Monotropism 2.0: Reframing Autism from the Inside Out
Why the DSM—and the psychology behind it—is incapable of explaining what autism actually is.
We’re coming out swinging today—I have a difficult question for you.
What exactly is autism?
And to be clear, I’m not asking what it looks like. I’m asking what it is.
If you’re not sure, that’s okay. None of us quite know—not fully. Not even the world’s leading researchers. The science isn’t settled, because the science just isn’t there yet. Not where it needs to be, at any rate.
What we currently have instead are diagnostic frameworks—checklists of behaviors filtered through a clinical lens, shaped more by social expectations than neurological insight. They tell us how autism deviates from the norm, but not what it actually is.
So, here’s my best working definition. It’s not clinical. It’s not peer-reviewed. But it’s grounded in lived experience, deep cognitive modeling, and years of reflecting with other autistic people on what actually fits:
Autism is a distinct cognitive structure characterized by inside-out processing, monotropic attentional flow, and recursive depth of engagement.
Autistic cognition builds meaning through internally anchored relevance and sustained focus, prioritizing depth and coherence over breadth and behavioral conformity.
Rather than representing a deviation from typical development, autism reflects a valid and coherent neurological framework—frequently mischaracterized because it functions in ways not widely understood.
Did your eyes glaze over? I know—this definition is complex. That’s not incidental.
Autism is complex.
Not in the sense of being confusing or chaotic—but in the sense of being internally structured, multilayered, and often invisible to those who aren’t living it from the inside out.
And that’s exactly what deficit-based pathology—like the kind embedded in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)—fails to capture.
Instead of engaging with the structure of autistic cognition, deficit-based pathology flattens it. It tries to fit an entire neurotype into a mold shaped by neurotypical expectations. It reduces a valid system of thought to a list of behavioral deviations. And in doing so, it mistakes difference for disorder.
That’s why framing autism in terms of processing architecture and cognitive structure matters.
Not because complexity makes it harder to define, but because complexity is part of what makes it real.
It’s part of what makes it ours.
The truth is, the best deficit-based models can do is describe what autism looks like to an outside observer.
Every official definition—clinical or otherwise—stops there. They don’t explain what autism is. They just describe how autistic people appear when measured against a norm we didn’t choose.
And that might be understandable, to a point—we still don’t know nearly enough about what autism actually is. But the real problem isn’t the uncertainty. The problem is what fills that gap: deficit-based assumptions built on perceived difference, not functional understanding.
Instead of asking how autistic cognition works, diagnostic models like the DSM ask how far it deviates from what’s considered typical. They treat perceived deficit as a substitute for actual definition. That baseline—the so-called “norm”—is treated as objective, when it’s often arbitrary. Socially constructed. Polytropically biased.
The DSM classifies autism as a neurological condition, but it has no framework for describing neurological function. It cannot define how the autistic brain works—only how autistic people behave when compared to neurotypical expectations. Its criteria are behavioral, not structural. Diagnostic, not explanatory. It observes the surface and calls it the core.
What’s worse, it frames those surface observations as if they were intrinsic traits of autism itself. Sensory aversion. Social awkwardness. Repetitive behavior. But these are not autism. They are individual outcomes of autistic cognition developing under incompatible conditions. They are reflections of a system responding to friction—of people adapting to a world not built for their kind of clarity.
Autism is not defined by these traits. These traits are what emerge when autistic structure meets neurotypical infrastructure.
And defining autism by that collision? That’s not science.
That’s behavioral impressionism dressed up as diagnostic certainty.
And it’s not good enough.
Enter monotropism
Monotropism is a cognitive theory of autism that offers an entirely different foundation.
Developed by actually autistic researchers—Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser—this theory proposes that autistic people tend to process the world through a “monotropic” attention tunnel. Focus isn’t scattered—it’s channeled. Sustained. Constructed around internally anchored relevance.
This model doesn’t just offer a better explanation. It offers something shockingly accurate.
