We Are Not Here to Perform: A GLP’s Reflection on Communication, Connection, and Respect
Most autistic children are GLPs, yet most therapies still demand performance over connection. This piece challenges those expectations—and invites a new way of listening, rooted in respect and relational growth.
Introduction
I was born in the early 1970s, and came of age in a world where education was almost entirely teacher-led. In many ways, this structure allowed me, an autistic gestalt language processor (GLP), to survive a system that never recognised what I was or how I communicated. Direct instruction provided a clear scaffold: it modelled the scripts I would need, the phrases that were expected, the ways of performing studenthood that made the adults around me comfortable. Whilst I often struggled privately to assemble and retrieve these gestalts, the consistency of teacher-led environments gave me, at least, a framework to draw from.
Today, standing in front of classrooms as both an educator and a lifelong GLP, I see a radically different expectation at work. The modern push towards student-led learning—rooted in the assumption that children must demonstrate mastery through spontaneous collaboration and self-direction—has magnified the performance demands placed upon every learner. But for GLPs, the shift has been especially alienating. Rather than being offered structured models to internalise and adapt, we are expected to construct language in real-time analytic exchanges, to “perform” conversation before the necessary internal resources have been fully built. Teachers are increasingly discouraged from providing the very scaffolding—explicit modelling, direct language, guided narration—that supports authentic GLP development. Instead, all students are expected to perform student interactions correctly from the outset, with little recognition that different neurotypes build language through different developmental pathways.
Gestalt processors do not acquire language by performance. We build language relationally—through shared experiences, embedded meaning, and the gradual internalisation of scripts that hold emotional and contextual weight. Nearly a century ago, Lev Vygotsky described a vision of language development far more attuned to our experience than most modern interventionist models. In Thought and Language (1934/1986), Vygotsky argued that language emerges not in isolated utterances or performance-based drills, but within socially mediated activity, where meaning is co-constructed between learner and guide. Later work, such as that of Wertsch (1985), further illuminated how these mediational means—shared tools, scripts, and cultural practices—shape cognitive and communicative development.
Yet in contemporary education and clinical practice, there is a persistent misunderstanding of how GLPs grow into our language. Intervention often focuses on drilling performance: eliciting direct answers, enforcing back-and-forth exchanges, prioritising fluency over meaningfulness. In doing so, it misses the essence of how our language systems truly form. We do not thrive when pressured to perform; we thrive when invited to belong.
Why Performance Demands Harm GLPs
Throughout my childhood, the pressure to answer questions rapidly and correctly was constant. Pauses were treated as errors; deviations from expected conversational patterns were seen as defiance or incomprehension. Yet for me, conversation was rarely a linear process. Language came in pieces—scripts, echoes, stored experiences stitched together to approximate what was required. When asked a question without a familiar scaffold, I often froze, not from lack of understanding, but because the retrieval path was nonlinear and the demand came too fast. There was no allowance for how differently my mind was processing the experience. The expectation was clear: to be acceptable, I needed to perform conversation, not live it.
Today, as an educator working with neurodivergent students, I see the same expectations persisting—and in some ways, intensifying. The current educational climate celebrates “student-led” discourse, but often only within rigid, performance-driven templates. Students are praised when they can collaborate spontaneously, reflect aloud in standardised forms, or engage in rapid peer dialogue. Those who cannot—those who need more time, more structure, or more relational scaffolding—are often labelled as lacking “soft skills” or “social-emotional competence,” despite the profound validity of their communicative styles. The framework has simply shifted from demanding right answers to demanding right performances.
The broader cultural hostility to authentic autistic communication has been thrown into even starker relief in recent months. In a speech following his nomination, RFK Jr. listed a litany of things he claimed “autistics” could never do: pay taxes, play baseball, write poetry. His rhetoric was not only factually incorrect, but deeply revealing. It laid bare a belief that value is tied to visible, normative performance: speaking a certain way, achieving a certain status, behaving according to analytic standards of interaction. Those of us who build language and meaning differently—who do not perform on command—are written out of the future he envisions.
The cruelty of these expectations is not simply moral; it is developmental. Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) reminds us that growth occurs when support is matched to a learner’s current capacities—not when abilities are demanded in advance of their emergence. Language cannot be summoned into being through pressure alone; it must be nurtured within a relational space where the learner is seen, understood, and scaffolded forward from their present foundations. Jerome Bruner’s work in the 1980s further elaborated this truth: effective scaffolding is not the extraction of correct answers, but the careful co-construction of meaning through guided participation. When GLPs are expected to perform before we have fully internalised the structures of conversation, the result is not accelerated development. It is anxiety, shame, and withdrawal.
