The Missing Control Group
Author’s Note: Before we dive in, I need to be very clear about what this post is and isn’t saying.
There are legitimate neuroanatomical and neuro-endocrinological conditions that exist. We can track dopamine, measure processing speeds, and observe sensory gating. There are people with permanent configurations in their neuro-architecture. Individuals whose traits are so foundational they require lifelong tools, adaptations, or community scaffolding.. This post is not a denial of that. In fact, it is an argument that they are the only ones being honest about the “load.” However, I am challenging the sanctity of the Baseline. Neurodivergence is not a discrete minority condition; it is the natural variation of human nervous systems operating under different loads, thresholds, and developmental trajectories and the attempt to define a “neurotypical” baseline was always scientifically incoherent.
I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted to begin this next set of posts, but I kept circling the same structure while working on the case study. In any trial or study, there’s always a control group to compare to, whether it’s the standard of care or a group considered “typical” or “average.”
The problem, which I’ve known for years, is that “typical” and “average” don’t actually encompass everyone. In clinical trials and product design, this shows up in how certain populations are underrepresented in the control group leading to outcomes that don’t translate across demographics.
For example: many temple thermometers misread temperatures in people of color. The baseline was never built with us in it.
So while I was researching shame and how it evolves over time, I kept running into something else:
Why is recursion shamed?
Recursion is a universal human function. Philosophically, it’s our ability to fold thoughts into themselves—what makes human consciousness distinct from other animals. We can reflect on our own thinking. We can self-reference. We have structures like the prefrontal cortex and the default mode network that allow for this.
So why would we ever shame that capacity?
And what does that say about the “control group”?
The Hunt
I went looking. Through papers, literature, journals.
What I found? The neurotypical control group doesn’t exist.
At least not in any structurally defined way.
The neurotypical control group has never been built as a formal construct. It’s simply been defined by what it isn’t.
The Origin of the Terms
I’d known pieces of this story for years, but I hadn’t gone deep until recently. The term “neurodivergence” didn’t come from science or medicine. It came from satire.
In the 1990s, autistic communities online started using “neurotypical” sarcastically. The point was: If we’re divergent, then what are you? The term “neurotypical” was a way of turning the lens, of pointing out that “normal” is not a neutral word.
Over time, the terminology took hold:
1993–1994: Jim Sinclair and the ANI community began using “neurotypical” to distinguish themselves from non-autistics.
1998: Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist, coined the term “neurodiversity” in her honors thesis, drawing directly from the ANI community.
2000: Activist Kassiane Asasumasu introduced the term “neurodivergent” to expand the umbrella beyond autism, to include ADHD, dyslexia, and others.
Once “neurotypical” left its original context and entered broader academic discourse, it hardened, not as a clarified concept, but as a clinical contrast term. You start seeing it in the early 2000s:
“Compared to neurotypical controls…”
“Neurotypical development follows…”
“Social cognition in neurotypicals vs. autistic individuals…”
But here’s the problem:
They never actually defined it.
They used it like a known category, but it wasn’t a built model- it was inferred.
It was backfilled. They built the image of “typical” by subtracting everything they already considered divergent.
No rooted criteria. Just negative space.
Pop Science and the Coaching Explosion
In the 2010s, things got even blurrier.
Pop science, therapists, influencers, and coaching language adopted these terms and they spread quickly through autism advocacy and ADHD communities.
“Neurotypical” became a word everyone used. It sounded real. But it was never given structural depth. It was reactive, contrast-based, a linguistic placeholder that calcified into identity.
And in the literature? It’s still treated as a statistical category. One that supposedly encompasses 80% of the population.
But again: it’s never been structurally defined.
Just... used. Quoted. Reified. Without ever being questioned.
What, exactly, were these groups being defined against? Recursion. Self-referencing. Emotional looping. Intensity. The traits that now define many neurodivergent profiles were originally coded as pathological because they broke the social or scientific illusion of linearity. The ‘typical’ brain, then, was defined not by its structure but by its suppression of recursive output.
Free Recursion
Humans, by nature, are recursive to varying degrees. We’re all equipped to think about our own thinking. That capacity isn’t rare, it’s embedded into our neuro-architecture, specifically the Default Mode Network and the Pre-frontal Cortex.
So if recursion is biologically native, then how do we explain a control group that’s supposedly free of it? How do we claim 80% of people don’t loop, don’t spiral, don’t think inwards?
We don’t.
Because it’s not possible.
The logic fails.
You cannot have a population-wide recursive architecture and then pretend 80% of people aren’t using it.
Unless…
the control group isn’t truly typical.
Unless it’s just the group whose recursion hasn’t leaked yet.
Enter Critics
This is where the critique gets sharper.
Some trauma-informed theorists are starting to suggest that neurotypicality isn’t real, not as a brain type. It’s a mask. A high-functioning trauma response. A performance perfected through suppression.
The “control group” isn’t healthy.
They’re just more skilled at hiding.
But still, the field resists. The language persists. To preserve the myth, people will even frame neurodivergence as a transient trait, a flare-up in grief or trauma that will recede back to “normal.” That way, the idea of neurotypicality doesn’t have to die.
The Pristine Minority
Some modern papers have stopped using “neurotypical” and instead refer to “typically developing” individuals. But that group is still curated. It’s defined by exclusion.
