August was a truly horrific month for political and media attacks on Neurodivergent people. This was most tragically seen in the racist, classist, ableist assault on Black Autistic Professor Jason Arday. There is a section dedicated to him below.

The first Black Autism Acceptance Day takes place on September 19th. Founded by Ayanna Sanaa Davis, aka , it highlights the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding and advocacy. Attendance is free and open to all. There will be two days of online speakers and panels from 5 to 9pm UK time.

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Autistic Resistance & Challenging Neuronormativity in the Therapy Room

Therapy either upholds neuronormativity and pathologises Autistic people, or challenges normative values and supports Autistic wellbeing through neuroaffirming resistance.

This 45-minute webinar is available to watch on demand now.

Whether you’re a therapist wishing to take the next step in your neuroaffirming practice, or an Autistic person seeking greater understanding of the ecosystemic factors impacting your wellbeing, this is for you.

From what neuronormativity is and how it shapes services, to how Autistic people and therapists can resist pathologisation and push back, the webinar explores the core role power and privilege play in our environments and our mental health.

A month’s access is £5 and all my other downloadable resources are included, as well as the full article archive.

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Webinars, Events and Training

Please note the listings below are all live online events and as such I am unable to verify or endorse content. Times are UK time - convert here. Please confirm details before booking.

Regular live online support and interest groups can now be found here.

September

Burnout, Masking and The Body: A Somatic Lens On ND Burnout with Octavia Landy - Onlinevents - Wednesday, September 2nd - 6 to 8pm - By donation

Back to School - Pete Wharmby - Wednesday, September 2nd - 7 to 8.30pm - £10

Masking Black Autistic Girls in UK Schools with Dr Tiffany Nelson & Wardah Farah - A2ndvoice CIC - Thursday, September 3rd - 7 to 8pm - Free

Different Minds Online Book Launch - Pete Wharmby - Thursday, September 3rd - 8 to 9pm - Free

Polyvagal Purrs: Rescue Cat Inspired Self Care for Trauma and AuDHD with Eve Menezes Cunningham - Onlinevents - Saturday, September 5th - 10am to 12pm - By donation

Understanding Teen Anxiety - Becky Richens, Independent Mental Health Nurse Consultant - Sunday, September 6th - 1 to 3pm - £35

Building Our Resilience Course with Joe Lenton - NeuroHub Community Ltd - Starts Wednesday, September 6th - 6 to 7pm - Pay what you can

Whiteness in Therapy - Lucia Sarmiento Verano - Monday, September 7th - 6 to 7pm - By donation

Everything You’ve Heard About Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is Probably Wrong - Sonny Jane Wise - Monday, September 7th - 1 to 3am - From AU$25

Transitions, Change & Uncertainty - Choose Your Way ND BrainSpace - Tuesday, September 8th - 12 to 1pm - Free

Cothú Autistic-Led Parent Programme Training for Professionals - AUsome Training - Starts Tuesday, September 8th - 1.30 to 6pm - From £966

Beyond RSD: Building Confidence as a Neurodivergent Business Owner with Suzi Payton - Inclusion Support Hub - Wednesday, September 9th - 2 to 3pm - Free

Inclusive Approaches to Supporting Neurodivergent Children with Feeding Challenges - RDs for Neurodiversity - Starts Wednesday, September 9th - 5 to 7pm - US$1350

The Two Spirals Model of Neurodivergent Wellbeing: A One-Day Masterclass with Louise Lucas & Zena Nicholas - Curiosity Spot & Counsellors’ Staffroom - Friday, September 11th - 9.30am to 3.30pm - From £155

Autism in Black Autistic Adult Summit - Friday, September 11th to Sunday 13th - Free

Beyond The Label: Understanding Autism - Becky Richens, Independent Mental Health Nurse Consultant - Sunday, September 13th - 1 to 3pm - £35

Supporting Autistic Young People with Self-Acceptance with Jess Garner - GROVE Online Community for Autistic Young People - Sunday, September 13th - 7 to 9pm - Free

Autism and Kink with John Pendal - Wicked Grounds - Sunday, September 13th - 7 to 9pm - From US$22.63

Beyond The Label: Understanding ADHD - Becky Richens, Independent Mental Health Nurse Consultant - Tuesday, September 15th - 9 to 11am - £35

Beyond Bites, How Context Shapes Eating - Laura Hellfeld - Tuesday, September 15th - 10 to 11.30am - £3.72

Rethinking Struggle, Expectations and Neurodivergence in Children with Eliza Fricker - The Centre for Autism Wellbeing Hub - Tuesday, September 15th - 7 to 8.30pm - Free

Neurodivergent Adults, Burnout, Recovery and the Nervous System - Viv Dawes & Courtney Freedman-Thompson - Tuesday, September 15th & 22nd - 7 to 9pm - £33.22

Beyond OCD: Working with Compulsions in Neurodivergent Clients with Dr Emma Bede - Wednesday, September 16th - 10am to 12pm - Pay what you can

Autism Course for Teachers, Principals and SNAs - AUsome Training - Starts Wednesday, September 16th - 7 to 9pm - £113.40

Alexithymia and Autism - Pete Wharmby - Wednesday, September 16th - 8 to 8.40pm - Free

Here Together, The Neuro-Affirming School Trainer Program - AUsome Training - Starts Thursday, September 17th - 10am to 1pm - £630

ADHD, Autistic & AuDHD Peer Reflection Group for Therapists, Counsellors, Mentors and Coaches with Tanja Sharpe & Jill Holly - Creative Counsellors - Thursday, September 17th - 6.30 to 8pm - Included in Creative Counsellors £10 monthly membership

Spelling 101 for Non-Speaking Unschoolers (and Other People Too) with Rachel Katz Maeroff - MediaJustice - Thursday, September 17th - 9 to 10.30pm - By donation

Hormones, ADHD & Me - Becky Richens, Independent Mental Health Nurse Consultant - Friday, September 18th - 9 to 11am - £35

Speaking Up at School: Communication with Education Staff with Laura Hellfeld - Little Hiccups - Friday, September 18th - 10am to 12pm - Free

Black Autism Acceptance Day Virtual Summit - Ayanna Sanaa Davis - Saturday, September 19th to Sunday 20th - 5 to 9pm - Free

Resourcing Neurodivergent Clients Beyond Burnout and Overwhelm with Louise Lucas - Onlinevents - Monday, September 21st - 6.30 to 8pm - Pay what you can

Parenting When You’re Neurodivergent with Dr Chris Worfolk & Dr Lucy Rigley - Leeds Autism Practice - Tuesday, September 22nd - 7 to 8.15pm - £11.55

Speaking Up at School: Communication with Education Staff with Laura Hellfeld - Little Hiccups - Wednesday, September 23rd - 7 to 9pm - Free

Autistic Burnout - Pete Wharmby - Wednesday, September 23rd - 7 to 8.30pm - £10

Workshop Series: The PDA Neurotype - Trauma Geek - Wednesday, September 23rd and Friday 25th - 7 to 9.30/10pm - From US$50

Harnessing Interoception in Autism and ADHD - Dr Jennifer Kemp - Thursday, September 24th - 9 to 11am - From AU$73.13

Supporting PDA pupils - AUsome Training - Starts Thursday, September 24th - 7 to 9pm - £113.40

Selective Mutism International Conference 2026 - soundemotive - Friday, September 25th to Sunday 27th - 10am to 5pm - From £37.93

2026 STAR Sensory Symposium: Sensory Integration & Mental Health - STAR Institute - Friday, September 25th & October 9th - From US$199

PDA Health & Wellness Conference - PDA North America - Friday, September 25th - 3.30 to 11pm - US$125

Beyond The Label: Understanding PDA - Becky Richens, Independent Mental Health Nurse Consultant - Tuesday, September 29th - 9 to 11am - £35

Parenting Neurodivergent Teenagers Five-Week Course - Viv Dawes Autistic Advocate - Starts Tuesday, September 29th - 7 to 9pm - £49.46

What if We Made the World Bigger? Rethinking Comfort, Growth & Neurodivergent Wellbeing with Teodora Byrne - NDwise Hub - Wednesday, September 30th - 7.30 to 9pm - £12

October onwards

7th Global Online PDA Space Summit: Capacity & Capability - The PDA Space - Thursday, October 1st to Sunday 4th - Free

Get Konnected Autistic-Led Professional Course for People who Support Autistic Children and Young People - AUsome Training - Starts Thursday, October 1st - 11am to 1pm - £495

The Black ADHD Experience Conference - Destiny Huff Consulting - Friday, October 2nd to Sunday 4th

In Conversation with Pete Wharmby and Eliza Fricker: School - Thursday, October 1st - 8 to 9.30pm - £16.96

Being Me 10-Week Online Group Experience for Autistic 8 to 12-year-olds - GROVE - Starts Monday, October 5th - 11am to 12pm - From £250

Being Me 10-Week Online Group Experience for Autistic 12 to 16-year-olds - GROVE - Starts Monday, October 5th - 5.30 to 6.30pm - From £250

Being Me 10-Week Online Group Experience for Autistic 8 to 12-year-olds - GROVE - Starts Tuesday, October 6th - 5.30 to 6.30pm - From £250

NeuroJustice Summit 2026 - Fish in a Tree - Friday, October 9th to Sunday 11th - From US$150

ATAAC 2026: Assistive Technology & Communication Conference - Wednesday 21st & Thursday 22nd October - €80 online

Autistic Girls: Gender, Identity and Growing up Autistic Workshop for Allies - SWAN - Thursday, October 22nd - 7 to 9pm - From £10

Connection Has Many Languages: Rethinking How We Recognise Connection with Teodora Byrne - NDwise Hub - Friday, October 30th - 7.30 to 9pm - £12

The Think Sensory Summit Season 2 - Mick Olds & Greg Santucci - Monday, November 16th to Thursday 19th - Free

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Articles and Resources

New content from around the web

Professor Jason Arday

Kaligirwa on Professor Jason Arday and how anti-blackness kills

Kieran Rose on Professor Jason Arday, autism, racism, academia and the things we shouldn’t know

His students share everything good about Professor Jason Arday

Regina Martin explains how people fundamentally misunderstand white supremacy

Neurodivergent advocates discuss the media and systemic structural racism

Books

‘Great and Unfortunate Things’ by Jason Arday with Eve Claxton

‘We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity’ by Chantelle Jessica Lewis & Jason Arday

‘Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy’ edited by Jason Arday & Heidi Safia Mirza

‘Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova’ by Jason Arday

Children and Parenting

Mick Olds shares how collaborative problem solving can work through an episode of Bluey

Shubha Balbaer asks the world to see her son the way he sees himself

GROVE are asking parents, carers and young people to help shape their Neurodivergent Mentoring Training & Qualification

Em Hammond explains spoon theory in a child-friendly way

Tanya Valentin outlines how low demand parenting doesn’t start with lowering demands

Education

Helen Buzdugan on being Autistic or ADHD in a behaviourist school system

RISE With Me cards have been co-created by Neurodivergent young people and professionals to build more positive experiences at school

‘The School is Lava: A Story About Emotionally Based School Avoidance’ is now available from Danielle Jata-Hall

Rachel Dorsey shares a child’s experience of restraint and seclusion

Luisa Gray reflects on school, childhood, and why she never knew she was AuDHD

Michaela Silsby asks what the problem is with accommodating everybody

Dr Destiny Huff explains that being neuroaffirming doesn’t mean removing challenge

Sarah Boon shares ten things school needed to know about their younger AuDHD self

Mick Olds explains quick ways to incorporate movement and stop policing posture in a school environment

Marnina Kammersell looks at unschooling strategies for when consistency is hard

Apraxia and Non-speakers

Tiffany Joseph looks at how communication could be easier for Autistic people

David Kaufer challenges moves to restrict access to communication methods

Shubha Balabaer shares three weeks in a communication journey

Neurodivergent Cultures and Ways of Being

Ayanna Sanaa Davis explains why Black Autism Acceptance Day was intentionally established in September

