"It’s Actually GLP, Silly”: Coaching Culture, Self-Diagnosis, and the Great Script Confusion

Why Getting Language Right Matters—For Autistic People, GLPs, and Everyone Who Loves Us.

Autism Coaches keep calling ‘scripting’ a compulsion, a trauma tic, or “quirky autism.” It’s not. It’s gestalt language processing. And when you misname it, you misread people—especially those who need understanding most.

Introduction

You’re scrolling through Instagram, maybe at the end of a long day, half-dissociating while waiting for the kettle to boil. And then there it is—another pastel-coloured reel, algorithmically blessed, softly lit, and voiceover-ready. A smiling, concerned-looking woman in oversized jumpers and heavy eye contact stares through the screen and says:
“Do you ever feel like you need to script every conversation in advance? That might be your OCD. Or maybe… just maybe… it’s your quirky, undiagnosed autism. You’re not broken—you’re just a Ferrari in a school zone.”

Cue wistful music. B-roll footage of someone staring out a window. A gentle offer to sign up for her £397 self-paced course on “navigating neurodivergence as a sensitive, high-achieving woman.” Payment plans available, of course. Because healing should be accessible.

You sigh. You take a sip of tea. You wonder, briefly, if you are a Ferrari. You are not.
Because here’s the thing: this isn’t a one-off. It’s a genre.

Over the past few years, entire corners of the internet have been overtaken by white, cisgender women—many of them middle-class, many of them newly diagnosed or self-diagnosed—who’ve built entire brands around guiding others through the “late-diagnosed autistic female experience.” Some are well-meaning. Some are brilliant. And some, frankly, don’t know what they don’t know.

They speak with certainty, build parasocial trust, and offer support in beautifully branded slides. But again and again, they misrepresent what’s actually going on. They confuse trauma with processing style. They call scripting a compulsion. They mistake metaphor-rich communication for quirky masking. And at the centre of it all, they keep missing something fundamental:

It’s actually gestalt language processing, silly.

Welcome to the Coaching Carousel

Where every misdiagnosis comes with a downloadable workbook.

There’s a certain script to these scripts. The phrasing varies slightly, but the beats are always the same: personal revelation, confident misattribution, neurodivergent buzzword salad, and an invitation to join the course / coaching container / healing circle.

Let’s take a quick spin through the carousel.

“Do you have to script every conversation in advance?”

That’s OCD—the need to get it just right.
Actually: It’s GLP—gestalt language processing. I’m not obsessing. I’m assembling. My language comes in meaning-rich chunks, not linear word-by-word sequences. The script isn’t about control—it’s about coherence. Emotional coherence.

“Do you repeat quotes from films or TV shows? That’s a trauma response.”

You’re using pop culture to avoid vulnerability. Let’s explore that in my coaching container.
Actually: That’s Stage 1 echolalia in GLP. It’s not avoidance—it’s communication. I’m using stored language to convey emotion, memory, tone, timing. The quote isn’t just words—it carries the scene, the feeling, the moment I first felt seen. Sometimes a line from a cartoon or a sitcom holds more truth than anything I could generate from scratch. Not because I can’t speak for myself—but because that is how I speak for myself. Through resonance. Through retrieval. Through meaning that arrives whole.

“You overanalyse every interaction? That’s RSD—Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria!”

You’re addicted to closure. Let’s fix that mindset.
Actually: That’s the experience of a GLP trying to complete an unfinished gestalt. Our communication loops are emotional, narrative, and relational. When something ends without resolution, it can feel like being left mid-sentence in a language only we understand.

“You can’t explain how you feel unless it’s in metaphor?”

You’re just highly sensitive or neurospicy—lean into your mystic side!
Actually: That’s GLP emotional language. We don’t separate feeling from image. We don’t do flat affect labels on cue. We reach for metaphor because it’s the most honest, efficient, and exact way we know to communicate internal states. This isn’t whimsy. It’s fluency.

