They didn’t understand the behavior — so they renamed it. Calling it Oppositional Defiant Disorder didn’t make it more accurate. It just made the system more comfortable. Because it’s easier to label a person “noncompliant” than to ask: What are they resisting? What wasn’t safe? What rules were enforced without care, consistency, or repair? Defiance is often contextual intelligence. A nervous system saying, “This doesn’t feel right.” And when we diagnose resistance instead of interrogating the e