Lovette Jallow shares how she stims

David Gray-Hammond explores autism myths and who Autistic people are

Joyner Emerick outlines why Autistic people need understanding beyond ‘behaviours’

Thriving Autistic’s Discovery Programme resources and videos for recently identified Autistic adults are now available free

Chris Stephens shares their experience of monotropism in the workplace

Tiffany Joseph explains the apraxia - dyspraxia spectrum

Wellbeing and Neurodivergence

Janae Elisabeth shares her experience of PDA and CPTSD, and freeze and fawn states

Dr Megan Anna Neff explores autism, ADHD and dissociation

Ayanna Sanaa Davis on the isolation and loneliness that can come with being Disabled

Teodora Byrne questions why we’ve been taught to distrust comfort

Sonny Jane Wise shares things they’re getting better at as someone diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder

Dr Destiny Huff shares how she tells the difference between depression, burnout, and when she’s experiencing both

David Gray-Hammond explains psychosis

‘I Need My Space (But I Like You Too!): A Neurodivergent Guide to All Types of Relationships’ by Alice Bramhill is available to pre-order

Kelly Mahler, David Gray-Hammond, Adele Murray & Helen Edgar discuss the importance of environments and felt safety for Neurodivergent people

Stephanie Bealer outlines the difference between accountability and shame for Neurodivergent adults

Tiffany Joseph asks why society doesn’t prepare us to expect, welcome, and support disability as part of the human experience

Rolondo Talbott on the racialisation of assistive technology and accommodations

Neurodiversity Paradigm Exploration

Sonny Jane Wise has created an updated version of their Neurodivergent Umbrella graphic

Dr Patty Gently on the neurobiological reality of giftedness as a neurodivergence, and the social justice implications

Neurodivergent-Affirming Practice

Naureen Hunani urges neuroaffirming clinicians to stop exhausting themselves trying to convince people who have already decided they won’t change

Cassie Krajewski shares the books she’s reading as a white therapist learning how to decolonise her therapy practice

Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia have created a checklist to help identify affirming therapists

Naureen Hunani on the harm of ABA-based feeding therapy

Rebecca Engle explains why her childhood made her question behaviourism

Neurodivergent Health

Janae Elisabeth explains how she deals with health demands as a PDAer

Dr Linda Bluestein outlines anxiety and fatigue as signs of hypermobility

Timotheus Gordon looks at navigating the healthcare system as a Neurodivergent person

Dr Linda Bluestein on young women, walking sticks, and the cost of disbelief

Laura Hellfeld considers food exploration as more than eating

Research

Dr Mary Doherty reflects on Autistic shame as an under-recognised determinant of mental health

Sivathasan et al. issue a call to action to align counselling psychology with neurodiversity scholarship

Doherty et al. explore Autistic psychiatrists’ perspectives on mental healthcare for Autistic people

Dr Jaime Prout explains research into genetic markers for hEDS

Bloom et al. propose Neuro-EDS, a clinical framework describing a neuro-predominant phenotype within hEDS/HSD

Jesse Meadows discusses research shifting the focus in ADHD from attention to energy

Language and Pathologisation

Sandhya Menon questions whether ODD is PDA in disguise

Kieran Rose explores the media frenzy and political narratives around Autistic people

Evaleen Whelton asks who gets to decide who is Disabled?

Marie Camin reflects on the glass onion of the autism severity debate

Marion McLaughlin explains why embracing being Neurodivergent doesn’t mean denying being Disabled

David Gray-Hammond explores what the UK’s ‘overdiagnosis review’ means for Autistic & ADHD people and their families

Dr Monique Botha on the evidence for ADHD and clinical diagnosis

Sonny Jane Wise explains that diagnostic categories are socially constructed but the underpinning experiences are very real

Alex Kronstein on elopement vs going somewhere

Sonny Jane Wise discusses us of the term ‘Neurodivergent’ without losing specificity

Dr Jaime Hoerricks asks where ‘profound autism’ ends and ‘profound unsupportedness’ begins

Find more resources on my website.

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Work with Me

My inbox is always open to hear from people who’d like to work with me as a counsellor or rewind trauma therapist; collaborate professionally; seek consultation; or suggest ideas for potential projects.

What I offer:

Online counselling for adults (18+). Sessions usually take place weekly, fortnightly, or on an ad hoc basis.

Rewind trauma therapy for PTSD symptoms can be carried out as part of counselling work or as a stand-alone therapy.

One-to-one neurodiversity discussion for anyone wanting to understand more, and ad hoc clinical consultation and supervision around neurodiversity for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, education professionals and others.

One-to-one video calls for those who are considering becoming counsellors and would like support navigating the range of qualification pathways. Find out more at How to Become a Counsellor in the UK.

I offer a free, 15-minute online video call for anyone who is interested in counselling or rewind trauma therapy with me and would like to find out more.

Please get in touch via contact@jadefarrington.com

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Disclaimer: Inclusion in this roundup is for information purposes only and is not an endorsement. No responsibility can be taken for inconvenience or loss due to the content of linked materials, or due to mistakes in, or subsequent changes to, event details. While efforts are made to check that resources are in line with neurodiversity paradigm values, it is not possible to fully check all content, particularly in the case of books and paywalled courses. Nothing in this round up constitutes medical or legal advice. Readers are encouraged to critically engage with content and to undertake due diligence.

Affiliate links: This newsletter contains affiliate links for Amazon, and Kieran Rose, The Autistic Advocate. This means that if you make a purchase through one of these links then I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

A few of you told me how helpful ‘Three Essential Resources I Regularly Share with Clients: Practical support for Autistic and ADHD adults’ was, so here are a few more.

Whether you’re Autistic/ADHD yourself, or you support people who are, these resources may help put words and frameworks to some common experiences, and help you explore well beyond the brain.