“You talk in loops? Repeating the same story again and again?”

That’s executive dysfunction. You need a flow chart and a Notion board.
Actually: That’s gestalt repair. It’s how we work through meaning until it lands. We loop not because we’re forgetful, but because something vital didn’t finish loading. You can’t fix that with a time-blocked planner.

Let me be clear: I’m not dismissing any of the conditions mentioned above. OCD, trauma, RSD, executive dysfunction—they’re all real, complex, and deeply affecting. Many of us experience them. Some of us live with several at once.

But what’s happening on the coaching carousel isn’t nuanced clinical reflection. It’s branding. It’s misattribution dressed up as insight. And it’s leading people—often vulnerable people—to misunderstand the root of their own communication style.

Not every script is a compulsion. Not every loop is executive dysfunction. Not every quote is avoidance. Sometimes—often—what’s being described is GLP: a distinct, well-documented language development pathway that carries with it a unique set of needs, strengths, and challenges (Lee, 1966; Lee & Canter, 1971; Peters, 1977; Bloom, 1970; Ferguson & Farwell, 1975; Nelson, 1973; Peters, 1983; Prizant, 1983; Blanc, 2012).

When we mistake GLP for something else, we don’t just muddy the waters—we mislead those trying to understand themselves, and miseducate the broader public about how autistic and neurodivergent minds actually work.

So no shade to your healing journey. But maybe… let’s label things accurately. For everyone’s sake.

But Actually, What Is Gestalt Language Processing?

Let’s talk about the thing they keep misdiagnosing.

GLP stands for Gestalt Language Processing. It’s not a vibe. It’s not a trauma tic. It’s not something you can “break free from” with the right bullet journal. It’s a valid, well-documented way that some people—autistic AND otherwise—develop and use language.

Here’s the simplest way to put it:

GLPs learn language in chunks. Emotionally resonant, often sensory-rich, context-bound chunks.
Think: mixtapes, not syllable drills.
Think: Lego bricks, not alphabet soup.

Where analytic processors (ALPs) pick up words and build sentences from scratch, GLPs store entire gestalts—like “we’re not doing that today” or “I don’t want to talk about it”—as full units. These gestalts are felt, not just spoken. They carry tone, memory, and relational context.

And yes, many GLPs are autistic. But not all. We also see this pattern in:

• Traumatised individuals (especially those with attachment disruption)

• Queer and trans folk navigating complex identity narratives

• People with learning differences like dyslexia or auditory processing issues

• Multiply-marginalised folks whose language development unfolds under chronic pressure

GLP isn’t a deficit. It’s not a “delay.” It’s a different system. A system often pathologised because schools, clinicians, and yes—coaches—don’t understand how it works.

So why haven’t you heard of it?

Because the people shaping public discourse—particularly in the neurodivergent self-help space—aren’t drawing from this research. They’re drawing from their own (usually white, cis, middle-class) experience, and marketing it as universal truth. It’s not malice—it’s market logic.

The coaching industry, bless its Canva templates, thrives by framing difference as a problem and selling pre-packaged solutions. GLP, with all its nuance, doesn’t fit neatly into that model. You can’t coach someone out of being a gestalt processor. You can only support them in learning how their language works—and that takes actual expertise, not three modules and a workbook.

Many of the “quirks” coaches attribute to autism, OCD, or trauma?
They’re GLP traits.
But without the language for GLP, they sell a misunderstanding—wrapped in empathy, priced like insight.

Let’s be honest: what’s being sold isn’t language support. It’s self-recognition. People want to feel seen. GLPs especially—we live for recognition, resonance, and mirrored meaning. But recognition without accuracy? That’s marketing, not care.

Why This Matters

Let’s pull back the curtain.

This isn’t just a debate about terminology. It’s not a semantic quibble or a snarky jab at influencers with Canva Pro and a healing vibe. It’s about what happens when language itself is misunderstood—and when people, especially those already marginalised, are misread because of it.

