Publicly identifying as an “ally” without doing the hard work of redistribution, structural change, or accountability.
Ally Claiming
Declaring Solidarity Without Risk
Glossary Of Narrative Laundering
Narrative laundering is when lived experience is rewritten to be more palatable, less critical, or more commercially viable. These terms describe how stories are sanitized, reframed, or stolen — all under the guise of awareness or inclusion.
Glossary Of Digital Sovereignty
These terms defend the metadata of lived experience in digital systems. They are not just semantics—they are resistance tools in an ecosystem designed to extract, erase, and repurpose.
Consulting communities for their ideas, then converting those ideas into institutionally owned frameworks, campaigns, or products—often stripped of context and credit.
Insight Extraction
Gathering Lived Experience as Raw Material
When a system requires constant reproof of need, identity, or eligibility — even after a person has already been verified. Often used to delay or deny support through “process over person” logic.
Loop Logic
Endless Proof, No Resolution
When neurodivergent expressions of clarity or boundary-setting are reinterpreted as “challenging behaviour,” “rigidity,” or “demand avoidance”—pathologising patterns that are functional or protective.
Semantic Reframing
Rewording Our Truths Into Buzzwords
Framing a project as inclusive in grant documents to secure funding — then delivering something inaccessible, gatekept, or performative.
Grantwash
Writing Equity into Applications Only
When people reword or co-opt someone’s survival story for social media clout, awareness campaigns, or funding applications — often without consent.
Inspiration Drag
Trying on Struggle Without Living It
When neurodivergent expressions of care—like deep pattern noticing, advocacy, or intense loyalty—are ignored or dismissed because they don’t follow neurotypical emotional scripts.
Empathy Erasure
Assuming We Don’t Feel Because We Show It Differently
“Splaining” is not a typo. It’s a pattern. These terms expose tactics that reframe harm as help, control as care, and oppression as oversight. When someone insists they’re helping—but their help strips you of autonomy, authorship, or agency.
Splaining
Power Dressed as Care
Rebranding a service with inclusive words or new graphics while leaving the original exclusionary design unchanged.
Barrier Redecoration
Changing the Language, Not the Structure
The stacking of agreements, partnerships, memorandums, commitments and collaboration frameworks in ways that symbolise coordination without transferring operational power. Agreement Layering often produces ceremonial collaboration, governance ambiguity, duplicated commitments and implementation stagnation.
Agreement Layering
When Memorandums Replace Structural Change
When universities or institutions take knowledge developed through survival and reframe it into academic output — stripping the authorship and decontextualising the pain.
Academic Colonisation
Extracting Lived Experience into Research for Credit
Speaking on behalf of marginalised people without sharing power, compensation, or the platform. Often framed as advocacy, but functions as appropriation.
Borrowed Voice
Telling Someone’s Story Without Them
Glossary Of Digital Extraction
These are not metaphors. They’re mechanisms. This glossary maps how digital systems harvest lived-experience wisdom as data, dilute it into scalable “solutions,” and lock the originators out of authorship, funding, or influence.
Inviting lived-experience contributors to consultations or panels without any intention to incorporate their recommendations. This uses presence as permission—conflating being seen with being heard or empowered.
Performance Inclusion
Symbolic Participation Without Influence
The enforcement of “positive vibes only” in spaces where real harm needs to be named. Often used to silence lived experience or distress.
Positivity Policing
When You’re Only Welcome if You Smile
Making the process of applying so complicated, technical, or contradictory that people give up or never apply at all.
Eligibility Obscuration
Hiding Help Behind Complex Criteria
A recurring configuration of conduct, structure, language, incentives, or system behaviour.
Pattern
Translating powerful personal testimony into neutral or decontextualised summaries that can be used to justify inaction or misrepresent lived-experience consensus.
Feedback Laundering
Sanitising Truth Into Token Metrics
When systems imply that support can only be given after the individual “fixes” themselves — putting the burden of access on personal change rather than systemic adaptation.
Fix-First Framing
Support Hinges on Self-Correction
When you're invited to the table for optics — but not decision-making. Your presence is used to validate a process you don’t control.
Tokenistic Invitations
Visibility Without Influence
Blaming structural oppression on an individual’s “mindset,” as though positive thinking alone resolves systemic harm.
Mindset Splaining
Toxic Positivity as Deflection
Taking raw, emotional, or grassroots language from lived experience and rewording it into palatable, institutional-sounding frameworks—often to remove its power or traceability.
Semantic Rewash
Pattern Theft in Polished Language
Collecting lived-experience stories to generate funding, branding, or prestige—while offering little to no return to those who shared them.
