Part 2: EFS and Breaking the Trauma Loop in the Unidentified Autistic Family
If External Family Systems (EFS) is about naming the invisible puppet master—ableism—then it’s also about breaking a very specific kind of loop: the trauma loop that happens in families where neurodivergence is present but unidentified.
There’s a concept explored in Thomas Hübl’s book Healing Collective Trauma that speaks to this. It suggests that when a person or collective has experienced trauma, there’s an innate pull toward reenactment. Not because anyone wants to stay stuck, but because trauma inherently seeks resolution. It wants to be felt, processed, expressed, alchemized, and moved through. If that doesn’t happen—if it can’t happen—the nervous system (and the family system, group/collective, and/or larger community/culture) will continue to loop.
Hübl notes that as we grow up, each of us builds an internal sense of space, time and rhythm (‘S-T-R’ for short) as we grow up, orienting us to our environments, bodies, and caregivers. When traumatized, a lag develops between the syncing of the S-T-R, creating a distortion in our perception and ultimately a warped experience of space-time.
But here’s another problem: in families where autism or neurodivergence hasn’t been identified, leading to emotionally harmful patterns as a result of silent internalized ableism, the root cause of that looping is literally unknown, and when something this profound and all-encompassing is operating beneath the surface without recognition, it doesn’t just color how people interact—it shapes their reality.
Processing, emotional regulation, nervous system, cognition, communication, sensory experiences, social cues, executive functioning, somatics, and even physiology—everything is touched by this invisible truth. Yet for many families, it remains hidden, which inherently means the trauma can’t be named and the loop can’t be broken.
The result? Families find themselves trapped in the warped space-time described by Hübl, living out a false future shaped not by growth or possibility, but by unprocessed trauma repeating itself in a kind of psychic limbo.
“[Trauma] is the oblivion of consciousness, the restriction of life force, the suppression of evolutionary light. It is endless repetition and snowballing calamity. It is to live and die in shadow, asleep in the dream of separation. Before we sleepwalk over the edge, we must come awake. ”
The most painful part is families often desperately want to stop the cycle. They desire closeness, peace, clarity, safety, and a way out of the maze they’re trapped in without language to describe it. But they are missing the one thing that could make that possible: the truth. Until they receive the key—the knowledge of their neurodivergence and the systemic ableism that has unknowingly shaped their perceptions of themselves and each other—they remain locked out of their real future, on the outside looking in.
This is what makes the EFS lens powerful. By helping families identify and externalize ableism—not as another scapegoat, but as a real and active external force—EFS shifts the focus back to where it belongs. It helps families stop turning inward on themselves in confusion, blame, and shame. It stops the micro-level reenactment of macro-level harm. And in doing so, it frees up space for something new: a shared language, a shared understanding, and ultimately, a shared path forward.
“Only when we become lucid do we greet the limitless potential of true future, which is ever available and longing to be met. ”
This is the hope of External Family Systems—to widen the lens to include systemic and internalized ableism, the neuronormative culture that raised us, and the truths that have been buried. To support families in healing from fragmentation, naming systemic harm, and showing up as their full selves. When we name those truths we can finally begin to heal, resynchronize our S-T-R, exit the trauma future and enter the authentic future, where the Unidentified Autistic Family System is no longer destined to repeat the past.
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About the Author
Claire McCulley, LCSW, is a social worker, therapist, researcher, writer, disability justice advocate, and theorist based in NYC developing the Unidentified Autistic Family Systems framework. Drawing on lived experience, clinical practice, and systems thinking, she explores the intergenerational impacts of masking, misattunement, and collective trauma in unidentified neurodivergent families. Her work centers autistic self-understanding, relational healing, and culturally attuned theory that speaks to real-world patterns.