What is autism-informed therapy?

Put simply, autism-informed therapy is any style of therapy that respects the individual differences that come with autism and doesn’t focus on changing the individual. It focuses on the needs of the individual, not on the needs of those around them, as the priority.

One of the biggest shortcomings in the mental health field when working with autistic clients is the focus on suppressing what can be viewed as “problematic” behaviors without focusing on the underlying reasons for them and the adaptive nature of said behaviors. When a therapist works only to stop a client from exhibiting certain behaviors to help a client meet the needs of those around them, they’re actively teaching and reinforcing the masking that many autistic clients already do as a byproduct of living in a society built for neurotypical individuals. When a therapist is autism-informed, they work to understand why the client does what they do and build compassion for that first and foremost before working on helping a client to adapt to the needs of a certain situation based on that client’s own goals.

Here’s how that looks different in a therapy setting:

Let’s say we have a client that comes to therapy because they have difficulty adapting to the needs of their job and they often find that they lack the motivation or energy needed to complete those tasks.

On the surface level, many people might jump to problem solving. Let’s figure out how you can organize these tasks, prioritize and get through them as well as you can. Maybe we can also talk about your sleep schedule or figure out if you should look for a different job. While these may all be part of the picture, they miss some important things that might be going on.

From an autism-informed lens, we might be more interested in the sensory inputs this client is exposed to throughout the day and find out that they work in a loud, busy office where they are asked to do tasks verbally without any written follow-up. We might also learn that there are social interactions throughout the day that feel confusing at times and take a great deal of energy to get through. Through these observations, we might recognize that this client is absolutely burnt out. They are overloaded on a sensory level and are put in a position where they need to mask, socially, all throughout the day. Their battery is drained by 11:00am and they don’t have the tools necessary to recharge, so they shame themselves instead, believing that they should “just get over it.” They try to push through every day, without a break, because that’s what they feel those around them want. They feel alone in a room full of people and don’t get a reprieve or the connection they desire.

The world is overwhelming for everyone at times, but it can be even more overwhelming for autistic individuals. If we don’t understand our own nervous systems, our sensory sensitivities, the rules that we live by, and the social cues that we’re missing, we can quickly find ourselves lacking compassion and a realistic path forward. In order for us to work through a problem, we need to understand why exactly this is a problem for us, personally, and what we want the outcome to look like, personally. We want to understand how what we’ve been doing have been attempts at adapting and honor those attempts before working to fix something. Therapy is not “one-size-fits-all” and it should be personalized to you and your own experience of the world.

To find out how autism-informed therapy can help, or to learn more about some of the concepts mentioned here, click the links below: