The Plight of the Winter Lamb: Neurodivergence and the Yearning for Flock
- greenwoodhealing
- Jul 1
- 6 min read
*Reposted from my therapy website www.stablebalancellc.com
Last night, I watched the new movie The Sheep Detectives, produced by Three Strange Angels and Working Title Films. The last time I went to the theater was the day before my hysterectomy in March. After bringing my father into the cult of Project Hail Mary, we dragged my poor mother to the cinema to watch a movie she had absolutely no interest in watching, let alone spending the car payment it now costs for a family of three to go to the theater in 2026. For the record, she loved Rocky and Eva Stratt. (My mother has great taste in characters.) Overall, she only fell asleep for ten minutes of the film. For my mother, this is an A+ audience rating. During the mandatory twenty minutes of previews, we saw the trailer for The Sheep Detectives. It looked silly, funny, and light, the kind of thing that feeds the soul when the world feels like a chaotic blender of political detritus and misery. I told myself, “I want to see that.”
Then my clients started seeing it. I heard the same mantras over and over again.
“You need to see it.”
“You will laugh and you will cry. Get ready.”
“Oh, you have to go.”
Last night, after a week that began with a head injury and whiplash (courtesy of an unscheduled random gravity check off the back of my horse) and ended with the realization that my life is about to implode, I was delighted to find that the movie was finally available for streaming. So, neck deep in work and self-pity, I put it on.
My clients were right.
I did need to see it.
It’s not just the humor. The movie did make me laugh out loud, especially when Sebastian, the black Castlemilk Moorit, voiced by the incomparable Bryan Cranston, attempted to explain the nature of God. (And don’t get me started on the chicken.) As a therapist deeply invested in the transpersonal, the ram’s explanation of God best encapsulates the bleating confusion of trying to understand the depths of human experience, religion, and cultural nuance in a single, bizarre, and oddly accurate conversation. Cheers to the script writers who managed to balance pathos with hilarity so effectively throughout the film.
Sebastian, of course, represents something else throughout the film—the winter lamb.
The winter lamb is a lamb born outside the typical lambing season, which occurs in spring. Not entirely undesirable to a shepherd who can raise a winter lamb to be ready for fleecing in the spring, the winter lamb is, however, ironically shunned by its own flock. The story of the winter lamb bleeds into the film with a dark shadowy presence. These sheep are not without their own foibles—the desire and ability to forget things they don’t like and the prejudice and discrimination within their fleecy ranks, to name a couple. The winter lamb is ostracized. He cannot play with the other adorable lambs. He is not even given a name in a culture where “every sheep deserves a name.”
Sebastian calls out the other sheep for the stories the winter lamb hears throughout their life. That they are not one of the flock. They don’t have a flock. They are not welcome. The heartbreak of his own story is mirrored in the shy yearning of the tiny winter lamb who is a quiet but forceful emotional arc of the story. In perhaps its most heart-wrenching moment, Sebastian points out how the winter lamb not only hears these pejorative and toxic statements throughout its life, but that it starts to believe them. In believing, they then choose to leave the safety of the flock.
The unspoken words are as devastating as the expression on the CGI lamb’s little face.
In believing, the lamb chooses to die because a lamb without a flock will rarely survive.
To the flock, if you don’t belong, don’t meet the arbitrary standards of a “birthing season,” then you are not worthy of the most basic fundamental rights—the right to live, to be loved, and to belong.
I’m an autistic ADHDer. I was diagnosed late in life at the age of 37 after a client asked me, point blank, if I was autistic. It was the most life-changing moment in my life. I spent the next two years in deep grief for the child I once was. The child who was always on the outside looking in, a participant observer in my own life. I learned how to be the chameleon, the one who could blend in and disappear into the groups I was forced to participate in, but in which I never truly belonged. I was, for the vast majority of my life, lonely, if not always alone.