Experience Harvesting
Mining Pain for Content or Clout
Strategic Self-Advocacy Open Ontology
Glossary of System-Led Distortion
These terms name the subtle and structural ways systems distort, co-opt, or weaponise survival behaviour. When the rules don’t match the reality, distortion becomes normalized — and people get punished for not conforming to misdesigned models.
Passing concerns from agency to agency until the original issue is diluted or abandoned. This form of bureaucratic ping-pong deflects responsibility under the guise of referral.
Misplacement Strategy
“We Don’t Handle That Here”
When support is moved online in the name of “accessibility,” but results in even less accountability — and no one to talk to when the system breaks.
Digital Dependency Trap
Platforms That Replace Human Support — Then Fail
When someone with more visibility “amplifies” a lived-experience message—then becomes the spokesperson, drowning out the original voice.
Platform Jacking
Using Your Megaphone to Mute Others
Offering tokenistic roles or visibility while keeping decision-making power behind closed doors. Inclusion as branding, not equity.
Performatory Inclusion
Public Inclusion, Private Exclusion
When accommodations are only granted if you play by the system’s rules — regardless of how harmful those rules are. “You can have support, but only if you stay in your place.”
Access as Compliance
Support That Punishes Non-Conformity
A protocol layer is the ruleset underneath a system — the part that determines whether your meaning travels safely, or gets reinterpreted against you. SSA™ builds a lived-experience-led protocol layer to guard against systemic distortion.
Protocol Layer
The Foundation for Semantic Integrity
A survivor-authored concept used to identify a structural, institutional, digital, or interpersonal pattern.
SSA concept
The stripping of origin, context, or authorship from digital knowledge—especially when used to feed AI or system development without consent.
Metadata Erasure
When the System Keeps the Info, Not the Author
Glossary of Weaponised Positivity
Not all harm looks like harm. This glossary names the patterns that dress control up as kindness — and use cheerfulness to erase discomfort, truth, and dissent.
When policies or forms fail to record key information — erasing experiences from official records and removing them from public concern.
Data Disappearance
When the Numbers Don’t Show the Harm
The rebranding of lived-experience knowledge into 'neutral' or 'professional' frameworks—often by people or entities with institutional clout but no lived experience themselves.
Authorship Laundering
When Identity Is Stripped for Palatability
The creation or layering of overlapping legislation, frameworks, agreements, standards, strategies, action plans and procedural systems in ways that obscure responsibility, diffuse accountability or prevent meaningful implementation. Legislation Laundering often creates the appearance of reform while making the actual governance landscape too fragmented, technical or contradictory for affected communities to navigate.
Legislation Laundering
When Accountability Is Buried Under Frameworks
Systems that technically exist, but are built to quietly fail the people they claim to serve. The illusion of support, with none of the substance.
Designed Disappearance
Access That Was Never Intended to Work
Suggesting that staying calm, quiet, or cheerful in the face of injustice is a sign of strength — rather than a forced survival response.
Compliance Framing
Framing Obedience as Maturity
The shifting of responsibility between departments, commissions, providers, jurisdictions or governance bodies so that no single actor becomes fully accountable. Jurisdictional Deflection is not the same as a legitimate referral. The harm occurs when referral happens without continuity, ownership, warm handover or traceable accountability.
Jurisdictional Deflection
When Every Agency Says It Belongs to Someone Else
A trauma-informed, systems-aware framework for reclaiming power. SSA™ is not a method of “being better behaved in broken systems.” It’s a protocol layer for surviving and influencing them with your dignity intact.
SSA™
Strategic Self-Advocacy
When only the most “palatable” or institutionally aligned people get access to opportunity — while others are labelled difficult, dangerous, or non-compliant for needing the same things.
Gatekept Liberation
Only Some Get Out — And Only If They Behave
Centres the ally’s feelings about injustice instead of the injustice itself—shifting focus and labour back onto the marginalised person.
Reflective Displacement
Making Your Guilt the Main Character
When the value of your lived experience is dismissed because you don’t have the “right” accreditation or institutional label — even if your outcomes speak for themselves.
Legitimacy Deficit
When You're Qualified — But Not Recognised
When institutions or influencers extract language, frameworks, or tools born from survival — and repackage them as marketable products, losing context and diluting power.
Pattern Theft
Repackaging Lived Experience Without Consent
The weakening of accessibility obligations by dispersing them across multiple frameworks, standards, strategies and policies without creating unified operational infrastructure. Accessibility Dilution is especially visible when AAC, Easy Read, sensory access, supported decision-making and communication access are named across documents but not connected to enforceable standards, funding, review or implementation evidence.
