The Shape of Recursion
Autism, trauma, and the structural relationships between coexisting conditions
I’ve spent years now trying to understand the patterns that shape how I think, how I experience, how I respond.
And one of the clearest structural truths I keep coming back to is that recursion—the process of returning to a thought or sensory-emotional thread to deepen it, align it, resolve it—isn’t just a tendency in my cognition. It’s foundational. Recursion is how thought stabilizes. How emotion integrates with meaning. How action finds clarity.
Take that loop away, and everything begins to fragment.
And this led me to a deeper question: what happens when that loop is disrupted—especially by conditions that are commonly described as overlapping, coexisting, comorbid. People talk about combinations like autism and ADHD, autism and OCD, or autism and synesthesia as if they’re simply coexisting traits within a person. But that framing carries the implicit assumption that the underlying cognitive structure is the same regardless of how those traits present.
I don’t believe it is.
What I’m describing here is based on a cognitive framework I’ve been developing called Monotropic Expansion. It builds on the established theory of monotropism, which is increasingly recognized as one of the most accurate models of autistic cognition. In its original form, monotropism describes a mind oriented toward depth over breadth—one that processes experience by narrowing focus around a few powerful interests, rather than spreading attention across many simultaneous inputs. It’s a solid starting point. But what I’ve come to understand through lived experience and structural modeling is that the narrowing of attention isn’t the whole story. It’s what happens inside that narrowed focus—the way thoughts build, loop, and return—that actually gives the system its shape.
By the way—and for the sake of full transparency—when I refer to autism in what follows—in any of my writing, really—understand that I’m doing so with the explicit assumption that autism is, at its core, a manifestation of monotropic cognition. And no, that view isn’t universally accepted—yet. But it’s where the most coherent, lived-experience-informed research is heading. The only thing still holding that consensus back is the inertia of deficit-based psychology, which continues to define autism by how it deviates from neurotypical behavior rather than how it structurally functions. I’ve written at length about the flaws in that legacy framework, so I won’t rehash it all in this post—but this assumption will shape everything that follows.
In Monotropic Expansion, I treat recursion as a key internal mechanism of autistic cognition. The autistic mind doesn’t just fixate—it loops. It revisits. It refines. Meaning is built through recursive return, not convergence. And that has significant implications. If a mind is recursive by default, then traits like ADHD, OCD, or synesthesia don’t just stack onto that system the way they might in a so-called “neurotypical” mind—a mind structured for rapid-switching, externally driven, broad-spectrum input. They interact. They alter flow. What might look like distractibility or impulsivity in a neurotypical system can instead create recursive fracture in an autistic one. The loop tries to form—and breaks. Thought doesn’t wander; it misfires. And when the recursive loop becomes unstable, cognition itself begins to fragment. The same trait, in a different architecture, leads to a completely different internal experience—not just in expression, but in structure.
ADHD traits in a neurotypical system might express as scattered attention, novelty-seeking, or difficulty regulating impulse. But in an autistic system, those same traits don’t just cause distraction—they interrupt the recursive loop. Thought doesn’t just wander. It fractures. The mind tries to return, to deepen, to complete a loop—and is pulled out of it before the pattern resolves. It isn’t a lack of focus—it’s a structural mismatch between the need to stay and the demand to switch.
OCD traits can present similarly. In an autistic mind, the recursive loop is already active by default. Trauma or stress can then push that loop into overdrive, creating compulsive patterns that don’t just revisit an idea, but trap it. A check becomes a recheck. Then a system of checks. Not because the mind craves order, but because the loop—the very thing it needs to trust—feels unsafe. It grips the loop tighter, hoping that through enough repetitions, it might finally stabilize.
Even a condition like synesthesia, often described as a cross-sensory blending, interacts differently with recursion. I experience persistent overlap between language, sound, texture, and emotional tone. And when my recursive process is intact, that overlap brings clarity—it helps ideas take shape through resonance. But when trauma disrupts that process, the feedback loops become distorted. The blend becomes noise. What was once grounding starts to destabilize.
