Story Swapping: The AuDHD Habit That Sounds Like Interruption and Means the Opposite

Someone tells you a story — something small, an observation, an experience. You respond with a story of your own, as close in shape or theme to theirs as you can manage. Their dog story prompts your dog story. Their burnt-dinner story prompts yours.

This is story swapping, and depending on who's in the conversation, it lands as one of two completely different things.

In a lot of neurodivergent conversational patterns, story swapping is a genuine compliment. It signals: I'm paying attention. I understood the shape of what you just said. I'm offering you something of mine that resonates with what you offered me. I'm with you.

A lot of neurotypical listeners read the exact same behavior as the opposite: one-upping, making it about you, a small dominance move that pulls attention away from the person who was originally talking. From inside that conversational protocol, a story swap can genuinely feel like an interruption.

Neither reading is wrong, exactly. They're accurate to two different sets of rules for what a conversation is supposed to do.

Autism researcher Damian Milton named this dynamic in 2012, reframing a long-standing assumption in autism research as what's now known as the double empathy problem. The old framing held that autistic people are impaired at reading what others are thinking and feeling. Milton argued, and the field has since taken seriously, that the difficulty runs in both directions: autistic and non-autistic people struggle to understand each other, and neither side is more impaired than the other. The empathy gap exists because empathy depends on mutual reciprocity between two people running compatible protocols — not on one person's individual capacity.

This removes the burden from one side of the conversation entirely. Autistic people aren't failing at empathy. Neurotypical people aren't failing at empathy. Two groups are running different conversational protocols that don't natively translate — and story swapping is a small, concrete example of exactly that mismatch.

There's a structural reason underneath the habit, and it explains more than story swapping alone.

A neurotypical nervous system quiets its own baseline activity and treats most sensory and associative input as routine, forwarding only the novel or salient fraction to active processing. An AuDHD nervous system doesn't filter the same way. A very large share of what it registers in a given moment — associations, sensory input, tangents that are actually connected under the surface — doesn't get filtered out the way it would for a neurotypical listener.

This shows up conversationally as long, branching, associative speech that loops back, layers up, changes subject, and returns to the original topic from a different angle. From outside, this can look disorganized. It isn't. It's how a nervous system that isn't filtering the same material locates itself in a topic — pinging the connections, checking what resonates, mapping the shape of the thing before naming it directly.

Cutting that process short by demanding linear narration too early doesn't produce clarity faster. It loses information the linear version wouldn't have surfaced.

There's a single question that does most of the work of staying connected across this gap, useful for either side of the conversation: "How does that connect?" or "Help me understand how that connects to what you just said."

This isn't a request to slow down or speak more linearly. It's an invitation to make one local connection visible — to draw the line the speaker's mind has already drawn, so both people can see it. Most of the time, a practiced listener is already tracking. When they're not, this single question gets them there without asking the speaker to restructure how they think.

If you're the one doing the associative talking, you can offer the same thing preemptively: "This connects to what I said earlier because…" — flagging the link explicitly rather than waiting for the listener to ask.

If you tend to respond with adjacent stories and someone seems to have gone quiet or pulled back afterward, they may not be able to name what bothered them beyond a vague sense of having been talked over. Naming the pattern directly can repair it:

"When I answered with my own dog story, I wasn't trying to take the spotlight — that's how my brain shows it understood you. I realize that might have landed differently than I meant it."

If someone in your life regularly answers with their own adjacent stories, consider that this might be their way of being with you rather than against you — an echo and a gift, in their conversational grammar, even if it doesn't feel that way in yours.

This is a useful example of something bigger: a lot of cross-neurotype friction isn't about one person doing something wrong. It's two coherent systems that don't automatically translate into each other — and once you know that, the fix usually isn't "stop doing the thing." It's naming what the thing actually means, out loud, so both people can update their read on it.

It also has a quiet sorting function. Someone who can hold this kind of conversation, tangents and all, without needing it narrated linearly, is signaling structural fit. Someone who can't tends to get read, accurately, as further out — regardless of how long you've known them.

• Story swapping — answering a story with an adjacent story of your own — is a compliment in a lot of neurodivergent conversational patterns.
• The same behavior often reads as one-upping or interruption in neurotypical conversational protocol.
• The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) reframes cross-neurotype misunderstanding as bidirectional — neither side is more impaired, the protocols just don't natively translate.
• The branching isn't disorganization — it's how the nervous system locates itself in a topic before naming it directly.
• "How does that connect?" keeps a listener oriented without asking the speaker to restructure how they talk.
• Naming the pattern directly repairs it faster than either side guessing at intent.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The 'double empathy problem.' Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only.

Well wishes. 🙏

L.C. Dialogos Buddhist chaplain, Plum Village tradition

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