Diverging Experience Practice

What I Learned About Lived Experience Practice (And How We Can All Do Better)

When I started hearing “lived experience” thrown around constantly in my MSW program, I thought I knew exactly what it meant. As someone who’s openly neurodivergent, who’s navigated mental health systems, who’s lived in marginalized communities – I figured lived experience practice was about bringing my background, my understanding, my story into my work with clients. Simple, right?

Looking back, I can see why I interpreted it that way. I took the term literally – “lived experience” sounds like it’s about the experiences you’ve lived through personally. Such a neurospicy moment for me, taking something at face value when there was actually a whole professional framework hiding behind those two words! Or at least there should be one made for the social work sector.

Turns out I was missing about half the picture. And judging by the vague head-nodding I see whenever someone mentions “lived experience” in lectures or placement meetings, I’m not the only one who had it backwards.

The Reality Check I Needed

Last year, for one of my learning activities, I ended up doing an annotated bibliography on lived experience frameworks. I was looking for guidance on how neurodivergent social workers should navigate being open about our identities while practicing ethically. What I found instead was a wake-up call about what lived experience practice actually means.

See, I’d been thinking about it as a one-way street: my experiences informing my practice. But the frameworks I researched – from state governments in Victoria and Western Australia, community services, and with legal aid services in contexts around mental health and disability – showed me something much bigger.

Lived experience practice isn’t just about practitioners bringing their personal backgrounds to the work. It’s about creating systems where the lived experiences of clients and communities actually shape services, policies, and practice. It’s about co-design, not just representation. It’s about organisational change, not just individual authenticity.

The difference hit me like that moment when you realize you’ve been pronouncing a word wrong your whole life, except this time it was about my entire understanding of professional practice.

What the Profession Actually Says (Spoiler: It’s Complicated)

Of course, being the thorough student I am, I also dug into what our own profession says about this. The AASW Code of Ethics does mention lived experience, but mainly in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners, recognizing the value of their “knowledge and lived experiences as they share and strengthen their practice.”

When it comes to self-disclosure more broadly, the Code gets cautious under Section 5.6.7: we should use it “with circumspection, and only when it is reasonably believed that it will benefit the service user.” If we’re unsure, we need professional consultation or supervision.

That’s solid guidance, but notice what’s missing? Any real framework for what lived experience practice actually looks like day-to-day. The code of ethics recognises its value but doesn’t give us much to work with beyond “be careful and ask for help when you’re not sure”.

Meanwhile, other sectors, such as in mental health and disability, have developed comprehensive frameworks with principles like “purposeful,” “prepared,” “genuine,” and “inclusive” engagement. They’ve thought through governance, sustainability, compensation for lived experience expertise, and organisational readiness for change.

We’re out here winging it with buzzwords while other fields have actual roadmaps.

The Red Eye Problem (Again)

This reminds me of something I wrote about before – that “red eye” moment when you’re seeing a systemic problem but everyone’s treating it like an individual issue. We keep talking about lived experience as if it’s about individual practitioners being “authentic” or “representative,” when the real work is systemic.

If we’re serious about lived experience practice, we need to ask harder questions:

  • Are we creating space for clients to co-design services, or are we just hiring people with certain personal backgrounds and calling it lived experience?
  • Do our organisations have frameworks for incorporating community voices into decision-making, or do we just expect individual workers to figure it out?
  • Are we compensating lived experience expertise appropriately, or are we treating it as something people should just naturally bring to the job?
  • Are we giving space to practitioners with sort after lived experience to explore what does that mean through supervision, training, and reflective practice or are we throwing them out to the deep end?
  • Have we prepared our systems to actually listen, and change based on what lived experience tells us, or are we just checking a box?

What This Means for Those of Us Figuring It Out

For neurodivergent practitioners like me (and maybe you), this broader understanding actually takes some pressure off. We’re not walking representation machines. Our job isn’t to be the neurodivergent voice for every client, colleague, and policy discussion.

This connects back to something I’ve written about before – that tokenism trap where you get hired partly because of your marginalized background and then become “the neurodivergent one” or “the gay guy” (as I mentioned in my last post about what I had learned about being openly neurodivergent in the workplace). When organisations think lived experience just means “hire someone with X background,” they’re setting everyone up for that same uncomfortable dynamic where you’re expected to represent your entire community rather than do the systems work of including representation with the community at large.

The literal way I initially understood “lived experience” – as something that informs your practice – actually makes more sense than how it often gets implemented, where it becomes a credential that gets you hired to be the designated representative.

Instead, our lived experience becomes one piece of a larger puzzle. Yes, our understanding of navigating systems as neurodivergent people matters. Yes, our insights about masking, accommodation, and acceptance can inform our practice. But the real goal is creating environments where our neurodivergent clients can share their own experiences and have those experiences shape the services they receive.

That means:

  • Getting comfortable with the AASW’s guidance: Use self-disclosure thoughtfully, seek supervision when unsure, focus on what benefits the client.
  • Pushing for organisational frameworks: Don’t just bring your experience – advocate for systems that center client voices.
  • Learning from other sectors: Those mental health and disability frameworks aren’t just academic exercises – they’re roadmaps we can adapt from.

What We Can All Do Better

If you’re a practitioner (neurodivergent or otherwise):

  • Reflect honestly: How are you sharing your story or creating space for clients’ stories to shape your practice? Are you taking the time to educate yourself what lived experience with a systemic lens is currently saying about the context you are working with?
  • Use supervision to think through when and how your lived experience adds value
  • Advocate for your organization to develop actual frameworks, not just good intentions.

If you’re an educator or supervisor:

  • Stop treating “lived experience” as a buzzword everyone just gets
  • Teach the frameworks that exist in other sectors
  • Help students understand the difference between personal authenticity and systematic lived experience practice

If you’re in organizational leadership:

  • Look at what mental health and disability sectors have built
  • Invest in co-design processes, not just hiring practices
  • Create structures for ongoing community input, not just one-off consultations

The Bottom Line

Lived experience practice isn’t about being the neurodivergent social worker, or the person with mental health experience, or the one who “gets it” because of your background. It’s about creating professional practices that center the experiences of the people we serve and the communities we work with.

That’s bigger than any individual practitioner can achieve alone. It requires organizational change, professional development, and systemic thinking. It requires moving beyond buzzwords to actual frameworks.

But here’s the thing – when we get it right, everyone benefits. Clients get services that actually reflect their realities. Practitioners get clearer guidance about how to integrate their backgrounds ethically. Organizations get more effective, responsive approaches.

We just need to stop pretending we all know what we’re talking about when we say “lived experience” and start doing the actual work of figuring it out.

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If you are wondering which frameworks I had looked into, they are:

This list contains hyperlinks to the framework documents that had been mentioned.