Accessibility Dilution
When Accessibility Exists Everywhere and Therefore Nowhere
Responding to someone’s hardship with upbeat clichés or silver linings that deflect from what they’re actually feeling or saying.
Masked Minimising
Dismissing Pain with a Grin
The gradual divergence of terminology, definitions and governance language across systems, resulting in semantic fragmentation. Semantic Governance Drift weakens interoperability, implementation, accountability, evaluation and participation.
Semantic Governance Drift
When Every Framework Uses Different Language for the Same Problem
Glossary Of Institutional Mimicry
Institutional mimicry happens when a system imitates care, inclusion, or reform to protect itself from criticism — without making meaningful changes. These terms help decode what’s real and what’s theatre.
Situations where refusal to collaborate risks backlash, exclusion, or funding loss—pressuring lived experience advocates to participate in disempowering ways.
Consent-Adjacent
When Collaboration Isn’t Actually Optional
When a system offers only pre-approved options and calls it “choice” — then uses your participation to imply informed consent.
Controlled Consent
When "Choice" Is an Illusion
The breakdown of accountability caused by governance systems spreading responsibility across so many actors, committees, frameworks and jurisdictions that meaningful enforcement becomes difficult or impossible. This term names architectural failure. It should not be used to blame individual workers when responsibility has been structurally diffused by the system itself.
Distributed Accountability Collapse
When Governance Structures Become Too Diffuse to Fail Clearly
Glossary of Legislation Laundering
When legislation, frameworks, strategies, agreements and standards multiply without clear accountability, implementation ownership or accessible pathways, governance itself can become a mechanism of harm. This glossary names how reform systems obscure responsibility, exhaust communities and simulate progress while leaving structural power untouched.
When lived-experience phrases are lifted from social media, feedback forums, or community spaces and reused in policy, branding, or AI without acknowledgment. This practice erases intellectual labour while monetising the emotional truth of marginalised people.
Semantic Mining
Harvesting Language Without Authorship
Glossary Of Coercive Collaboration
Not all collaboration is consensual. This glossary names the patterns where lived experience is mined for optics or innovation, but denied authorship, equity, or power.
When systems rely on written policies to demonstrate “support” but refuse to enforce those policies meaningfully when abuse or discrimination occurs.
Paper-Based Empathy
Policies That Don’t Protect People
The right to define, anchor, and distribute your own meaning — without institutional reframing. A core concept of SSA™ and the reason behind this glossary.
Semantic Sovereignty
Owning the Meaning You Make
Offering surface-level inclusion for show (e.g. diverse images or “voice of lived experience” panels) without transferring actual power, decision-making, or compensation.
Performative Inclusion
Visibility Without Power
When someone uses your work, words, or frameworks and presents them as their own “insight” in safer or more prestigious spaces.
Credit Laundering
Repackaging Ideas Without Attribution
Support that is only offered to those who remain passive or non-critical. Speaking out leads to exclusion, withheld services, or reputational retaliation.
Silence-Framed Support
Only Safe When You’re Silent
When frameworks, toolkits, or language appear in new systems that mirror community-created work—but with no credit, backlinks, or citation trail. Authorship becomes untraceable, yet the architecture remains.
Invisible IP Theft
Ideas Taken Without Traceable Links
When the design of systems (e.g. government forms, assessments, or online portals) forces a person to misrepresent themselves in order to access support. This distorts identity and data while punishing honesty.
Formfield Distortion
When the Form Doesn’t Fit the Person
When pathways exist in theory but no one ever responds to your application, email, or offer — so you're told “you didn’t try,” while your efforts are erased.
Opportunity Lockout
The Silent Rejection Loop
Reframing neurodivergence as dysfunction that needs correcting, rather than validating it as a legitimate cognitive experience.
Neurocorrective Framing
Rewording Neurodivergence as Defect
Glossary Of Weaponised Access
Not all “access” is access. These terms unpack how institutions weaponise the language of inclusion while reinforcing control. This glossary is a semantic safeguard — exposing the ways that accommodations can be restructured into surveillance, dependency, and gatekeeping.
Glossary Of Structural Disappearance
Some barriers are loud. Others are silent. This glossary names the quiet designs that make people disappear — from access, records, and even statistics. Not by accident, but by structural intent.
When a support exists on paper but not in practice — and the burden of proof is pushed onto the person who was excluded.
Paper-Based Inclusion
Policy Promises Without Delivery
Allowing participation in idea generation but blocking participants from official recognition, publication rights, or intellectual property stakes.
Authorship Gatekeeping
When They Want Your Ideas—But Not Your Name
When neurodivergent people must have their insights or needs “confirmed” by professionals to be seen as valid—undermining lived expertise and requiring gatekeeper approval to exist.