As a child, I was the weird, intellectually complicated, super serious, kind of (self-compassion is a thing, okay?) self-righteous and pretentious kid who hid behind my brain so that others couldn’t see the pain inside my mind. In the eighth grade, my teacher invited the class to diss me, ostensibly as a joke. It backfired tremendously when the other students tore me apart for forty-five minutes. The process would repeat when I had to present the results of a research project during undergrad and my professor didn’t like the results. Over and over again, I would be drawn and quartered in large crowds and classroom fishbowls. The need of the flock to remain homogenous is so intense, there is no room for someone of a different breed or color fleece. As a winter lamb, I resolved myself to being outside the social milieu always, a perpetual outcast who desperately wanted to fit in, but would always find a way to hover just along the perimeters of flow.
I yearned for, but never found, my flock.
Worse, I started to believe all the horrible insults I heard about myself throughout my life—weird, bitchy, ice queen, nerd, geek, freak, weak, broken, etc. etc. The list goes on. Gods, it’s a veritable treasure trove of human cruelty I alternately fought, fed, and succumbed to. In the darkest of moments, I thought about the choice of whether to stay or go, to leave not just the flock, but life all together.
As a neurodivergent person, I struggle significantly not just with being the perpetual outsider, but with something called rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD. Rejection sensitivity, and its intense cousin RSD, are neurological and sensory phenomena that register rejection as a mortal injury. To the neurodivergent brain, rejection, whether perceived or realized, is fatal. The pain is excruciating. Sticks and stones might break bones, but rejection? That will kill you.
To the winter lamb, to the neurodivergent human, rejection and the loss of flock can be fatal.
Neurodivergent people are at significantly higher rates of death by suicide. Neurodivergent children are at significantly higher risk of attempting death by suicide.
This isn’t just a cute metaphor, friends. This is the byproduct of years of socialization and the failure of western psychology to account for its own history regarding neurodivergence and the systematic ways ego triumphed over good science. And yes, more on that later.
There is nothing so essential as the need to belong. First, we must belong to ourselves. The greatest gift you can give the world is your authenticity. I truly believe that. Even if your authentic self is a jerk.
In a recent workshop with other 5Rythyms dancers, I spoke to the ways in which my pulls for connection were misunderstood, leading to the rejection dance with RSD. I offered myself as I could be in that moment. I made clear that I could offer a part of myself, but not my whole self, and in the deep grief of isolation, returned to the familiar place of being outside looking in. But this group of dynamic women surprised me. They wept with me. They wept for me. And they took hold of my hands and dragged me back into the flock.
“I want to experience all of you,” they said.
All of me.
The good.
The bad.
The angry.
The real.
All of it. Every nuance and flicker, every quirk countered with rage, and every cry paired with whimsy.
And I realized that my life is lived heart forward. That, like the winter lamb in The Sheep Detectives, I have put myself out into the flock over and over again. Such vulnerability is the challenge of the neurodivergent soul. Not to face down rejection a million times over and come out unscathed. After all, the fact that those that reject you are not ready for you doesn’t dull the pain or eliminate the emotional scars of the cruelty often underlying these social divisions. But it is in knowing that living in our own authenticity yields both integrity to the Self and to the discovery of the flock.
I truly believe there is a flock for every winter lamb.
We owe it to neurodivergent people to learn about neurodivergence, to unmask our own misunderstandings, and discover a type of leadership and community that is not ruled by the three A’s of western social dominance: Athleticism, Artificiality, and Appearance. We owe it to ourselves to build a community rooted in vulnerability, belonging, and open-hearted curiosity. We owe it to ourselves to open ourselves and our hearts to welcome in the brave, quirky, wonderful, weird, dramatic, quiet, infinitely varied personalities of the winter lambs.
We owe it to ourselves.
Most importantly, we owe it to the winter lambs.
Our survival depends on it.
Only then can we experience the wonder of the world around us. Only then will our flock be complete.
With You on the Journey,
Sharon
No AI was used in the generation of this post.
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