SirAaronMason.com

When I began writing my first book on Cultural Effectiveness Training, I knew I was stepping into a conversation that has been shaped for generations by race, power, privilege, oppression, identity, and trauma. I also knew that if I wanted people to truly understand C.E.T.—not just intellectually, but in their bones—I needed to choose the right doorway.

A framework this deep couldn’t start anywhere.
It needed to start somewhere honest.
Somewhere human.
Somewhere that didn’t cause half the audience to shut down before they even turned the page.

And for me, that doorway was neurodiversity.

This wasn’t a branding choice. It wasn’t a trend I was chasing. It wasn’t even a conscious strategy at first. It grew out of my own lived experience—my sensitivity, my story, my nervous system, and my complicated relationship with being a neurodivergent Black man raised inside the long shadow of historical trauma.

Long before I had language for any of it, my body told the truth. I felt everything. I picked up the tension adults pretended not to feel. I sensed danger before anyone said a word. I absorbed grief that wasn’t technically mine but lived in my family, my culture, and my ancestry. My sensitivity wasn’t fragile; it was finely tuned. And that sensitivity, amplified by being a Black boy in a world that demanded toughness, obedience, and emotional silence, shaped my entire way of being.

When you are both neurodivergent and a survivor of historical trauma, you don’t just carry the weight of what happened—you feel it through every channel of your nervous system. You inherit stories you never heard but always felt. You learn the world not from what people explain, but from what their bodies communicate. You become fluent in the unspoken.

That is the soil C.E.T. grew out of.

But here’s the thing: if I had opened the book with race, history, systemic oppression, or cultural trauma, many readers—especially those in positions of privilege—would have entered already defensive, already preparing counterarguments, already believing the work was “for someone else.”

I didn’t want a book that widened the divide. I wanted one that softened it.

Neurodiversity gave me a way to do that.

It allowed me to start with something universal—the nervous system, the way our bodies interpret the world, the patterns we inherit, the ways we adapt, the masks we learn to wear, the overwhelm we carry but can’t always name. Neurodiversity gave me language that didn’t accuse, didn’t shame, didn’t isolate, and didn’t divide people into categories that were never real in the first place.

It invited everyone to the table.
Not as “others” or “allies,” but as humans with nervous systems shaped by culture.

It allowed people with privilege to enter the conversation without shutting down. It allowed people who have never explored identity to recognize themselves in the work. It allowed those who don’t see themselves as “traumatized” to understand they were still shaped by history, expectation, and cultural norms. And it allowed those who are marginalized to finally see their lived experiences reflected with depth and dignity.

Beginning with neurodiversity made the conversation bigger, not smaller. It expanded the framework to include the full spectrum of human experience—not just those carrying visible pain, but also those carrying conditioned power. It created space for people who have been oppressed, people who have been privileged, and people who are both, depending on the room they walk into.

C.E.T. was never meant to be a model only for the marginalized.
It was designed to help us examine the stories we inherit, the systems we participate in, and the ways our awareness—or lack of it—affects the people around us. Neurodiversity became a natural entry point because it focuses on the nervous system first, before identity labels, before political debate, before cultural defensiveness kicks in.

It lets us start with humanity, not hierarchy.

And starting with myself—my neurodivergence, my sensitivity, my history as a Black man shaped by intergenerational trauma—allowed me to offer a personal truth that invites rather than pushes away. Neurodiversity wasn’t just a topic; it was the most honest place I could begin. It allowed me to bridge my personal experience with a universal one. It made space for readers to see themselves long before I asked them to see others.

Choosing neurodiversity for the first book wasn’t a detour.
It wasn’t a soft introduction.
It was the foundation—the place where every conversation about culture, trauma, equity, and systems must eventually return to.

Because if we don’t understand the nervous system, we can’t understand human behavior.
If we can’t understand behavior, we can’t understand culture.
And if we can’t understand culture, we can’t change it.

This book begins with neurodiversity because neurodiversity brings us back to the beginning—before systems, before roles, before labels—back to the truth that every one of us is shaped by the world we’re born into and the history we carry in our bodies.

It’s the place where C.E.T. starts.
And honestly?
It’s the place where healing starts, too.