INTRODUCTORY CLINICAL GUIDE FOR PRIMARY CARE CLINICIANS: AUTISTIC & ADHD CO-OCCURING HEALTH CONDITIONS

Resource by All Brains Belong VT (2023)

There’s increasing community recognition and research that being Autistic/ADHD can bring with it a higher likelihood of experiencing a range of co-occurring health conditions and other neurodivergences. This guide from All Brains Belong highlights many of these.

The pdf is designed for clinicians and provides an important resource that Autistic and ADHD people can hand to their GP or other healthcare professionals. Knowledge of these connections is hugely variable from person to person, so it can be complete luck of the draw whether a professional is able to connect the dots between your autism or ADHD diagnosis and the range of physical symptoms you’re experiencing.

That’s why this guide is so useful for Autistics and ADHDers too. Understanding what may be going on for us health wise - and what we might need as a result - can be a vital step in accessing the care we actually need, instead of feeling dismissed by professionals who may be missing the knowledge necessary to realise which tests or referrals are needed.

Autism and ADHD are not things that exist in the brain, and they’re not isolated from everything else. Our neurology covers our entire bodymind. The way everything we experience is received, processed, understood, stored, reinterpreted, and in turn interacts with the broader environment comes under this, in constant two-way flow. Understanding our ecosystemic reality, and challenging the separation of mind and body, can help us to understand more about ourselves and our needs on a very practical level.

You can get the resource as a pdf.

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SPOTLIGHT ON AUTISTIC MELTDOWNS: DISTINGUISHING INTERNALISED MELTDOWNS FROM SHUTDOWNS

Article by Mati Boulakia-Bortnick (2025)

Autistic meltdowns and shutdowns can be experienced very differently from person to person. Someone may find their meltdowns come in the form of explosive rage - while another may cry uncontrollably, for example.

Understanding the difference between meltdowns, internalised meltdowns, and shutdowns - and how each looks for you - can be extremely useful. They’re very different whole bodymind states, which means supporting yourself and recovering in different ways. Noticing the differences in energy and the ways in which they express can help you to map out and understand triggers, signs, preventative steps, and what you need when they do happen. Mistaking one for another - or conflating them with other experiences such as panic attacks - can make it harder to get your needs met, or mean you don’t get support at all.

Mati, , gives examples of the internalised meltdowns that are often mistaken for shutdowns, and why they’re so commonly misunderstood. You can Mati’s piece here.

’s piece on distinguishing meltdowns and shame spirals is also a valuable read for many.

AUTISTICS WHO DON’T KNOW THEIR OWN BODIES ARE CAUSING HARM TO THE MOST MARGINALIZED IN OUR COMMUNITY: A CALL DIRECTLY TO YOU AUTISTICS WITH COMMUNICATION PRIVILEGE

Article by Tiffany Joseph (2025)

This piece from was written in response to the harm caused by speaking Autistics denigrating and dismissing some of the communication methods used by Non-Speakers.

Whether or not that applies to you, the reality is that community knowledge around Dyspraxic traits and experiences is nowhere near as advanced as it is around Autistic and ADHD ones - at least not from where I’m writing in the UK.

It’s very difficult for adults to get an assessment for dyspraxia (developmental coordination disorder) on the NHS, and many people who experience a significant number of traits - or would even meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis - are completely unaware of it.

I share Tiffany’s piece with clients not because I think they’re out there trying to shut down the communication methods of Non-Speakers, but because understanding dyspraxia is relevant to all Autistics and ADHDers, and many mention challenges that could potentially be well understood through this lens. I also consider it incredibly important for all of us to listen to, and to learn from and about, the most marginalised members of the Autistic and broader Neurodivergent communities.

I’ve written about the pool of traits that lead people to identify as Autistic, ADHD, or both (AuDHD). I included a link to Tiffany’s piece in there, along with a note that we probably need to include Dyspraxic traits in the pool too. Autistic, ADHD and Dyspraxic attributes may come as a group. Each individual who identities as one of these things almost invariably experiences at least some traits from the other diagnostic categories. It’s important to remember that the lines drawn between them are choices humans have made, not essential and unchanging barriers, and that there is considerable overlap. Dyspraxic, Autistic and ADHD attributes and experiences absolutely exist, but the medical diagnoses that seek to characterise them are evolving constructs.

Tiffany’s piece can help people begin to understand the motor differences that may underpin or contribute to experiences from Autistic inertia and ADHD paralysis, to why so many of struggle to find the right words - or any words at all - when under stress or pressure.

As mentioned earlier, autism and ADHD (and dyspraxia) are not merely brain differences, and they are not things we’ll find located there. They are whole bodymind neurological differences that have a far greater impact than merely the way we think or process information.

You can read TJ’s piece here, along with a follow-up about the apraxia-dyspraxia spectrum.

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Work with me

What I offer:

Online counselling for adults (18+). Sessions usually take place weekly, fortnightly, or on an ad hoc basis.

Rewind trauma therapy for PTSD symptoms can be carried out as part of counselling work or as a stand-alone therapy.

One-to-one neurodiversity discussion for anyone wanting to understand more, and ad hoc clinical consultation and supervision around neurodiversity for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, education professionals and others.

I offer a free, 15-minute online video call for anyone who is interested in supervision, counselling or rewind trauma therapy with me and would like to find out more.

Please get in touch via contact@jadefarrington.com

That’s the premise of my webinar recorded for the Autistic Mental Health Conference 2026 which you can watch below.

Curated around the theme of Ecosystemic Causes of Mental Health issues, the event hosted a variety of talks for Autistic people; parents and families; professionals and practitioners; and advocates and allies.

My own presentation challenges therapists to take the next step in their neuroaffirming practice. It suggests important considerations for Autistic people and families who may be seeking their own therapy, as well as anyone advising or supporting.

Paid subscribers can watch my 45-minute talk below, and also have on demand access to the entire archive of articles, videos, and downloadable resources.

