Yellow Ladybugs Conference 2025

Creating Safe Spaces for Anxious Autistic Brains: Understanding Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn Responses

This week, Chenai had the privilege of speaking at the Yellow Ladybugs 2025 Neurodivergent Women & Gender Diverse AFAB People Conference, and like always—it was equal parts nourishing, powerful, and deeply real.

Chenai spoke on a panel with Chelsea Luker titled “Creating Safe Spaces for Anxious Autistic Brains: Understanding Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn Responses.” Hosted by the amazing Katie Koullas.

It was a deep dive into what safety really means for neurodivergent people. Not the kind of safety defined by compliance, but the kind felt in the body. The kind that lets you exhale.

We unpacked how behaviour is so often misunderstood—especially in Autistic students navigating a world not designed for their nervous systems.

What looks like defiance might be flight.

What looks like passivity might be fawn.

What looks like aggression might be a desperate plea for safety.

Chenai and Chelsea shared some of the practical strategies they use in their work, grounded in co-regulation, autonomy, and sensory attunement. But more than tools, we spoke about paradigms—about shifting our gaze from “fixing behaviour” to understanding the story behind it. This work matters deeply to me. Because for so many of us, what gets labelled “challenging” is actually wisdom—just misread by a system still obsessed with normalising.

One of the greatest joys of this year’s conference was also witnessing my dear friend and newly-joined Rainbow Muse Collective member, Christina Schmidt, bring her truth to the stage on day 3, in her talk, “Centring Black Autistic Voices: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know.” Her words were fierce, affirming, and so necessary.

It felt like a homecoming—to share space with other neurodivergent folks committed to real, embodied, liberatory care.

To everyone who showed up: thank you for holding this work with me. To everyone still learning: keep going. We don’t need to be perfect to be safe. We just need to be present.

Check out the conference page and the always wonderful Yellow LadyBugs