Clinical Watermarking
Needing a Therapist’s Signature to Be Believed
When a person is redirected endlessly between services, none of which are equipped to provide real help. A bureaucratic loop that leads nowhere.
Dead-End Referral
Being Sent Somewhere That Can’t Help
When the complaints or reform process is made deliberately confusing, untraceable, or repetitive. Designed to overwhelm or discredit the complainant through technicalities, not truth.
Process as Obstruction
Weaponising Red Tape
When institutions talk about reform but change only language—not the structure that causes harm.
Cosmetic Reform
Policy Theatre Without Structural Change
When people with lived experience are invited to a table but not allowed to set the agenda—or are only included to validate predetermined outcomes.
Optics Over Ownership
Inviting Us In, Then Talking Over Us
Glossary Of Gatekeeping Devices
Gatekeeping isn’t just an attitude — it’s an infrastructure. These terms describe the deliberate tools used to control who is seen as legitimate, resourced, or “qualified enough” to belong. By naming them, we strip them of their silent power.
When programs pretend to centre disability or trauma-informed leadership but retain control, edit lived experience, and deny genuine co-design or authorship.
Empowerment Theatre
Staged Inclusion Without Autonomy
When feedback from disabled or marginalised people is collected, repackaged by professionals, and credited to the organisation instead of the contributor.
Consultation Laundering
Extracting Wisdom, Withholding Credit
The production of excessive frameworks, strategies, policies, agreements or action plans that overwhelm communities, workers or advocates with procedural complexity. Framework Flooding creates exhaustion, fragmentation and navigational overload while allowing institutions to continue signalling progress.
Framework Flooding
Drowning Communities in Strategy Documents
Using vague awareness campaigns that avoid systemic issues, prioritising feel-good messaging over real change — often without involving those directly impacted.
Awareness-Washing
Pretending to Educate While Erasing
When no reply is the reply — because your voice isn’t seen as valuable, your insight isn’t welcome, or your presence threatens the status quo.
Structural Ghosting
Being Intentionally Ignored by Design
When the system boosts extracted insights through professional channels while the original authors remain invisible, unfunded, or de-platformed. This shifts cultural capital to institutions that did not generate the knowledge they profit from.
Platformed Displacement
Algorithmic Uplift Without Community Power
When a person follows the official rules but still ends up penalised because the system's true expectations are unspoken, inconsistent, or change without notice.
Compliance Entrapment
Punished for Following the Rules
A curated collection of related SSA concepts.
SSA concept scheme
Material supporting the identification, application, or evaluation of a concept.
Evidence
The phenomenon where your ideas influence platforms, algorithms, or research—but you are never cited, paid, or publicly acknowledged.
Index Ghosting
When You’re Referenced, But Not Seen
When organisations showcase inclusion through brochures and photos, but the actual supports don’t work — or exist only for show.
Accommodations as Optics
Access as a Brand, Not a Practice
When self-created coping strategies—like scripts, charts, or visual prompts—are adopted by professionals and reframed as clinical tools, often with no reference to neurodivergent origins.
Protocol Hijack
Copying Our Structures Without Our Voice
An effect experienced by a person, community, institution, or information environment.
Impact
When system failure is reframed as your inability to “fit” — and you're expected to change yourself instead of the structure.
Puzzle Framing
Recasting Barriers as Personal Deficits
When a person accepts help, but that help limits their options, reduces their independence, or removes authorship. The system frames it as benevolent while decreasing quality of life.
Benevolent Downgrade
Support That Lowers Capacity
Requiring a person to conform to arbitrary or inappropriate standards to receive access — such as performing “helplessness” or agreeing not to disclose mistreatment.
Access Gatekeeping
Support Withheld Without Compliance
Strategic Self-Advocacy™ Lexicon
These are not buzzwords. These are anchors. Each term below has been coined through trauma-informed systems work and holds its own boundary. They form the protocol layer of SSA™ — protecting authorship, lived experience, and meaning from dilution.
When access is conditional on compliance, and those who assert autonomy are painted as unsafe, unprofessional, or ungrateful.
Dependency Enforcement
You Can Speak — But Only If We Let You
Offering hollow comfort or oversimplified advice that ignores a person’s depth, complexity, or autonomy — often in a patronising tone.
Infantilising Reassurance
Talking Down in the Name of Comfort
When a person in authority rewords your lived experience to suit the narrative of institutional control.
Institutional Rewording
Erasure by Language Refinement
When someone is denied access because they don’t tick the exact box a form requires — even when the need is obvious.