In my webinar, you’ll learn about:

• The Ecosystemic Model of Distress & Wellbeing and how we and our mental health cannot be separated from our environments

• How Autistic people’s existence is politicised by these environments, leading to the questioning of our very being

• How Autistic people and therapists can resist pathologisation and push back against neuronormativity

• The core role power and privilege play in our environments, including therapeutic spaces

• What neuronormativity is and how it shapes mental health services

• Why therapeutic practice can be so slow to change and embrace the reality of neurodiversity

• How Western therapy is shaped by privileged groups and pathologises and others those who can’t or don’t comply with systems of power

• The limitations of person centred therapy when faced with neuronormativity

• What Autistic people can do to access neuroaffirming services

• The importance and value of lived experience in neuroaffirming practice

• What neuroaffirming actually looks like

• How professionals can get the basics right even if they don’t specialise in - or know much about - neuroaffirming support

• How as therapists we all need to take accountability for our work with marginalised people and that we can all inadvertently cause harm

• What therapists can do to take the next step or begin their journey in neuroaffirming practice

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Watch my talk below

Subscriptions are £5 per month or £50 per year, or the equivalent in your local currency. There’s no tie-in so you can cancel whenever you like. You’ll also have on demand access to the entire archive of articles, videos, and downloadable resources as long as you remain a member.

If a higher price is showing it’s likely to be because you’re on an iPhone, and Apple takes a cut. You can avoid this by signing up via a web browser, or on a laptop or desktop.

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August always tends to a be a quieter month for webinars, and illness means the resource round up is smaller too. There’s still plenty to keep you reading…

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If I were to include every resource I signpost to in my work as a counsellor it would be a very extensive list.

Nothing works for everyone, even if the topic covered feels highly relevant. But the frequency with which these resources come up - and the positive feedback that many clients give about them - makes me think they’re worth sharing with a wider audience.

NEUROWILD COMMUNICATION ASSIST TOOL (CAT)

Resource by Em Hammond (2024)

In everyday life, people rarely stop to think about different communication styles. Neuronormative communication is so embedded that people may go through life never having realised that differences exist beyond a few well known examples such as sign language. But communication runs much deeper than simply whether we’re using mouth words or augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). This lack of awareness can lead to enormous difficulties when people have mismatched communication styles, and no idea this is happening.

Some process quickly and internally. Some need to vocalise to order their thoughts. Others don’t have an internal monologue and can only gain clarity by writing or speaking. Some people need time away to process emotions before it’s possible to have a constructive conversation. Some want validation or problem solving. Others want to be heard or reassured.

When differences are known, it’s usually Neurodivergent people who are expected to do the work of changing their communication style to better fit with neuronormative expectations - not because neuronormative communication is better, but because it’s dominant and holds privilege over divergent styles.

This tool from Em Hammond helps bring these differences into awareness in a non-pathologising way. People who want to better communicate with one another can sit down and use the resource together.

Not everyone we want improved communication with is going to be willing and able to come together with us to use a tool like this. It’s still useful even if it’s one sided, as it draws our attention to differences we may not have been aware of, and supports us to consider how we might bridge those gaps in effective and affirming ways.

I work with Neurodivergent adults, and frequently signpost to this resource when people want to improve communication with an important person in their life. It’s also useful for young people, as well as professionals supporting effective communication.

You can view it on Facebook and download the pdf from Teachers Pay Teachers.

LOOPS OF CONCERN - REVISITED

Article by Sonny Hallett (2025)

Being monotropic (the predominant attentional style of Autistics and ADHDers) can be beautiful, especially when we’re in a deep flow state with one of our passions. But it can also be painful, when we’re stuck in a loop going over and over the same difficult memory or problem, or we’re unable to start or stop something.

Sonny Hallett published this self-help guide to rumination and inertia, specially tailored to common Autistic and ADHD thought processes. Sometimes we know where the difficulty lies and what to do about it, but it can often take a lot more thought and consideration to really understand the roots or to move on.

Sonny notes that although rumination (going over and over the same thing) and inertia (struggling to get started or stop) can feel very different, they can share the same fundamental mechanics of monotropism.

Their guide offers prompts to support you through the process of working out what’s needed to move past the loop or being stuck. Sonny provides examples of ruminating ahead of a meeting and being unable to start cooking. However, the guide can be used flexibly to support you to unpick your thoughts, questions and feelings around pretty much any challenge.

You can read it here.

A FIELD GUIDE TO EARTHLINGS: AN AUTISTIC/ASPERGER VIEW OF NEUROTYPICAL BEHAVIOR

Book by Ian Ford (2006)

This is by far the oldest resource on the list - which you can probably tell by the title and its reference to Asperger.

Despite some outdated language and statistics, this is a book that many Autistics (and other Neurodivergents) still find helpful in understanding why so many people around them act the way they do. What it describes isn’t actually neurotypical behaviour, but neuronormative behaviour, which is privileged by society as a whole. People of any neurology are likely to be influenced by and try to conform to neuronormativity, to a greater or lesser degree. Neurotypicals are simply more able to do so successfully and with less effort.

This book was recommended to me by a supervisor while discussing how many people were looking for a resource to help them understand dominant social norms, small talk, and general neuronormative-style social skills.

Autistic and other Neurodivergent social skills are equally valid, and neuronormative social skills are not better. Research has indicated that different styles tend to work well when interacting with others who share the same style, though misunderstandings and communication challenges can still occur regardless. Neurotypicals still misunderstand and fall out with one another just as anyone else does, for example.

The double empathy problem highlights how responsibility for effective communication is a two-way street. Existing in the world that we do means it’s useful to understand people we want or need to interact with. Sometimes we might actively want to utilise neuronormative social skills, much like we might want to speak in another language.

