Trusting One’s Gut vs Trusting What We’re Told

Truth vs Confabulation or Over-Intellectualising vs Being Straight-Up Human

By Troy Lowndes - A neuroaffirming male aged 51.

Listen the podcast: here

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Every blog piece starts somewhere. This one began with a question that felt like standing in a fog between two worlds - where every side of a story holds some truth, yet none of them quite meet in the middle.

I kept circling the same thought:

Can someone spend decades crafting a complex scientific theory of belief formation… simply because they never learned to ask the small, personal questions that might have revealed everything sooner?

In this article, I explore that idea through a neuroaffirming lens - with curiosity, contemplation, and an eye toward the patterns many of us carry without naming.

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1. When an undiagnosed neurodivergent mind avoids itself, it tends to build outward instead of inward.

For some people, thinking is safer than feeling.

So instead of introspection, they construct:

• Theories

• Maps

• Models

• Predictive frameworks

• Cognitive architectures

It’s not that they’re trying to understand humanity.

They’re trying to understand themselves *without naming themselves* as the subject.

The inner world feels too raw, too unstructured, too charged with past shame or confusion.

So they build an external system that mirrors their internal chaos but in a form they can control.

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2. When “Understanding the world” becomes a proxy for “understanding myself.”

Instead of asking:

• Why do *I* respond this way?

• Why does uncertainty overwhelm *me*?

• Why do *I* get stuck in loops?

They ask:

• Why do *humans* respond this way?

• How does belief form?

• Why do minds create narratives?

They universalise what is actually personal.

A kind of self-study conducted behind a glass barrier.

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3. Emotional patterns get mistaken for philosophical puzzles.

A person like this may spend decades studying:

• cognitive bias

• perception

• belief scaffolding

• predictive processing

All while the true motive is silent:

“I need a system to make my internal world make sense.”

They build a cathedral of thought around a wound they don’t know how to touch.

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4. Grand theories become a shield against emotional exposure.

Undiagnosed ND + high intellect often yields:

• hyper-systemisation

• explanatory compulsion

• decades-long research spirals

• endless nuance-seeking

• avoidance disguised as precision

Simplicity feels unsafe.

Certainty feels medicinal.

So instead of:

“I struggle with emotional ambiguity.”

They build:

“A unified theory of belief formation across social, cognitive, and predictive layers.”

Both may be true.

But only one heals anything.

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5. Intellectualisation becomes a lifelong avoidance strategy.

This is deeply human.

When someone spends decades explaining:

• belief

• identity

• cognition

• behaviour

…what they might really be doing is avoiding:

• unprocessed grief

• shame

• vulnerability

• the fear of being wrong

• the fear of being misunderstood

• their own neurodivergence

The more brilliant the system, the more fragile the unspoken truth beneath it.

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6. The “forgotten questions” are small, simple, and terrifying.

The ones that could have replaced 30 years of scaffolding:

• What hurts?

• Why is ambiguity intolerable?

• Why do I cling to structure?

• What am I afraid to feel?

• What part of me needed soothing that I never received?

• Could neurodivergence explain what no theory ever quite did?

These collapse the fortress in seconds.

Which is why they are avoided for decades.

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7. Why thinkers in belief, psychology, and cognition often fall into this pattern

These fields attract people who:

• grew up misunderstood

• felt “different but didn’t know why”

• were praised for intellect but not met emotionally

• needed frameworks to survive

• turned personal confusion into academic pursuit

They aren’t seeking universal truth.

They’re trying to decode their own mind in a socially acceptable way.

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Plain Speak

As a neurodivergent person I often find myself floating inbetween, undecided - floating in the flux.

How now that i've asked these seven questions i find myself standing close on the side of Yes ... someone who is:

• undiagnosed neurodivergent

• emotionally avoidant

• intolerant of uncertainty

• gifted at analysis

• not ND-affirming

can absolutely create a vast, complex scientific model of belief formation as a way to avoid asking a handful of small, personal questions.

This doesn’t make them wrong.

It makes them human.

They built a cognitive fortress around a tender interior they never learned to name.

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Now that I’ve reached the end of this piece, the conclusion feels much clearer.

What I’ve described here isn’t just a pattern I’ve observed in others ... it’s one I’ve lived.

My path was never academic or traditionally intellectual, yet it was shaped by a deep cognitive bind that, in hindsight, operates much the same way.

I built intricate mental scaffolding instead of asking the smaller, more honest questions that might have shown me the way sooner.

And naming that now ... whether through ADHD, Autism, or the increasingly recognised overlap of AuDHD - doesn’t feel like regret.

It feels like clarity.

If you’d like to follow more of these reflections, you’ll find them here:

www.tonethread.com/blog