In religious hierarchies, the standards for "legitimate" communication and "credible" testimony are predominantly defined by neurotypical adults. This paper investigates how adultism and neuronormativity - the systemic privileging of adult and neurotypical modes of being - inhibit disclosure by rendering a survivor's distress "unintelligible" within the institution.
Central to this maintenance of power is the "pathology paradigm": when survivors - particularly children and neurodivergent individuals - express trauma through "atypical" sensory or mindbodily signals, the institution often misreads these as medical deficits or (spiritual) disobedience. This exclusion is rooted in the "Double Empathy Problem": the communication gap between different modes of perception is systematically blamed on the survivor's "deficits." For these groups, whose distress often manifests outside verbal-logical norms, institutional infrastructures keep their lived reality "obscure", resulting in "epistemic death": a state where the survivor, having their experiences repeatedly silenced and labeled "unreal", loses the capacity to trust their own knowledge and perception.
This silencing is stabilized by an "ecclesial panopticon", an internalized surveillance where "believers" monitor their own mindbodies to fit institutional norms. Survivors become their own "guards", suppressing their "existential confusion" to remain socially "intelligible." By treating children and neurodivergent people as objects of paternalistic care rather than knowledgeable subjects, the church renders their specific forms of resistance invisible. Ultimately, the paper argues that regaining (linguistic) agency requires an "ethics para joder" (De La Torre) by shifting from seeking institutional "fixing" to a disruptive praxis that reclaims "unintelligible" mindbodily signals as authoritative sites of knowledge, survivors can dismantle the foundations of critique-resistant authority from the base up.