Performative demands breach the ZPD by asking for what has not yet been built. They transform communication from a collaborative process into a stage performance where only one style is applauded. For GLPs, this is not simply an educational failure; it is a repeated act of erasure. We do not need to be forced into analytic moulds. We need others to enter into our worlds long enough to scaffold us toward authentic, meaningful expression.
How We Actually Build Communication (Declaratives, Narration, Embedded Choices)
In my own early experiences, it was not direct questioning that helped me build language, but declarative statements and gentle commentary. When adults narrated what was happening, offered observations without expectation, or simply shared the world alongside me, language felt safe. I could attach meaning to their words without the immediate pressure to respond. I could gather gestalts—whole experiences, resonant phrases—at my own pace. Embedded choices, too, gave me a crucial sense of agency: rather than being trapped by interrogations I could not answer, I was invited to move into language through possibility, not compulsion.
In my classroom today, I see how powerful these approaches remain for my GLP students. When we move away from quizzing and towards narrating, when we offer declaratives rather than demands, when we embed choices into commentary rather than insisting on binary responses, students who had been labelled “nonverbal,” “disengaged,” or “oppositional” begin to open. I see them reach for language—not necessarily to answer, but to share, to script, to build. Their echolalia, once treated as meaningless noise, becomes an act of profound connection: a reaching outward, a weaving of old words into new relationships. It is in these moments—unpressured, unjudged—that genuine communication takes root.
The reality is that the structures that support GLP development have been well understood in theory for decades. Jerome Bruner’s concept of “formats”—those repetitive social rituals like peekaboo, shared storytelling, and familiar routines—describes exactly the kinds of embedded, relational experiences through which we naturally build language. These formats are not random; they provide the predictable scaffolding that allows meaning to be co-constructed. Similarly, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of language development emphasised that it is through shared, mediated experiences that cognitive and linguistic growth occurs. Words are not isolated units; they are embedded within cultural and emotional frameworks long before they are consciously produced.
Yet much of contemporary speech-language pathology—and especially the way it is marketed on social media—betrays a profound misunderstanding of GLPs and of natural language acquisition more broadly. Many practitioners, unfamiliar with the Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) framework developed by Prizant, Blanc, and others, continue to approach GLPs from a rigid, deficit-based viewpoint. They frame scripting as a failure, gestalt retrieval as disordered, and spontaneous conversation as the only valid goal. Their services are marketed to anxious parents with slogans like, “Will my child ever be conversational?” or “Why won’t my child answer questions?” The implication is clear: if a child does not “perform” child correctly—speaking in polished, analytic sentences on demand—then something is wrong that must be corrected.
This marketing preys upon a deep fear: that the child’s authentic communication differences will “ruin” the parent’s vision of what parenthood should look like. Rather than being supported to understand their child's natural developmental path, parents are often coaxed into pursuing normalisation at all costs. And the costs, for GLP children, are heavy indeed. Forced into therapies that misunderstand their very nature, they are taught that their ways of speaking, thinking, and relating are wrong, incomplete, or shameful.
As an autistic GLP and a teacher, I know another truth. When we offer declaratives, when we narrate without demanding, when we embed choices gently into shared experience, we are not delaying development—we are nurturing it. We are meeting children where they are, respecting the integrity of their communication, and building bridges towards authentic expression. Our language may not look like yours. But it is no less rich, no less human, no less worthy of being heard.
Real Examples — Then and Now
My first semester of college remains one of the clearest memories I have of being crushed under the weight of performance demands. Among my required courses was Speech and Debate 101, an absolute terror of a class for a GLP like me. Every lesson was framed as a competition: who could respond fastest, who could argue most fluently, who could construct analytic sentences under pressure. It was not simply the expectation of speaking that overwhelmed me, but the demand to generate language spontaneously, linearly, and without scaffolding. The moment I stood to speak, the scripts I had painstakingly assembled through years of lived experience collapsed under the urgency of the task. I stumbled, stalled, lost my place. I performed poorly, and the failure was immediately attributed not to a mismatch of teaching method and learning style, but to my supposed lack of intelligence—written off as a “dumb jock” mistakenly assigned to an academic course. No one recognised that I was struggling not because I had nothing to say, but because I had not been given the means to say it under those conditions.
Today, as a teacher, I see what becomes possible when students are not forced into that same performance trap. One of my students, whom I will call Melody, showed me this with extraordinary clarity. Melody is a gifted artist, but traditional classroom interactions often left her overwhelmed and withdrawn. She struggled with direct questioning and open-ended discussions, frequently scripting or retreating into silence when pressed to “participate.” Rather than pushing her to perform conversations she was not yet ready to navigate, we allowed her to lead with her strengths. Melody began building her language around her artwork—first describing her materials, then her process, and eventually assembling scripts that grew into coherent, meaningful narratives about her creative choices. As she prepared for an on-campus art gallery showing, her excitement became tangible. She was able to script introductions, explain her pieces, and engage with visitors in a way that felt authentic, not forced. Her pride was unmistakable: she was not pretending to be “normal;” she was communicating naturally, richly, and with purpose. For the first time, she could see a future for herself in the arts, not despite her way of communicating, but because it was finally allowed to unfold on its own terms.