Trauma doesn’t just make recursion difficult—it can teach the system to reject it altogether. That’s what I’ve felt. I experience attentional expansion, but I prune hard when loops feel unsafe or unresolved. I have compulsive checking tendencies when internal alignment feels off. And I experience language and affect as deeply entangled—sometimes beautifully, sometimes overwhelmingly. I’ve seen how trauma reshapes those processes not by removing them, but by teaching the mind that return itself is dangerous. A child who fixates on a question and is repeatedly punished for “not letting it go” learns not to trust the loop. They don’t stop looping—they start flinching away from it. Focus doesn’t dissolve—it reroutes.
The system tries to protect itself from its own architecture.
Sometimes that protection takes the form of constant switching. Sometimes it becomes grip. Sometimes it just feels like losing access to a way of thinking that used to feel whole. And the more I look at it, the more I believe that many of the behaviors labeled as inattentive, obsessive, or disorganized may actually be the visible effects of recursive trauma—an internal loop either avoided, overloaded, or distorted because returning to it has, at some point, become unsafe.
These are the expressions I know firsthand. To be clear, I’m not mapping a universal theory. I’m tracing a structure that feels consistent and naming what I believe is an overlooked pattern: that in autistic minds, traits often seen as separate conditions don’t just coexist—they interact. And that interaction changes not just the behavior, but the architecture.
That has implications. It suggests we can’t keep treating overlapping neurodivergent traits as modular. It suggests we may be misreading survival strategies as dysfunction. And it suggests that approaches built for neurotypical systems may not just fail neurodivergent ones—they may cause deeper recursive harm.
I don’t have a full model yet, but this feels like part of it. Naming recursion—and how it adapts, fractures, and rebuilds—isn’t just an academic exercise. It’s a way to honor how cognition actually works for people like me. And maybe, for people like you, too.
I welcome input—from clinicians, researchers, fellow pattern-mappers, or anyone who sees some part of themselves in this. This is where I’m at. This matters. Let’s talk about it. ∞
I'm finding the same with dealing with a romantic breakup that happened a couple of months ago. I keep circling round and round the events of the relationship, journalling every day, about 50,000 words so far, writing poems, song lyrics, even a constantly edited allegorical short story, all trying to make sense of what happened. My take on it is constantly evolving as the weeks pass. I try not to talk to friends and family about it, as I can see they are thinking that I should just let it go, but my mind hangs on, not I think out of desperation, but because it wants to form a coherent theory about why it happened as it did. I find AI useful, talking into the app, seeing how the algorithm summarises and comments on what I am thinking. At least it never gets bored. Maybe once I land on an explanation that convinces me I will be able to move on, I don't know. But you are right about autistic brains spiralling around an anchor point, at least that is my experience.
Fellow pattern mapper here. I am experiencing this first hand with the processing of a shifted dynamic in an inner personal relationship. As I navigate the recursion, I am met with concern from friends and loved ones. "Don't let it consume you." To which I reply, that's exactly what I need to do. So long as I am able to continue engaging with other areas of my life, I see it as harmless at least, if not an integral part of gleaning every morsel of what needs to be gleaned.
As I have allowed myself to return to the loop as many times as I need to, giving grace and honoring the process, I have found that I not only feel more free to engage other areas of my life, but that the wealth of understanding that comes from the recursion is informing those areas as well.
This is not a process I am new to, but one that can often get blocked, as mentioned. The element that I am so interested in most recently, is becoming more sensitive to detecting when I need to shift a dynamic to allow for the recursion to happen more seamlessly.
My notes app has over a dozen notes. My journal is full of ink scribbled pages; all saying the same thing but slightly different. In a classic DSM model, this is obsession. But as I scan the contents of each piece, I recognize the brilliance in approaching the same scenario using different language/rhetoric. Not only does this allow me to practice expressing my thoughts for different audiences if need be, it also adds important details to the map, filling in gaps and contributing the overall idea of interconnectivity.
Well timed article per usual. God speeeeed.