Sometimes masking (adopting neuronormative ways of interacting both willingly or unwillingly, and consciously or unconsciously, is a type of masking) is forced on us as a matter of survival. It’s often the only way to access gatekept resources or services. It shouldn’t be that way, and no one should be forced to comply with neuronormativity. No one should be taught neuronormative social skills from the perspective that they are the only kind of social skills, nor that they are ‘correct’, ‘more acceptable’ or ‘better’ than any other type. They are not. We need to keep pushing for equal acceptance of Autistic and other Neurodivergent ways of being and for allistics (non-Autistics) and neurotypicals to learn divergent social skills and communication styles, while also having a choice to learn theirs too where that feels useful and possible as part of that two-way street.

To reiterate: Neuronormative social skills and communication styles are not better than Neurodivergent ones. No one should be made or expected to adopt them, nor should they be penalised if they do not.

I personally found this book extremely eye opening. It produced a lot of lightbulb moments, along with some sadness. The author identifies the neuronormative need to cling to existing ways of doing things until there is a readiness and willingness to move as a pack rather than as an individual, and change feels socially acceptable and emotionally safe. Along with the dynamics of power and privilege, this goes a long way to explaining why vital neuroaffirming changes are so slow to be enacted across society and systems, and such deep resistance is encountered, despite the overwhelming evidence of need.

You can buy a copy here.

THE NEURODIVERGENT FRIENDLY WORKBOOK OF DBT SKILLS (SECOND EDITION)

Workbook by Sonny Jane Wise (2026)

I know, this is a fourth resource. I’m sneaking it in with the excuse that I don’t exactly signpost to this; I email a copy to almost everyone I work with because I have a clinical licence and it holds something of value for pretty much every Autistic and ADHDer.

Some clients go through through it cover to cover; some pop in and out of it as particular sections feel relevant; some bring parts to discuss in more depth in our therapy sessions; and some never look at it again after agreeing to me sending it through. Genuinely no judgement here.

The second edition (check you’ve got the 2026 version selected from the side menu) updates and expands on Sonny’s original workbook, tailoring DBT skills to make them neuroaffirming and supportive for Autistic and ADHD adults.

It covers everything from spoons, burnout and alexithymia, through sensory needs, mindfulness, meltdowns and communication. The workbook centres environmental and systemic factors and disability, while promoting whatever agency each individual does have to increase self-awareness and make changes where they’re possible and wanted.

You can buy a copy here.

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Work with me

What I offer:

Online counselling for adults (18+). Sessions usually take place weekly, fortnightly, or on an ad hoc basis.

Rewind trauma therapy for PTSD symptoms can be carried out as part of counselling work or as a stand-alone therapy.

One-to-one neurodiversity discussion for anyone wanting to understand more, and ad hoc clinical consultation and supervision around neurodiversity for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, education professionals and others.

I offer a free, 15-minute online video call for anyone who is interested in supervision, counselling or rewind trauma therapy with me and would like to find out more.

Please get in touch via contact@jadefarrington.com

Libby’s new book, Supporting Teenagers with Selective Mutism: A Practical Guide for Schools, Families and Professionals, is out now.

Libby writes…

When an autistic child or young person does not speak in school, in a shop, at an appointment or in front of unfamiliar people, somebody will often say: ‘It’s part of his autism, isn’t it?’

Sometimes the words are intended to reassure. Sometimes they reflect uncertainty about whether a separate diagnosis matters. At other times, they become a reason to stop looking: the child is autistic, autistic communication is different, and therefore the silence requires no further explanation.

But this apparently simple statement can hide something important. Autism may shape how a young person communicates, processes language, experiences sensory information and responds to other people. It can also change the way selective mutism presents. However, autism does not make distressing or disabling barriers to speech unimportant. Nor does it mean that a young person cannot also meet the criteria for selective mutism.

If we absorb every difficulty into the word autism, we risk missing the child in front of us. We may overlook anxiety, shutdown, sensory threat, trauma, language-processing demands or a learned expectation that speaking is dangerous. Most importantly, we may fail to provide the particular support that would allow communication to become safer and more accessible.

Autism and selective mutism can coexist

Selective mutism is an anxiety-based difficulty in which a person who is able to speak in some situations is consistently unable to speak in others. It is not a deliberate refusal. The child is not being rude, oppositional, manipulative or attention-seeking. In the moment, speech is unavailable.

Autistic people can, of course, have selective mutism. Historically, however, autism and selective mutism were sometimes treated as competing explanations: if a child was autistic, their lack of speech was attributed to autism; if they had selective mutism, clinicians sometimes questioned whether autism could also be diagnosed. This either/or thinking has never reflected the complexity of real children.

An autistic young person may speak freely at home about a favourite subject, joke with siblings and have a sophisticated vocabulary, yet be unable to answer the register at school, ask for help when hurt or speak during an assessment. Another may be able to speak to one trusted adult but not to peers. Some can talk when the interaction is spontaneous but become silent the moment they are directly questioned. Others manage at school through enormous effort and then lose speech at home when their capacity is exhausted.

These patterns deserve careful assessment. The question is not simply, ‘Can this child speak?’ It is, ‘Under what conditions is speech accessible, and what happens when those conditions change?’

Why it can be harder to recognise in autistic young people

Selective mutism does not always look like complete, obvious silence. This is especially true for autistic children and teenagers, whose communication may already be highly variable.

A young person may use rehearsed phrases, echolalia, humour, a babyish voice, animal noises or growling when ordinary spontaneous speech is unavailable. They may answer with a single word, nod, shrug, smile or say ‘I don’t know’ to bring an interaction to an end. Some become exceptionally skilled at avoiding situations in which speech will be expected. They may position themselves behind a parent, arrive late, look busy, allow a friend to answer or communicate through a phone. Others speak just enough to remain unnoticed, while never initiating, asking for clarification or expressing their true views.

High verbal ability can make the difficulty easier to dismiss. Adults may say, ‘But he talks for England at home,’ as though fluent speech in one safe setting proves that speech is equally available everywhere. It does not. Communication competence and communication performance are not the same thing.

Masking adds another layer. An autistic pupil may force out answers at school because compliance feels essential, while experiencing intense distress internally. Staff see speech and assume all is well; the family sees exhaustion, irritability, shutdown, physical symptoms or loss of speech afterwards. If assessment considers only whether words were produced, it misses the cost of producing them.

