I was on retreat: a gathered community of leaders with disabilities and neurodivergence, drawn together to reflect, to rest, and to listen. During one of the sessions, ‘Leading From Who You Are’ the facilitator posed a deceptively simple question:
Who are you, apart from your team, your organisation, your context?
It was meant to help us excavate our identity, to reach below our roles and responsibilities to the self beneath. But I couldn’t answer it. In fact, I couldn’t even understand what was being asked.
What does it mean to imagine the self apart from the people, patterns, and places that shape it? I didn’t just struggle for an answer. I struggled to comprehend the very premise of the question. The rest of the room began to engage in conversation and I listened in to attempt to discern what I was missing. Others were talking about self; their understanding of who they felt they were but none were acknowledging how that self has come into being. It was as if they believed they ‘sprang from the mind of God’ (Peer Gynt, Act 5 Scene 3), fully formed. That’s a common assumption about the self, but I don’t think it’s true.
I was baffled, in part, because when I usually experience a dissonance between my own understanding and that of those around me, I instinctively blame my neurodiversity/autism. In this context, however, I felt restricted in doing that. For a fleeting moment, I feared there was something wrong with me beyond what I could safely attribute to autism.
I’ve come to see that what unsettled me on that retreat wasn’t a lack of self-awareness but a different way of being a self altogether.
At first, it might seem contradictory to say that autistic people experience selfhood as fundamentally relational. The stereotype is that autistic people struggle with social connection and interpersonal understanding. Surely, then, autistic people would feel themselves as more isolated, not less. This assumption collapses, however, when we explore how autistic relationality actually works. Autistic people often experience difficulty with certain social performances: small talk, fluid group dynamics, decoding unspoken social rules. This does not mean we are less relational; it just means we connect differently.
Autistic researcher Damian Milton challenges the typical narrative with his theory of the ‘double empathy problem’, which proposes that autistic social difficulties arise not from inherent deficits but from ‘mutual misattunement’ between autistic and neurotypical people. I am not less social; I simply socialise differently. Neurotypical society tends to privilege social ambiguity, implicit communication, and high-context interactions and these modes are exhausting or bewildering to us autistics. This doesn’t mean that we are not interested in relationships but we tend to find fulfilment in these connections through shared activities, clear structures, predictable rituals, and deep focused interests. We flourish in communal spaces that are stable, ordered, and trustworthy; places where the unspoken social rules are replaced by liturgies, patterns, and shared rhythms.
Beyond this, many autistic people experience a form of ‘ecological selfhood’ which is a sense of self that is intrinsically tied to our environment, sensory world, routines, and the people and objects that anchor us. The boundaries between self and context, therefore, are often blurred.
Naoki Higashida captures this in his remarkable book:
It’s as if my body belongs to someone else and I have zero control over it… I can’t just think about things in isolation—my thoughts are all linked to other things.
Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, trans. KA Yoshida and David Mitchell (New York: Random House, 2013), 36.
I don’t perceive myself as something separable from my context. I experience selfhood as something that emerges within forms of social, as well as ecclesial liturgies, shared spaces, and communal belonging. When people ask me to strip that away to find some ‘pure self’ underneath I get lost, not because I am avoiding myself but because I have never known myself apart from the places and people around me.
Grant Macaskill, in his theological reflection on autism, puts it bluntly:
Autistic people often embody modes of relationality that resist the individualism of Western culture. Their difficulties are less about absence of sociality and more about divergence from normative expectations of social behaviour.
Grant Macaskill, Autism and the Church: Bible, Theology, and Community (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 73.
What I struggled with on that retreat was not self-awareness. I was struggling with the premise that my truest self could somehow be detached from my community. That model of selfhood just doesn’t fit, but more than that, I am beginning to wonder whether it doesn’t fit anyone.
Perhaps autistic relationality doesn’t simply offer an alternative way of connecting but offers the Church a prophetic reorientation. If the dominant leadership cultures centres on the autonomous, performative self, maybe it is those cultures, not autistic people, that are out of step with the Body of Christ. Perhaps autistic ways of being illuminate what our theology has always said but our practice has too often forgotten: that the self is made in relation, that difference is not a problem to be managed, but the very ground where communion takes root.
What if autistic relationality is not a deficit to be overcome but a gift to be received: a sign that we lead most faithfully not by extracting ourselves from others, but by remaining deeply, dependently, unmistakably embedded in the life of the community?
Our culture tells us that identity is something we must cultivate independently. The self is seen as a solitary project: find yourself, be yourself, lead from your authentic self. This story of selfhood assumes that the truest ‘you’ exists somewhere prior to or beneath your context.
This story of selfhood is deeply rooted in the modern, Western imagination, shaped by Enlightenment ideals of autonomy, rationality, and the self as an isolated, self-determining agent. This is not just a cultural whim; it is a historically located worldview that has shaped leadership, spirituality, and even Christian discipleship in the West, and I believe this modern ideal is a myth.
The Christian tradition, particularly through the voices of Augustine, Rowan Williams, and Yves Congar, calls this into question. The self, they suggest, is not a fortress. It is not a self-contained treasure waiting to be uncovered through introspection. Thomas Merton offers a sharper vision:
The true self is not a private, isolated self… It is found in the act of self-forgetfulness, in love.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 42.
Love, relation, community; these are not optional extensions of selfhood. They are the very ground of it.
My recent reading of Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac gave this instinct theological clarity. Both rejected the idea that the Church is simply a collection of individuals. They insisted the Church is a communion: a people bound together by the Spirit, by shared life, by mutual dependence.
The Church is not the sum of individuals. It is the common life of grace and truth, a communion in Christ through the Spirit.
Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of the Laity, trans. Donald Attwater (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 16.
Congar’s vision resonates deeply with this idea of autistic relationality. You cannot understand the Church, or the self, by pulling it apart into isolated units. The Church is a living body, not a loose assembly of separate selves and, perhaps, autistic relationality teaches us this in its own particular, embodied way. It shows us what I am calling ‘inclusive othering’, where difference is seen, honoured, and held together in the unity of shared life. It refuses to collapse our distinctiveness into a bland sameness but insists that we are bound together precisely as different. Autistic relationality is not about dissolving difference to find connection, but about finding connection through difference.
It is not only Christian theology that challenges the Western fixation on the individual. Many cultures across the world understand the self as fundamentally communal. The Zulu concept of ubuntu (“I am because we are”) expresses this beautifully. In ubuntu thinking, your identity is not forged first and then added to community. Rather, “You are summoned into your identity by others.” (Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 105).
The self is not a solitary treasure to be excavated. It is a calling, a voice that is spoken into being by the community that loves, challenges, and shapes us. Perhaps, then, the question is not, “Who are you apart from your context?” Perhaps the more faithful question is, “Who are you within your context? What unique voice, gift, and way of leading do you offer precisely because you are embedded in your community?”
I do not lead from some self distilled and extracted from others. I lead from a self that is deeply, inescapably connected to the Church, to the Body, to the patterns that sustain me. Augustine, too, knew this:
Let your heart be more closely bound to the Church than to your own heartbeat.
Augustine, Sermon 265D, in Essential Sermons, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007), 326
When I return to the question of who I am, apart from my context, I realise I still have no answer… but perhaps that’s not a failing. Perhaps it’s a faithful refusal to sever what God has joined together.