Experiences like these are not anomalies; they are evidence. Michael Tomasello’s work on language acquisition underscores what we who are GLPs have always known intuitively: that language is fundamentally a social and intentional act, not a mechanical performance of isolated skills. Language develops through meaningful participation in shared activities, through the gradual layering of experience and intention into expressive form. Likewise, scholars such as Barbara Rogoff have demonstrated that true cognitive and communicative development occurs through guided participation, not rote rehearsal. Melody’s journey—and my own—validate these frameworks. We do not fail when we are supported relationally rather than judged performatively. We flourish.
The difference lies not in our ability to learn, but in whether the world is willing to meet us where we are.
What We Wish You Understood
What we wish you understood is simple, though it seems to sit persistently out of reach for many systems and practitioners: we are not deficient. We are processing differently. Our communication is not broken; it is layered, relational, and deeply rooted in meaning-making that unfolds over time, not through immediate performance. When we are given space to build language through shared experiences, through emotional scaffolding, through embedded routines, we grow. We connect. We find our voices—not the voices others try to force upon us, but the ones that are truly ours.
We thrive in environments where language is offered, not demanded; where communication is framed as an act of shared presence, not interrogation. Declaratives, commentary, embedded choices—these are not lesser forms of communication. They are bridges, grounding us in trust and possibility. It is within these spaces of joint attention, of mutual narrative-building, that we develop our deepest fluency. Jerome Bruner’s work makes this clear: human learning, including language learning, is fundamentally embedded in cultural and relational formats. It is through the repetition of shared stories, rituals, and experiences that we internalise the tools of thought and expression. Likewise, Tomasello’s research affirms that language arises most robustly when it is social and intentional—when it grows out of the genuine needs and desires to connect, rather than the demands to perform.
It is not lost on me that much of the most humane and relational work on sociocultural development has historically emerged not from the centres of Western psychological orthodoxy, but from the margins—the Global South, post-Soviet scholars, and cross-cultural researchers who were less entangled in the eugenic and racist legacies that shaped so much of American developmental science. Perhaps it is no coincidence that where collaboration and collective meaning-making were valued over individualistic performance, richer models of language acquisition were allowed to flourish. In traditions less obsessed with normalisation and standardisation, there was more space to observe how diverse minds, including ours, naturally build language.
As a GLP, as a teacher, as a human being, I am asking for a shift in perspective. Do not see our differences as failures to meet your benchmarks. Understand that we are learning, building, and communicating within our own natural frameworks. Meet us there. It is not we who must be remade. It is your understanding that must expand.
Final thoughts …
In the United States today, when a child receives an autism diagnosis, it often triggers an immediate and overwhelming cascade of referrals: to speech-language therapy, occupational therapy, behaviour therapy, and a host of expensive interventions. Parents, often already frightened by the diagnostic process, are encouraged to believe that immediate and intensive therapy is the only path to hope. Yet missing from this pathway is a crucial piece of understanding: the majority of autistic children are gestalt language processors. And the majority of American speech-language pathologists have never been meaningfully trained to recognise or support GLPs.
This presents a profound and painful contradiction. Children are referred to therapy under the assumption that they will be taught to communicate more effectively. Instead, too often, they are forced into environments where their natural language development is misunderstood as disordered, where scripting is pathologised, where the demand for analytic performance erases the validity of their actual communicative strengths. They are not scaffolded; they are remediated. They are not invited to build meaning; they are trained to perform output.
What needs to change is not our way of building language. What needs to change is the system’s expectation—and the knowledge base of the professionals tasked with supporting us. Language does not grow through interrogation or compliance. It grows through connection, shared experience, and respect for the diverse paths human development can take.
This article is not just a personal reflection; it is an awareness exercise. It is written for those who are willing to listen differently—to educators, to clinicians, to parents, to policymakers. It is written to remind us that when a child’s communication is met with pressure to perform rather than an invitation to connect, we lose something far greater than time or efficiency. We lose trust. We lose authenticity. And we lose the chance to truly understand each other.
I am not a broken speaker. I am a whole person, building and living language through relationship, resonance, and meaning. And so are the students I teach, and the children whose futures are too often decided by systems that have yet to learn how to hear them.
We are not here to perform.
We are here to connect.
If you are willing to meet us where we are, you will find that we have always been speaking.
You only need to listen differently.