Misdiagnosis and Identity Confusion

Every week, I meet people—students, parents, fellow educators—who’ve never heard the term gestalt language processing. But they know something isn’t landing right. They’ve been told their scripting is OCD. Or their metaphorical language is masking. Or their looping is anxiety.

Some are neurotypical GLPs who’ve mistakenly decided they must be autistic, because what else explains their intense, layered way of speaking? Others are autistic—but analytic processors—who hear influencer after influencer describe GLP traits as if they define autism itself, and walk away feeling like they don’t “count.”

In both cases, what could have been a moment of recognition becomes confusion.
And that confusion compounds over time—until people no longer know how to name themselves at all.

When someone’s never heard the word “gestalt” but is coaching others through “autistic language quirks,” we have a problem.

Educational Fallout

This misunderstanding doesn’t just live online—it walks straight into classrooms. GLP students are everywhere. Many plateau at “functional literacy,” not because they’re incapable, but because we never taught reading comprehension in a way that matches how they process meaning.

They struggle not with decoding, but with the assembly of meaning—because our curricula are built for analytic thinkers, not gestalt ones. Comprehension strategies that work beautifully for analytic readers fall flat for GLPs, who learn through story, feeling, rhythm, image, and relational echo.

The tragedy runs deep.
Many of these students are labelled as disinterested, delayed, even defiant. Their brilliance is overlooked. Their voice, misheard. Their scripts, misunderstood.

And their parents? Often GLPs themselves—undiagnosed, unsupported, unsure how to advocate because no one ever explained their own language to them. I’ve sat with parents crying in IEP meetings, unable to describe what they know in their bones: My child is not broken. But the system doesn’t know how to teach them.
Neither did it know how to teach me.

Flattened Public Understanding

There is no such thing as a singular “autistic voice.”
But if you listened only to the coaching reels and neurodivergent empowerment ads, you’d think autism lived entirely in white, cis, verbal, middle-class female bodies with Pinterest aesthetics and perfect lighting.

GLP doesn’t look the same across race, class, gender, or disability.
It shows up in echolalia that’s deeply cultural.
In protest speech mistaken for defiance.
In queer metaphor mistaken for melodrama.
In delayed speech mistaken for lack of thought.

When public narratives ignore this variation, they flatten our understanding into something palatable, marketable, and ultimately hollow. That erasure leaves people lonely in their difference, isolated from kinship that could have been—if only someone had recognised the pattern.

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There is such profound relief in being seen clearly.
Not mislabelled. Not coached out of your natural expression. But named, in full, as who you are.

GLP is not a pathology. It’s not a phase. It’s not a branding niche.

It’s a way of being in language.
And like all ways of being, it deserves to be understood, respected, and nurtured—with depth, not diagnosis codes.

The Professionals Aren’t Trained Either

Here’s where it gets even messier.

It’s easy to poke fun at influencers with ring lights and hustle-queen energy. But some of the people making these misattributions? They’re licensed. They’re clinicians. They’re credentialed professionals—social workers, counsellors, psychologists—trained, regulated, reimbursed.

And still? They’ve never heard of gestalt language processing.

Not once.

It’s not part of the LCSW curriculum. It’s not taught in counselling programmes. Most psychologists encounter it—if at all—as a developmental oddity to “correct,” not a valid communication style to understand. In education, GLP barely registers outside a few early childhood speech contexts, and even then, it’s usually framed as something to “get past” rather than grow with. And looming over all of this is the ABA-industrial complex—an empire with deep pockets and massive reach—which has actively resisted the acceptance of GLP and Natural Language Acquisition as natural, healthy developmental paths. As Hutchins, Knox, and Fletcher (2024) note, these approaches are routinely undermined by behavioural frameworks that prioritise compliance and surface-level speech over relational meaning. That resistance isn’t neutral—it’s strategic, well-funded, and widely disseminated.

