they are taking. If I do not understand my own capacity, someone else may organize their life around promises I cannot actually keep.

If I cannot recognize a need in myself, I may eventually hold another person responsible for failing to anticipate it. This is why self-knowledge is not merely personal. It is relational.

Our blind spots have consequences. The ethical obligation is not to know ourselves perfectly. None of us do. It is to remain curious enough about ourselves that our unexamined inner worlds do not quietly become other people’s obligations.

We Learn Self-Knowledge in Relationship

This capacity does not suddenly appear in adulthood. Its beginnings are developmental. A young child saying, “too loud,” “I don’t like that,” “I’m scared,” “help me,” or simply moving away from something is already doing something important. They are noticing an internal state and communicating it into relationship.

What happens next matters. If adults repeatedly respond with:

You’re fine.

That didn’t hurt.

You aren’t tired.

You love this.

Stop being dramatic.

the child receives more than a correction. They learn something about the reliability of their own internal experience. They may learn that staying connected requires overriding what they notice inside themselves.

By middle childhood, self-knowledge becomes more differentiated. A child can begin to recognize:

I want to go, but I’m nervous.

I love this person, and I’m angry with them.

I said yes, and now I wish I hadn’t.

I can do this, but not for very long.

These are complex relational capacities. They allow contradictory internal states to coexist without one having to erase the other. Then adolescence adds another developmental task: differentiation. The questions become larger.

Who am I?

What do I believe?

What do I want?

Which parts of me are mine?

Which parts belong to my family?

Which expectations did I inherit?

What happens when what I know about myself conflicts with what other people expect me to be?

Adolescence is often where a person begins more explicitly separating: This is what my family believes from This is what I believe.

That distinction is crucial to shared reality. We cannot represent our subjective reality honestly in relationship until we have enough access to ourselves to recognize that we have one.

And development does not end there. Adulthood asks something additional: Can I take responsibility for bringing what I know about myself honestly into relationship?

Shared Reality Does Not Require Sameness

A theory of shared reality could easily become another argument for conformity. Everyone needs to agree, communicate the same way, and arrive at the same interpretation.

A neuroqueer relational ethic rejects that. Human beings are meaningfully different. We perceive, communicate, remember, and process differently. We experience sensory environments differently. We need different amounts of movement, autonomy, predictability, novelty, processing time, solitude, closeness, and support.

The goal is not to erase those differences. It is to make them visible enough that relationship can happen across them. Shared reality depends on differentiation:

This is my experience.

That is yours.

Neither of us has to disappear for us to discover what exists between us.

When Self-Knowledge Is Missing

The problem becomes particularly visible when one person’s unrecognized limitations begin reorganizing everyone else’s life.

A person repeatedly forgets something but cannot acknowledge that remembering is difficult. Someone else quietly becomes the person who remembers for both of them.

A person insists they can manage a responsibility they repeatedly abandon. Someone else learns to anticipate the abandonment.

A person cannot recognize their fear of conflict. Everyone around them learns to monitor silence, tone, withdrawal, or mood.

A person cannot acknowledge their own limits. The people around them begin adjusting to those limits while everyone continues pretending the limits do not exist.

That is where care can become hidden labor. The problem is not that someone needs more support. Needing other people is not a failure. Human beings have always depended on one another. The ethical question is whether the need is visible enough that other people can choose how they participate.

Community Asks Us to Carry With One Another

Community asks us to carry with one another. Self-deception asks other people to carry us without their consent.

That distinction matters because being carried is not the problem. We are all carried when someone reminds us of an appointment or when another person cooks because we cannot. We are noticed too sometimes. When a friend notices we are reaching overload before we do. Or when someone handles the logistics, drives the car, makes the phone call, finds the missing object, steadies the room, or lends us their executive functioning for a while.

That is interdependence.

Healthy community says:

I know where I struggle.

I can tell you what I need.

You can tell me what you are actually able and willing to offer.

Then we decide together what gets carried, by whom, and for how long. The labor, the limitation, and the choice are then visible. And because they are visible, consent becomes possible.

Self-deception obscures the arrangement. If I insist there is nothing for you to carry while continually placing weight in your hands, you never get the opportunity to consent to the relationship as it actually exists.

You cannot say:

Yes, I can carry this.

I can carry this, but not that.

I need something in return.

I cannot keep doing this.

Instead, the labor arrives disguised as ordinary life. You simply become the person who remembers and anticipates. The person who lowers expectations and smooths things over. The person who plans around another person’s limitations and absorbs all the uncertainty.

Over time, the carrying person can begin disappearing inside the accommodation. Their flexibility becomes expected and their competence becomes infrastructure. Their empathy is considered an endless resource.

That is not mutuality. It is hidden labor.

Community makes dependence visible enough to become mutual.

Self-deception can obscure dependence until it becomes extraction.

We can tell ourselves that we are simply accepting what another person freely gives, while remaining incurious about what makes that giving possible. We can mistake someone’s competence for infinite capacity, their accommodation for preference, their silence for consent, or their ability to carry something for an agreement that they should.

The problem is not dependence. We are all dependent on one another. The problem is dependence that remains unnamed long enough for one person’s adaptation to become another person’s expectation. Sometimes we don’t recognize the arrangement until something makes it impossible to keep believing the story we had been telling about it.