For the first time, many autistic people found through monotropism a theory that actually reflected them.
But like any theory emerging into a system that still sees autism through an external lens, it was interpreted in familiar terms.
Traditionally, monotropism has been framed as a kind of “bottom-up” processing.
Meaning starts at the sensory level and builds from there. And that framing made sense—at least on the surface.
But it’s still missing something. Perspective.
Why “bottom-up” misses the point
“Bottom-up” still centers the wrong perspective.
It implies a reactive construction of meaning from raw inputs—like autistic minds are constantly piecing together external stimuli just to stay afloat. That’s not what it feels like. And more importantly, that’s not what it is.
Autistic thought doesn’t build from the bottom—it radiates.
It expands from an internally stabilized core. Meaning begins at the center—rooted in clarity, precision, and deep relevance—and spreads outward in waves of cognitive construction.
That’s not bottom-up. That’s inside-out.
Inside-out: a better frame for autistic cognition
Inside-out processing doesn’t just feel more accurate—it corrects the distortion in how autistic minds are typically seen.
It helps shift the framing from deficit to structure.
When you understand autistic thought as an inside-out process, you stop asking why we don’t pick up every passing social cue or follow every thread of conversation. You start asking what we’re already building inside, and how everything else might align with—or disrupt—that process.
You start seeing autistic cognition as deliberate, internally driven, and meaningfully constructed—not chaotic, delayed, or deficient.
And when you see it that way, you start asking better questions.
Monotropic Expansion: a new model for how autistic minds work
Inside-out processing became the cornerstone of my own model: Monotropic Expansion.
It’s not a rejection of monotropism—it’s a development. A structural evolution. A way of mapping how monotropic cognition expands from a single node of focus, moves through recursive cycles of relevance-building, and develops inertia over time.
Monotropic Expansion accounts for things like:
Cognitive inertia as a structural state, not a motivational flaw
Recursive depth as a mechanism for insight, not overthinking
Anchoring as a form of stabilization, not rigidity
And meaning construction as a deliberate system, not an accidental side effect
This model has the potential to reshape how we support autistic people.
It can help explain the invisible patterns behind burnout, masking, sensory overwhelm, and late realization.
It even has implications for how we understand intelligence, focus, and learning—across the board.
But maybe most importantly, it offers a foundation built from the inside—not imposed from the outside.
Why this work matters
My goal in developing Monotropic Expansion isn’t just to refine a theory.
It’s to offer something that can help. To dismantle the deficit narrative.
To give autistic people the tools—and the language—to understand their minds and advocate for what they need.
Because the truth is: autistic people aren’t broken.
We’re not missing pieces.
We’re just structured differently.
And we deserve the same shot at clarity, accommodation, and self-worth as anyone else.
One of my primary goals for this Substack is to share—and invite participation in—the ongoing development of this model.
Monotropic Expansion isn’t meant to stand apart from the community it’s built on. It reflects years of personal insight, but it also draws deeply from the lived experiences and shared language of actually autistic people. My hope is that it continues to evolve through that same kind of collective clarity.
In the coming posts, I’ll be exploring individual components of the model in more detail—ideas like cognitive inertia, relevance anchoring, recursive insight, and the broader implications of inside-out processing. If any of this resonates with you, or challenges something you’ve long held, that’s exactly the kind of reflection this work is meant to support.
It’s time we stop letting outside observers define what autism means.
We’re not deviations from some imagined norm—we’re people, and we deserve to be understood on our own terms. ∞
This is wonderful, Michael. "Autism is not defined by these traits. These traits are what emerge when autistic structure meets neurotypical infrastructure." The only time I felt there was ever anything different with my son (who is awaiting ASD assessment) was when we spent time with other mothers and babies. There is intuitively, when he and I interact, a shared understanding. A language, if you like, even though there are no words. It is a way of experiencing the world that has an absolute sense and logic to it, it is only in comparison to the norm that the *something* emerges.