Experience Harvesting
Collecting lived-experience stories to generate funding, branding, or prestige—while offering little to no return to those who shared them.
Mining Pain for Content or Clout
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.
Ally Claiming
Publicly identifying as an “ally” without doing the hard work of redistribution, structural change, or accountability.
Declaring Solidarity Without Risk
Masked Minimising
Responding to someone’s hardship with upbeat clichés or silver linings that deflect from what they’re actually feeling or saying.
Dismissing Pain with a Grin
Distributed Accountability Collapse
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.
When Governance Structures Become Too Diffuse to Fail Clearly
Clinical Watermarking
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.
Needing a Therapist’s Signature to Be Believed
Infantilising Reassurance
Offering hollow comfort or oversimplified advice that ignores a person’s depth, complexity, or autonomy — often in a patronising tone.
Talking Down in the Name of Comfort
Sanitised Survival
Turning a complex, painful lived experience into an inspirational story that removes the systemic context — making it easier to consume, but harder to challenge.
Rewriting Struggle as Inspiration
Policy Stack Saturation
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.
When Systems Collapse Under Their Own Governance Layers
Reflective Displacement
Centres the ally’s feelings about injustice instead of the injustice itself—shifting focus and labour back onto the marginalised person.
Making Your Guilt the Main Character
Mechanism
A process through which a named pattern produces or sustains an effect.
Semantic Governance Drift
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.
When Every Framework Uses Different Language for the Same Problem
Compliance Entrapment
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.
Punished for Following the Rules
Neurocorrective Framing
Reframing neurodivergence as dysfunction that needs correcting, rather than validating it as a legitimate cognitive experience.
Rewording Neurodivergence as Defect
Benevolent Downgrade
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.
Support That Lowers Capacity
Algorithmic Appropriation
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.
When the Feed Eats the Author
Dead-End Referral
When a person is redirected endlessly between services, none of which are equipped to provide real help. A bureaucratic loop that leads nowhere.
Being Sent Somewhere That Can’t Help
Semantic Sovereignty
The right to define, anchor, and distribute your own meaning — without institutional reframing. A core concept of SSA™ and the reason behind this glossary.
Owning the Meaning You Make
SSA™
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.
Strategic Self-Advocacy
Data Disappearance
When policies or forms fail to record key information — erasing experiences from official records and removing them from public concern.
When the Numbers Don’t Show the Harm
Barrier Redecoration
Rebranding a service with inclusive words or new graphics while leaving the original exclusionary design unchanged.
Changing the Language, Not the Structure
Digital Dependency Trap
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.
Platforms That Replace Human Support — Then Fail
Gatekept Liberation
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.
Only Some Get Out — And Only If They Behave
Accessibility Dilution
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.
When Accessibility Exists Everywhere and Therefore Nowhere
Formfield Distortion
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.
When the Form Doesn’t Fit the Person
Splaining
“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.
Power Dressed as Care
Legitimacy Deficit
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.
When You're Qualified — But Not Recognised
Insight Extraction
Consulting communities for their ideas, then converting those ideas into institutionally owned frameworks, campaigns, or products—often stripped of context and credit.
Gathering Lived Experience as Raw Material
Gratitude Gaslighting
Insisting that people be “grateful” for crumbs of support — even when those crumbs are harmful, insufficient, or humiliating.
Forcing Thanks Where There Should Be Change
Optics Over Ownership
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.
Inviting Us In, Then Talking Over Us
Framework Flooding
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.
Drowning Communities in Strategy Documents
Administrative Invisibility
When someone is denied access because they don’t tick the exact box a form requires — even when the need is obvious.
Being Missing from the Right Paperwork
Performatory Inclusion
Offering tokenistic roles or visibility while keeping decision-making power behind closed doors. Inclusion as branding, not equity.
Public Inclusion, Private Exclusion
Empathy Erasure
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.
Assuming We Don’t Feel Because We Show It Differently
Jurisdictional Deflection
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.
When Every Agency Says It Belongs to Someone Else
Semantic Mining
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.
Harvesting Language Without Authorship
Puzzle Framing
When system failure is reframed as your inability to “fit” — and you're expected to change yourself instead of the structure.
