Mind Over Manner Brings Theatre-Based Neurodiversity Workshops to the Eastern Bay

Mind Over Manner is challenging the negative assumptions often placed on neurodivergent behaviour, encouraging people to look beyond what they see and understand the experiences, strengths and needs behind it.

Founder and workshop director Susan Huldane said the programme grew from her own experience as a mother trying to understand her neurodivergent child.

“I didn’t know what to do next,” she said.

With a background in using theatre to create conversations in settings including prisons, medicine, law and the military, she saw an opportunity to use performance to help people understand what can sit underneath behaviour.

“Theatre is a conduit,” she said.

“You get a voice saying how it really is.”

Professional actors portray situations drawn from lived experience, showing audiences what anxiety, sensory overload and confusion can look and feel like from the inside.

The aim is to replace judgement with curiosity.

A child throwing something, for example, might not be trying to cause trouble.

They could be responding to an overwhelming sound, smell, light or other sensory trigger.

“If you just out of the blue see someone throwing something, you're going, ‘That person's attention seeking’, when in fact they are actually reacting to a trigger,” Huldane said.

“It takes out the judgement.”

The workshops explore different sensory responses, including highly sensitive people, those who under-respond to stimuli and “sensory seekers” who need more movement, noise or intensity.

Huldane said understanding those differences can also change how people see strengths.

“It's recognising everybody's 100%, and all of us bring something to the worlds that we live in.”

An example of the theatre-based workshops showing how a neurodiverse brain may react to a situation. VIDEO // Mind Over Manner

The workshops are aimed at much more than parents.

Kaiako, health and wellbeing workers, social services, iwi organisations, youth workers and anyone who comes into contact with young people are encouraged to attend.

“The whānau can't do it on their own,” she said.

“The educators, the kaiako, can't do it on their own either.”

She said that shared understanding can help create a culture of collective care, where young people are supported rather than blamed, and where parents are not left carrying the burden alone.

“One of the most helpful things for me was that moment when someone goes alongside my child and engages with them, connects with them.”

The workshops also draw on Te Ao Māori perspectives and challenge the idea that there is one definition of “normal”.

Huldane said characteristics that can appear difficult in a classroom may have value in other environments, from heightened hearing and observation to strong spatial awareness and a need for movement.

She asks the community to listen before judging.

“We need to get curious and listen and hear them, because they've got something to say about the world we live in.”

“If you're curious, come along,” Huldane said.

“You’re all very welcome.”

She said the invitation is ultimately to reconsider what we think we are seeing when a young person is struggling.

Sometimes, behaviour is not the problem, "sometimes, it is the message."