The Communication Performance Framework ^TM

The Communication Performance Framework helps us separate three related but different things: competence, access and performance.

Communication competence is what the person knows and can do: their vocabulary, language knowledge, ideas, social understanding and ability to formulate a message. Communication access is whether they can reach and use those abilities in a particular moment. Performance is what we observe on the outside.

This distinction is crucial. A child may have the competence to answer a question but be unable to access speech because the room is noisy, unfamiliar people are watching, the question is unexpected, processing time is short and their nervous system has moved into a threat response. Their observed performance may be silence, a shrug or a scripted answer. That performance should not be mistaken for a lack of knowledge, lack of interest or deliberate non-compliance.

For autistic young people, access may be affected by several interacting factors: sensory overload, uncertainty, language load, executive-function demands, interoceptive confusion, fear of getting the answer wrong, previous negative experiences, social exposure, fatigue and the need for control or predictability. Selective mutism may sit within this wider access profile. It does not need to be artificially separated from autism, but neither should it disappear inside it.

The most useful question therefore becomes: ‘What is preventing this young person from accessing communication here?’ That moves us away from blame and towards practical change.

Not every loss of speech is selective mutism

Recognising selective mutism in autistic people does not mean labelling every period of silence as selective mutism. Autistic people may experience reduced speech or temporary loss of speech for many reasons. During overload or shutdown, language formulation may become slower or speech may disappear. In burnout, overall communication capacity may be reduced for a prolonged period. Some people find speech unreliable and prefer AAC, typing, gesture or other forms of communication. Others may become silent in response to trauma, pain, catatonia-like symptoms or overwhelming language-processing demands.

This is why thoughtful differential assessment matters. We need a detailed developmental and communication history, information from more than one setting and, wherever possible, the young person’s own account. We need to explore when speech is available, when it changes, what the person experiences internally and whether the pattern is consistent with selective mutism. We also need to consider co-occurring language, speech, hearing, mental-health and sensory needs.

The aim is not to collect diagnoses for their own sake. A useful diagnosis provides an explanation, protects the young person from harmful interpretations and guides support. If the label does none of those things, our formulation is not yet good enough.

Why the distinction matters

When selective mutism is dismissed as ‘just autism’, several things can go wrong.

First, the child may be expected to speak because adults know that they can do so elsewhere. They may be prompted repeatedly, praised extravagantly for talking, questioned in front of others or told that they must ‘use their words’. These responses increase self-consciousness and pressure, making speech less accessible.

Second, silence may be interpreted as an autistic preference that requires no intervention. Respecting non-speaking communication is essential, but respect does not mean ignoring distress. A child who wants to join in, ask for help or speak to a friend but cannot do so needs support. The goal is not to make them appear less autistic. It is to widen their choices and reduce the barriers that trap them.

Third, schools may set inappropriate speech targets: answer three questions in class, speak to an unfamiliar adult or order independently in a café. A target may look measurable while still being clinically unsound. If safety, regulation and communication access have not been addressed, the target simply measures how much distress the young person can tolerate.

Finally, important safeguarding issues can be missed. A young person who cannot report pain, bullying, abuse, confusion or a need to leave is vulnerable. They need reliable ways to communicate immediately; speech cannot be the price of receiving help.

Start with safety, not speech

My SAFE-STEPS approach was developed because speech cannot sensibly be treated as the starting point. The foundations come first: safety and environment, regulation, and recognition of the young person’s emotional experience. Only then should we consider carefully graded exposure and speech elicitation, always within a broader aim of communication and participation.

This matters particularly for autistic young people. A conventional programme may focus narrowly on moving speech from one person or place to another. Yet if the classroom is unbearably noisy, demands are unpredictable, the adult relationship feels unsafe or the child is already in burnout, adding a speaking exercise is unlikely to help. The environment is not background information; it is part of the intervention.

Safety may mean having a predictable arrival, a named trusted adult, reduced public questioning, permission not to speak, access to a quiet space and clear plans for communicating basic needs. Regulation may involve movement, sensory support, recovery time and adults noticing early signs of overload. Emotional support means acknowledging how hard the situation is without making the young person discuss feelings on demand.

Exposure can be valuable when it is genuinely gradual, collaborative and consent-based. It should build from what already feels possible, with the young person retaining control. It must never become flooding, bribery or a test of obedience. A child’s nervous system cannot be argued into safety.

Communication must be available now

A frequent mistake is to treat alternatives to speech as a last resort, as though writing, typing, gesture or AAC will prevent talking. In reality, removing communication pressure often creates more safety. Alternative communication gives the young person agency while speech is unavailable.

Every pupil with selective mutism should have an agreed way to ask for help, report illness or pain, say no, indicate that they do not understand and contact a trusted adult. This might include a help card, visual scale, written note, tablet, messaging system, symbol-based AAC or a pre-agreed signal. The method must work under stress, not merely when the child is calm in a practice session.

Schools also need to distinguish participation from speaking. A pupil can demonstrate knowledge through typing, pointing, matching, recording at home, submitting a video, using AAC or working with a trusted adult. These are not easy options or ways of avoiding learning. They are access arrangements that allow competence to be seen.

Listen to autistic young people

In the work informing my book on selective mutism in teenagers, I drew on the experiences of 505 young people. Again and again, their accounts showed that adults often notice the absence of speech but fail to understand the experience beneath it. Teenagers described pressure, embarrassment, exhaustion, fear of attention and the frustration of knowing exactly what they wanted to say while being unable to say it.

Older pupils are particularly vulnerable to being misunderstood. Their silence may be described as a choice because they can speak to selected people. Their avoidance may be framed as defiance. Their use of a phone or a friend to communicate may be removed in the name of independence. Yet adolescence brings greater social scrutiny, more teachers, busier environments, oral examinations, presentations, work experience and growing expectations to self-advocate. The consequences of being unable to access speech become larger just as adults may become less sympathetic.