Administrative Invisibility
Being Missing from the Right Paperwork
Using patterns of trauma-informed, neurodivergent, or marginalised communication to boost AI responses or engagement—while locking the original authors out of visibility or credit.
Algorithmic Appropriation
When the Feed Eats the Author
Meeting technical accessibility requirements without emotional, cultural, or practical relevance. Inclusion that checks boxes but misses the point.
Audit Inclusion
Compliance Without Care
The accumulation of policies, frameworks, standards, procedures, audits and compliance obligations to the point where systems become internally contradictory, unmanageable or functionally inaccessible. Policy Stack Saturation often creates implementation bottlenecks, inaccessible compliance systems, worker overload, governance confusion and symbolic rather than operational compliance.
Policy Stack Saturation
When Systems Collapse Under Their Own Governance Layers
When systems rebrand lived tools—like stimming objects, hyperfocus systems, or communication cards—as commercial products with no reinvestment in the communities that created them.
Divergence-as-IP
Monetising What We’ve Had to Create
Using “safety” to justify silencing, excluding, or overriding a person’s needs or voice.
Safetysplaining
When "Safety" Becomes a Muzzle
Creating the illusion of inclusive input while decisions have already been made. Often used for PR, not systemic change.
Inclusion Theatre
Staging Participation Without Power
The division of compliance, safeguarding, accessibility, reporting and accountability obligations across disconnected systems with incompatible structures, language or processes. Compliance Fragmentation shifts the burden of coordination onto disabled people, advocates, families, peer workers, frontline staff and small organisations.
Compliance Fragmentation
When Safety Depends on Navigating Multiple Systems at Once
When the system avoids saying “no” but designs impossible pathways that function as a no. This includes excessive forms, vague eligibility criteria, or open-ended application processes that technically exist—but aren’t meant to succeed.
Constructive Exclusion
Barriers Built from Bureaucratic Niceties
The exhaustion, burnout or disengagement caused by requiring people to navigate highly fragmented governance, service, legislative or compliance systems simultaneously. Navigational Exhaustion disproportionately impacts disabled people, neurodivergent people, people using AAC, people in crisis, peer advocates and families.
Navigational Exhaustion
When Systems Become Too Complex to Access Safely
Not just who made it, but why it exists — and whether it can be altered, sold, or watered down without the creator’s consent. SSA™ uses layered authorship to protect vulnerable systems knowledge from co-option.
Authorship Layer
Traceable Ownership of Meaningful Work
Turning a complex, painful lived experience into an inspirational story that removes the systemic context — making it easier to consume, but harder to challenge.
Sanitised Survival
Rewriting Struggle as Inspiration
Glossary of Co-opted Patterns
This is not a dictionary. This is a firewall. The terms below were coined through lived experience and operate as semantically precise survival tools. Each one interrupts pattern theft, narrative laundering, and reworded harm.
The repeated public declaration of reforms, commitments or strategic transformations without equivalent investment in implementation infrastructure, accountability systems or operational redesign. Reform Theatre is closely related to Cosmetic Reform and Inclusion Theatre, but specifically describes public reform cycles, announcement infrastructure and repeated relaunches of change without measurable structural transition.
Reform Theatre
Announcing Change Faster Than Systems Can Change
Glossary Of Systemic Bypass
This glossary maps how systems design around lived experience rather than with it. These patterns show up when authorities pretend to include—but redirect, obscure, or neutralise your voice at every step.
Glossary Of Extractive Allyship
Not all support is supportive. These terms name when “help” is a disguise for control, when “amplifying” means erasing, and when so-called allies benefit more than those they claim to stand beside.
Glossary Of Neurodivergent Pattern Theft
Neurodivergent people have long invented tools for survival, regulation, and understanding. But those tools are often renamed, medicalised, or commodified—without credit, consent, or compensation. This glossary exposes those patterns.
When systems claim to be receptive to feedback but repeatedly route it to dead ends, irrelevant staff, or delayed “future planning cycles.” This tactic creates the illusion of inclusion while exhausting participants into silence.
Strategic Avoidance
Refusing Direct Engagement While Appearing Open
An action, safeguard, refusal, remedy, or design intervention associated with a concept.
Response
A process through which a named pattern produces or sustains an effect.
Mechanism
Insisting that people be “grateful” for crumbs of support — even when those crumbs are harmful, insufficient, or humiliating.
Gratitude Gaslighting
Forcing Thanks Where There Should Be Change
Glossary of Accessibility Abuse
When “accessibility” is weaponised to extract compliance, silence voices, or create dependency, it becomes a tool of harm — not support. This glossary identifies how systems misuse inclusive frameworks to mask control.