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The only field that occasionally touches GLP is Speech-Language Pathology (SLP). And even there, it’s marginal. Only a small subset of SLPs—often those working from NLA models like Blanc’s—see echolalia as purposeful, expressive, and rich in relational meaning.

But here’s the kicker: SLPs don’t do literacy.
They don’t track what happens when a Stage 1 or 2 GLP learns to read but can’t access comprehension. They stop at verbal language. Meanwhile, educators might notice reading gaps—but have no idea that the student’s inner voice is gestalt-based, not linear or analytic. And therapists? Often misread metaphoric, looping, or non-linear language as evidence of trauma, dissociation, or disorder.

So you end up with a system full of well-meaning professionals, none of whom are trained to recognise or support GLP at the level it actually exists.

Here’s the landscape:

• SLPs see echolalia but not text.

• Teachers see comprehension issues but not gestalts.

• Counsellors see scripts and assume avoidance or OCD.

• Psychologists see metaphor and label it maladaptive.

• Parents see themselves in their children, but don’t know the words to explain it.

• And coaches, with the best of intentions and none of the training, build brands on misunderstandings.

The result? GLP individuals—especially autistic GLPs—go unsupported at every level. No one tracks their full trajectory. No one teaches to their way of thinking. No one sees the through-line of meaning that connects their earliest utterances to their adult comprehension struggles.

And that matters—because language is how we build the world around us. If your language system is misread, you’re misread. And when professionals misread you? It doesn’t just sting—it shapes your life.

The Hopeful Bit

Let me be clear: I’m not anti-coach. I’m not anti-self-discovery. I’m not even anti-Instagram.

What I am is pro-accuracy, pro-community, and deeply pro-literacy—in every sense of the word.

Because here’s the truth: when we name things well, people find each other. When we describe language as it really is, GLPs feel less alone. When we offer the right frameworks—not just the viral ones—people start to see themselves clearly for the first time.

That’s the work I’ve devoted my life to.
My three textbooks were written in this hope.
My poetry is rooted in it.
My fiction is seeded with it.
And more than a thousand articles here on The AutSide have been my way of saying, again and again:
You’re not broken. You were just never read clearly.

So here’s my invitation—especially to coaches, content creators, educators, and GLPs themselves:

Go deeper. Ask why. Be willing to unlearn.

If you’re a coach who’s never heard of GLP, don’t be embarrassed—be curious.
If you’re an educator struggling to teach comprehension, this might be the key.
If you’re a parent or adult wondering why your inner voice sounds more like film quotes than bullet points—welcome home.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to know the names of the people who’ve built the road before you.

I’ve written more about all of this here on The AutSide. You’ll find longform essays, annotated bibliographies, and reflections grounded in lived experience and rigorous research. It’s a library built for kin—whether you’re autistic, GLP, questioning, or just trying to understand someone you love.

Because when we get this right—when we see each other in full—everything changes.

Final thoughts …

So the next time someone tells you that scripting is a trauma response… or a compulsion… or “just one of those quirky little autistic things”…
when they say it’s RSD, or OCD, or overthinking, or masking, or maladaptive, or magical thinking, or a self-soothing ritual passed down from your inner wounded child in a satin cloak with glitter on the hem—
breathe.
Smile gently.
Tilt your head like you’re about to offer a riddle, or a recipe, or a softly-whistled tune.

And say—

“Well… it’s actually GLP, silly.”

Then wait.
Watch the moment of cognitive tilt as the acronym lands.
And if they lean in—curious, open, a little undone—you can begin.
You can tell them about language that arrives in waves and echoes.
About memory-music stitched into scripts.
About how sometimes a film quote is the only way to say “I love you” and mean it right.

You can show them the shape of your voice,
and maybe—just maybe—
they’ll begin to hear their own.

And if they don’t? That’s okay too.
There’s still a cup of tea, and a gesture toward the bookshelf,
and a quiet promise tucked between your lines:

You’re not too much.
You’re not too late.
You’re just a gestalt waiting to be understood.

Come in. Let’s start with the chorus.