Recasting Barriers as Personal Deficits
Tokenistic Invitations
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.
Visibility Without Influence
Semantic Reframing
When neurodivergent expressions of clarity or boundary-setting are reinterpreted as “challenging behaviour,” “rigidity,” or “demand avoidance”—pathologising patterns that are functional or protective.
Rewording Our Truths Into Buzzwords
Reform Theatre
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.
Announcing Change Faster Than Systems Can Change
Consent-Adjacent
Situations where refusal to collaborate risks backlash, exclusion, or funding loss—pressuring lived experience advocates to participate in disempowering ways.
When Collaboration Isn’t Actually Optional
Protocol Layer
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.
The Foundation for Semantic Integrity
Feedback Laundering
Translating powerful personal testimony into neutral or decontextualised summaries that can be used to justify inaction or misrepresent lived-experience consensus.
Sanitising Truth Into Token Metrics
Semantic Rewash
Taking raw, emotional, or grassroots language from lived experience and rewording it into palatable, institutional-sounding frameworks—often to remove its power or traceability.
Pattern Theft in Polished Language
Agreement Layering
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.
When Memorandums Replace Structural Change
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.
Consultation Laundering
When feedback from disabled or marginalised people is collected, repackaged by professionals, and credited to the organisation instead of the contributor.
Extracting Wisdom, Withholding Credit
Performative Inclusion
Offering surface-level inclusion for show (e.g. diverse images or “voice of lived experience” panels) without transferring actual power, decision-making, or compensation.
Visibility Without Power
Access Gatekeeping
Requiring a person to conform to arbitrary or inappropriate standards to receive access — such as performing “helplessness” or agreeing not to disclose mistreatment.
Support Withheld Without Compliance
Fix-First Framing
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.
Support Hinges on Self-Correction
Dependency Enforcement
When access is conditional on compliance, and those who assert autonomy are painted as unsafe, unprofessional, or ungrateful.
You Can Speak — But Only If We Let You
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.
Structural Ghosting
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.
Being Intentionally Ignored by Design
Platformed Displacement
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.
Algorithmic Uplift Without Community Power
Misplacement Strategy
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.
“We Don’t Handle That Here”
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.
Mindset Splaining
Blaming structural oppression on an individual’s “mindset,” as though positive thinking alone resolves systemic harm.
Toxic Positivity as Deflection
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.
Positivity Policing
The enforcement of “positive vibes only” in spaces where real harm needs to be named. Often used to silence lived experience or distress.
When You’re Only Welcome if You Smile
Awareness-Washing
Using vague awareness campaigns that avoid systemic issues, prioritising feel-good messaging over real change — often without involving those directly impacted.
Pretending to Educate While Erasing
Silence-Framed Support
Support that is only offered to those who remain passive or non-critical. Speaking out leads to exclusion, withheld services, or reputational retaliation.
Only Safe When You’re Silent
Metadata Erasure
The stripping of origin, context, or authorship from digital knowledge—especially when used to feed AI or system development without consent.
When the System Keeps the Info, Not the Author
Compliance Framing
Suggesting that staying calm, quiet, or cheerful in the face of injustice is a sign of strength — rather than a forced survival response.
Framing Obedience as Maturity
Grantwash
Framing a project as inclusive in grant documents to secure funding — then delivering something inaccessible, gatekept, or performative.
Writing Equity into Applications Only
Performance Inclusion
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.
Symbolic Participation Without Influence
Evidence
Material supporting the identification, application, or evaluation of a concept.
SSA concept scheme
A curated collection of related SSA concepts.
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.
Authorship Laundering
The rebranding of lived-experience knowledge into 'neutral' or 'professional' frameworks—often by people or entities with institutional clout but no lived experience themselves.
When Identity Is Stripped for Palatability
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.
Pattern Theft
When institutions or influencers extract language, frameworks, or tools born from survival — and repackage them as marketable products, losing context and diluting power.
Repackaging Lived Experience Without Consent
Navigational Exhaustion
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.
When Systems Become Too Complex to Access Safely
Cosmetic Reform
When institutions talk about reform but change only language—not the structure that causes harm.
Policy Theatre Without Structural Change
Academic Colonisation
When universities or institutions take knowledge developed through survival and reframe it into academic output — stripping the authorship and decontextualising the pain.