The Epistemic Rupture

Sometimes new information changes not merely how we feel about a relationship, but what we understand the relationship to have been. A resentment is finally named after years of silence. A person discovers that an agreement they believed was mutual was experienced by the other person as obligation. Someone realizes that what looked like ease was actually prolonged masking.

A hidden expectation becomes visible. A person discovers that they have been responding not to the other person, but to an internal version of that person built from fear, projection, assumption, or history.

These moments can create an epistemic rupture. The conditions of knowing have suddenly changed. Once that happens, the question is not always:How do we get back to the relationship we had?

Sometimes the more accurate question is:Do we want to build a new relationship now that we know more about what this one actually contained?

Repair, when it is possible, requires a new shared reality.

Why Talking Is Not Always Enough

There is a problem with telling people simply to know themselves better. Much of the self cannot initially be reached through language alone. Sometimes language is where we learned to mask. We learned the acceptable answer before we learned to recognize our own.

I’m fine.

It doesn’t matter.

Whatever you want.

I can do that.

I’m not angry.

I don’t need anything.

A person can become extremely articulate while remaining disconnected from their own embodied experience. This is one reason expressive arts matter.

Expressive Arts as a Pathway to Self-Knowledge

Art can make experience visible before it becomes explainable. A line can contain something we do not yet know how to say. A rhythm can reveal activation before we can name anxiety. A character can speak a truth that feels impossible in the first person. A body can move toward or away from something before the conscious mind understands why. A collage can hold contradictory experiences beside one another without forcing either one to disappear. A sandtray can externalize an entire relational system. A poem can give language to something that previously existed only as sensation. A song can hold grief and joy at the same time.

This matters because self-knowledge is not simply intellectual knowledge about ourselves. It is embodied recognition.

Oh. There I am.

Expressive practice gives internal experience form. And once experience has form, we can encounter it.

Art Creates a Third Space

Expressive arts also offer something relationally important: a third thing. Instead of only me looking at you and you looking at me, we can both look at what has been made.

The drawing.

The poem.

The movement.

The arrangement of objects.

The sound.

The story.

The artwork becomes a meeting place. I do not have to convince you that my internal world exists. I can place some part of it between us.

You do not have to experience it exactly as I do. You can become curious.

What is happening here?

What does this part need?

Why did this image appear?

What changed when you moved that figure?

Where are you in this picture?

The goal is not interpretation. It is encounter.

Witnessing Without Overwriting

Expressive arts do not automatically create belonging, they can also be used to interpret, diagnose, or overwrite someone. A neuroqueer expressive arts practice requires a different kind of witnessing.

The maker retains authority over meaning.

Not: I know what this is about.

But: Would you like me to know something about what you made?

That difference matters. One approach extracts meaning. The other creates conditions in which meaning can emerge relationally. Belonging does not require being perfectly understood. It requires knowing that we can reveal something of ourselves without immediately being overwritten.

From Expression to Interconnectedness

Expressive arts are often described as tools for self-expression. That is true, but incomplete. Expression can also become an invitation into relationship.

I make something.

You witness it.

Your witnessing changes what becomes possible for me to see.

You respond.

Something changes in you.

You create something in return.

Meaning begins moving between us.

The boundary between my experience and yours remains intact but something new begins to exist between us. That something is not sameness. It is participation. And participation may be one of the deepest forms of belonging available to us.

Belonging Is Infrastructure

Belonging is often described as a feeling but it is also something we build. It exists when people are allowed to show up as they actually are. When needs can be named without punishment. When limits can be admitted without loss of worth. When capacity can fluctuate and communication can take multiple forms. When silence, image, movement, sound, play, metaphor, and language are all legitimate ways of participating.

When saying I don’t know what I’m feeling yet is information rather than failure.

When asking for support does not automatically make someone a burden.

When people are allowed to revise their understanding of themselves.

This kind of community requires more than tolerance. It requires relational honesty. It requires self-knowledge. It requires curiosity. And it requires enough safety for people to become increasingly knowable without having to become the same.

A Neuroqueer Relational Ethic

A neuroqueer ethics of shared reality might begin here:

Difference is not the problem. Unexamined difference masquerading as shared reality is.

Self-knowledge is relational because other people live with the consequences of what we know—and what we do not yet know—about ourselves.

Interdependence is ethical when needs, capacity, and labor are visible enough for consent.

No person has perfect access to themselves. Curiosity and revision matter more than certainty. Communication is larger than language. Embodied, sensory, creative, symbolic, and relational forms of knowing count.

Expressive arts can make private experience encounterable without requiring it to become immediately rational or verbal. And the witnessing of the making must preserve the maker’s authority over their own meaning.

We are not in the business of creating one reality, leave that to the crapitalists. We are seeking enough shared reality that everyone involved can see what they are being asked to participate in.

Perhaps that is part of what we are doing when we make art together. We are not simply expressing ourselves, regulating, and making something beautiful. We are consciously practicing becoming visible to ourselves and one another.

We are discovering where our realities meet. And from that meeting place, we can decide what we are willing to carry together. That is where interconnectedness begins.

And perhaps belonging begins there too.

The language of neuroqueering is deeply influenced by the work of Nick Walker and others in the neurodiversity movement. My understanding has also been shaped by relational psychotherapy, expressive arts therapy, existential therapy, and developmental and attachment-based approaches. This essay reflects my own synthesis of those traditions in clinical practice.