My practice provides counselling for adults who are navigating life with high functioning autism.
For some individuals, ASD is newly on their radar, while others might have known about it for years. Whether you are recently diagnosed with ASD, self-identifying, or simply exploring neuro-divergence, feel free to consider arranging a time for an intro chat. You do not need a formal diagnosis to begin.
For those who might have received a late diagnosis of ASD, there may be a mix of feelings including relief, confusion, frustration, and perhaps some sense of validation.
These realizations bring new challenges, but they also open doors to the deepening of self-understanding.
Sessions are not “”a fix”” but a framework for self-discovery:
The sessions do not provide “treatment” for ASD, and are not geared towards treating or “fixing” the person or any conditions. There are no attempts to change any core neurotype.
Instead, the focus is on getting to know oneself better as one explores past events, situations, tendencies, thinking patterns, emotions, sensitivities, behaviors, strengths and struggles from new angles based on new understanding.
Equipped with the clarity of updated perspective, current options and future goals can be explored that facilitate the making of choices and decisions that contribute directly to quality of life.
A Safe Space:
Sessions are completely confidential, and free of judgment. The individual sets the pace. Also, there is no need to feel that “information must be supplied”. Preferences for privacy are respected at all times.
The daily struggle is real:
Sessions also provide the opportunity to acknowledge the struggle, how day-to-day life includes degrees of challenge, sensory input and over-stimulation.
Living in an environment with the prevailing cultural and societal expectations designed for neurotypical norms creates real friction.
The attempts to cope and manage effectively are often burdensome, stressful, anxiety-provoking, exhausting, triggering or overwhelming and can leave one feeling tense, agitated, distressed, worn thin and in need of recovery.
Empowerment:
But now, imagine learning how to identify exactly when and why things go well – and when and why they go sideways.
What strategies might facilitate this ability to identify what might benefit from change, and in which contexts? And what strategies might facilitate developing action steps that result in positive outcomes?
Imagine the value derived from navigating life in ways that respect your mind and body.
.
Sessions provide a collaborative approach to facilitate awareness building:
.
Collaborative Growth and Daily Living:
The exploratory discussions within sessions often focus on enhancing communication patterns, daily productivity, and overall life satisfaction. The dialogue builds practical frameworks tailored directly to one’s experiences of day to day life.
.
This kind of collaborative approach can contribute to the organic development of strategies and solutions over time that are doable and genuinely fit with each specific individual, as opposed to any reliance on predetermined formulas.
.
Customizing Functional Solutions:
Particular methods at times serve one individual brilliantly but for another person, not so much. The specific situation, context, values and perspective of the individual contributes to the kinds of strategies that work well for them.
.
So the process of discovering useful tools can be a very engaging, dynamic, and revealing process that honors individual differences without the need to bend to standardized expectations.
.
Exploring ASD Experiences:
.
Dedicated sessions:
It can be helpful to keep in mind that these sessions for individual adults living with high-functioning autism or exploring neuro-divergency can be quite different from general counselling. These sessions often do not have a crisis-management focus and/or are not focused on “fixing or treating” any conditions.
.
While at times the person might wish to explore specific struggles they have experienced, it can often be the case that they arrive at the session without anything particular they want to talk about – they just feel they would like to talk about their experiences and/or thoughts from their own point of view, in their own way, and at their own pace.
.
This is common and customary, and the sessions provide ample opportunity for this kind of open-ended exploration. Often these explorations – which might start with something “seemingly small or seemingly insignificant” – end up revealing blindspots, deepening self-understanding, expanding perspective, and unlocking new options for ways forward.
.
These dedicated sessions offer valuable space for exploring daily experiences with autism. Individuals might find that this kind of dialogue rarely happens elsewhere in daily life.
In the case you might be interested in setting up a time for an intro chat, please feel free to send an email that includes some windows of times, along with your time zone, that might be convenient for you.
.
It can be challenging to find a counsellor or psychotherapist that one feels is a good fit, so an intro chat can be a good first step to start. What would you like to get out of your counselling sessions, were you to begin? What would you like to make sure to say, and/or to ask, in an intro chat – what would be meaningful, for you?