Extracting Lived Experience into Research for Credit
Process as Obstruction
When the complaints or reform process is made deliberately confusing, untraceable, or repetitive. Designed to overwhelm or discredit the complainant through technicalities, not truth.
Weaponising Red Tape
Inspiration Drag
When people reword or co-opt someone’s survival story for social media clout, awareness campaigns, or funding applications — often without consent.
Trying on Struggle Without Living It
Safetysplaining
Using “safety” to justify silencing, excluding, or overriding a person’s needs or voice.
When "Safety" Becomes a Muzzle
Inclusion Theatre
Creating the illusion of inclusive input while decisions have already been made. Often used for PR, not systemic change.
Staging Participation Without Power
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.
Response
An action, safeguard, refusal, remedy, or design intervention associated with a concept.
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.
Index Ghosting
The phenomenon where your ideas influence platforms, algorithms, or research—but you are never cited, paid, or publicly acknowledged.
When You’re Referenced, But Not Seen
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.
Divergence-as-IP
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.
Monetising What We’ve Had to Create
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.
Eligibility Obscuration
Making the process of applying so complicated, technical, or contradictory that people give up or never apply at all.
Hiding Help Behind Complex Criteria
Access as Compliance
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.”
Support That Punishes Non-Conformity
Accommodations as Optics
When organisations showcase inclusion through brochures and photos, but the actual supports don’t work — or exist only for show.
Access as a Brand, Not a Practice
Legislation Laundering
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.
When Accountability Is Buried Under Frameworks
Borrowed Voice
Speaking on behalf of marginalised people without sharing power, compensation, or the platform. Often framed as advocacy, but functions as appropriation.
Telling Someone’s Story Without Them
Controlled Consent
When a system offers only pre-approved options and calls it “choice” — then uses your participation to imply informed consent.
When "Choice" Is an Illusion
Institutional Rewording
When a person in authority rewords your lived experience to suit the narrative of institutional control.
Erasure by Language Refinement
Empowerment Theatre
When programs pretend to centre disability or trauma-informed leadership but retain control, edit lived experience, and deny genuine co-design or authorship.
Staged Inclusion Without Autonomy
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.
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.
Opportunity Lockout
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.
The Silent Rejection Loop
Paper-Based Inclusion
When a support exists on paper but not in practice — and the burden of proof is pushed onto the person who was excluded.
Policy Promises Without Delivery
Authorship Gatekeeping
Allowing participation in idea generation but blocking participants from official recognition, publication rights, or intellectual property stakes.
When They Want Your Ideas—But Not Your Name
Loop Logic
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.
Endless Proof, No Resolution
Audit Inclusion
Meeting technical accessibility requirements without emotional, cultural, or practical relevance. Inclusion that checks boxes but misses the point.
Compliance Without Care
Strategic Avoidance
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.
Refusing Direct Engagement While Appearing Open
Protocol Hijack
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.
Copying Our Structures Without Our Voice
Strategic Self-Advocacy Open Ontology
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.
Paper-Based Empathy
When systems rely on written policies to demonstrate “support” but refuse to enforce those policies meaningfully when abuse or discrimination occurs.
Policies That Don’t Protect People
Authorship Layer
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.
Traceable Ownership of Meaningful Work
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.
Designed Disappearance
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.
Access That Was Never Intended to Work
Pattern
A recurring configuration of conduct, structure, language, incentives, or system behaviour.
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.
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.
Compliance Fragmentation
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.
When Safety Depends on Navigating Multiple Systems at Once
SSA concept
A survivor-authored concept used to identify a structural, institutional, digital, or interpersonal pattern.
Platform Jacking
When someone with more visibility “amplifies” a lived-experience message—then becomes the spokesperson, drowning out the original voice.
Using Your Megaphone to Mute Others
Credit Laundering
When someone uses your work, words, or frameworks and presents them as their own “insight” in safer or more prestigious spaces.
Repackaging Ideas Without Attribution
Invisible IP Theft
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.
Ideas Taken Without Traceable Links
Constructive Exclusion
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.
Barriers Built from Bureaucratic Niceties
Impact
An effect experienced by a person, community, institution, or information environment.