To qualify, you must have:
No formal diagnosis (ASD, ADHD, LD, etc)
No psychiatric medication history
No first-degree relatives with neurodevelopmental disorders
An IQ between 85–115
But this still collapses under scrutiny.
Because what about “yet”?
No meds yet
No trauma yet
No diagnosis yet
No breakdown yet
Add in the fact that many people actively avoid diagnosis, and what you’re left with is a moving target. The group you’re calling “typical” isn’t stable. It’s vanishing.
And when 62–72% of adults have experienced at least one ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience), you realize:
The pristine control group doesn’t exist in the wild.
You’ve filtered out trauma, divergence, medication, and variation and what you’re left with isn’t a human group.
It’s a curated vacuum.
Control Group Contamination
The better studies use a term like “Allistic”, non-autistic, which allows for a messier but more honest comparison group. Some include people with anxiety or ADHD. It’s a step closer to real life.
But even these groups are unstable. Because undetected neurodivergence is rampant. Especially in women.
And when your “neurotypical” control group is full of masked, high-performing neurodivergents, something strange happens:
Your results flatten.
The gap shrinks.
Your statistical differences disappear.
Researchers call it “noise.”
But it’s not noise.
It’s evidence of a myth.
This isn’t to say that all neurodivergence is just trauma or masking. There are permanent, structural neurological differences, autism, ADHD, and others, that reflect distinct developmental and sensory architectures. What I’m challenging isn’t those realities but the idea that there’s a stable, coherent, “typical” baseline to compare them against. The control group is the myth, not the diagnoses.
The Masked Majority
“Neurotypical” isn’t a different brain.
It’s just a brain currently within a “supposedly linear” operating range.
Once overloaded, those same people exhibit the same executive failures as the “divergent.” They’re not different. They’re just buffered. For now.
Let’s take over-functioning as an example. Over-functioning is the ultimate mask, especially for women.
From the outside, it looks like stability:
Spreadsheets.
Emotional labor.
Military precision.
Constant social regulation.
But when over-functioning collapses?
The doctor doesn’t say: “You’ve been holding too much.”
They say: “You’ve failed to function.”
What they miss is that over-functioning was the disorder.
Or more accurately, it was a recursive loop running at 200% just to maintain the “standard” baseline.
To them, you’ve just now become clinical.
To you? You’ve been carrying this for years.
***Again, I am not arguing that autism or ADHD are “just trauma,” nor that lifelong neuro-developmental differences aren’t real. They are real, embodied, and structural. What I am saying is that the category of “neurotypical” was never a valid biological baseline to begin with. Human nervous systems are inherently variable, recursive, and context-sensitive. Some people are born with configurations that diverge early and visibly. Others diverge later, under load, trauma, or prolonged suppression. The difference is not whether divergence exists — it’s when, how, and under what conditions it becomes legible. In that sense, neurodivergence isn’t a subset of people. It’s the full distribution of human nervous systems once you stop pretending a flat baseline ever existed.***
The Loops and Coins Model
In Loopwork, I track the interaction between unresolved patterns (‘loops’), emotional imprints (‘coins’), and the nervous system’s executive energy budget. When the load exceeds the system’s capacity, what looks like dysfunction is often a recursive overload state. Here’s how they interact:
Loops = unresolved recursive patterns
Coins = trauma imprints, emotional overloads
Energy Budget = the remaining capacity for executive function
Here’s how it unfolds:
Accumulation – You start collecting loops and coins. You “try harder.”
Saturation – Too many tabs open. No energy left for basics.
Collapse – You don’t just feel tired. You hit clinical markers. You present exactly like ADHD, Autism, Depression.
And because the model defines “typical” as the person still overfunctioning,
the scientific narrative becomes:
You’re not struggling because your brain is different.
You’re just not trying hard enough. Or you have an undiagnosed condition that prevents you from meeting an impossible baseline.
A systemic failure in a baseline becomes a personal diagnosis.
The Mask Is Not a Trait
Science treats neurotypicality like a permanent trait like height.
But if trauma can activate traits and coins can crash a system, then the trait isn’t “typicality.”
It’s safety. If the trait can be turned on by trauma, it was never an absence of trait. It was a suppressed baseline.
It’s just a name we give to brains that haven’t been forced to show their recursion yet. For the over-functioning example above, over-functioning isn’t a healthy baseline. It’s containment with a productivity overlay.
The Final Reframe
The strongest challenge to the myth?
Neurotypicality is a performance. Not a biology.
And the more we learn, the more contamination we find. The more the mask slips.
Control groups don’t hold. The pristine model falls apart.
Because we were never studying “normals.”
We were studying people who hadn’t cracked. Yet.
The Loopwork Conclusion
Neurotypical isn’t a brain type. It’s a mask state.
A social performance optimized for system compliance.
The real truth?
If modern life loops everyone long enough, then neurodiversity isn't a subset. It's the end state.
The mask slips.
The loops surface.
The recursion returns.
And that’s not failure.
That’s the system rebooting.
If we can no longer use ‘neurotypical’ as a clean contrast, then Loopwork offers a new way of mapping cognitive states, not by exclusion, but by recursion depth, energetic load, and emotional resonance. It’s not diagnostic. It’s diagnostic-adjacent. Not a replacement for the DSM, but an overlay for what the DSM can’t hold. Neurodivergence isn’t the exception to the human system, it’s what the system looks like when you stop hiding its variability.