We must ask young people what helps, but we must also make it possible for them to answer. A face-to-face verbal conversation is not a neutral method of gathering the views of someone with selective mutism. Offer written questions in advance, messaging, rating scales, drawing, sorting cards, AAC or communication through a trusted person. Silence during a pupil-voice meeting is not evidence that the young person has no view.

What schools can do

Good support is not complicated in principle, although it requires consistency. Adults should reduce the sense of being watched and tested. Use comments rather than a stream of direct questions. Allow generous processing time, then continue naturally rather than waiting in conspicuous silence. Avoid asking the pupil to repeat a response for an audience or drawing attention to unexpected speech.

Agree a whole-school communication plan so the young person does not have to renegotiate their needs with every teacher. Identify one trusted adult, but do not make that person the only route to safety. Prepare for changes, supply written information beforehand and reduce unnecessary uncertainty. Teach staff that communication may fluctuate from lesson to lesson and that a difficult day does not erase previous progress.

Assessment and support should consider both autism and selective mutism. Autism-informed adjustments may include sensory accommodations, predictable routines, reduced language load, clear expectations, low-arousal interaction and recovery time. Selective-mutism support may include removal of speech pressure, carefully planned communication hierarchies and gradual expansion of comfortable communication. These approaches should be integrated around the individual, not delivered as two unrelated packages.

Where needs are significant, provision may need to be specified in an EHCP. Vague wording such as ‘access to support’ or ‘opportunities to develop confidence’ is not enough. The plan should state who will support the pupil, how often, what training staff require, how the environment will be adjusted, what non-speaking communication will be available and how progress will be reviewed without equating progress solely with spoken words.

Redefining progress

Speech is only one possible sign of progress. Before speech changes, a young person may begin entering the room more comfortably, staying for longer, communicating by text, showing humour, making choices, initiating through gesture, tolerating another person nearby or recovering more quickly after interaction. These changes matter because they show that access and participation are widening.

Even when speech increases, we should ask about cost. Is the young person speaking with less fear, or merely complying more effectively? Can they communicate something difficult, or only give rehearsed answers? Can they say no? Can they ask for clarification? Are they exhausted afterwards? Progress that depends on masking and collapse is not sustainable progress.

The long-term aim should be flexible, autonomous communication. For some, that will include increasingly available speech. For others, it will involve a reliable combination of speech, typing, gesture and AAC. Success is not normal-looking communication. Success is being able to connect, learn, participate, express identity and obtain help without overwhelming distress.

Beyond ‘just autism’

Autism is not a minor detail in the assessment of selective mutism. It may profoundly shape why speech becomes inaccessible and what support will be effective. But ‘it’s part of his autism’ must never become the end of the conversation.

The better response is curiosity. Is this young person silent because speech feels unsafe? Are sensory and processing demands consuming the resources needed for language? Is this shutdown, burnout, selective mutism or an interaction between several factors? What can the adults and environment change? What communication is available right now? What does the young person want us to understand?

A diagnosis should not divide a child into separate conditions, but neither should one diagnosis eclipse everything else. We need an integrated formulation that sees the whole person: autistic, anxious perhaps, communicating differently, capable, and doing the best they can under the conditions around them.

Communication is not something we simply possess. It is something we are able to do under particular conditions. Our task is not to demand performance and then judge the child when it disappears. Our task is to create the conditions in which communication—spoken or otherwise—can become safe, meaningful and possible.

Why I continue to use the term ‘selective mutism’

Please note I continue to use the recognised diagnostic term selective mutism, rather than situational mutism, because “selective” describes the selective pattern of situations in which speech is accessible—it does not mean that the person is consciously selecting when to speak. Retaining the recognised term also helps ensure consistency in diagnosis, research, professional guidance, EHCPs and access to appropriate support. However, I completely understand why some people feel that situational mutism better reflects their lived experience and avoids any suggestion of choice. Families and young people should use whichever terminology feels most comfortable and accurate for them; my decision to retain the diagnostic term should never override an individual’s preferred language.

Learn more from Libby

Supporting Teenagers with Selective Mutism: A Practical Guide for Schools, Families and Professionals book

Small Talk Speech and Language Therapy website

Facebook page

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Do you find joy in patterns?
Do you notice details, echoes or tiny changes other people miss?
Have you spent years achieving, adapting and looking “fine” from the outside?

Then this might have been written with you in mind.

Maks Marzec is an autistic, Polish-British writer-performer, linguist, teacher, public service interpreter and late-returning theatre-maker from Lublin. He is now based in London.

Maks’ work is shaped by language, etymology, borders, migration, queerness, memory and the ways people become readable or unreadable in different rooms. He has worked across English, Polish, Mandarin Chinese and German, including in mental health and immigration settings, and now brings that attention to translation, power dynamics and listening into performance.

His current project, How I WrotE a book at 6 AND PROOFREAD IT AT 8, is a new 60-minute bilingual Polish-English theatre piece in two bodies, made with an all-neurodivergent creative team. It grew out of Maks’ own autistic, Polish-British and queer life, but it has become much bigger than autobiography: part story, part sensory score, part love letter to autistic attention, pattern and perception, and an argument with, and celebration of, the Polish language: its grammar, intimacy, exactness, correction and untranslatability.

Maks writes…

The book, the red pen and the contract of being good

When I say I proofread my book at eight, I don’t mean that someone made me do it.

I mean I wanted to.

At six, I wrote a book. At eight, unprompted and apparently delighted, I took a red pen and went through it, correcting every spelling and punctuation mistake I could find. I imagine myself doing it with a big smile. That is the complicated part. The red pen did not arrive first as punishment. It arrived as pleasure: I had made something, and now I could make it more correct.

I have always enjoyed systems that tell you where you are. I loved school. I was genuinely excited about exams. I know that sounds strange to some people, but exams were beautifully clear: here is the task, here are the rules, here is the mark, done. While waiting for the results was excruciating, when the feedback eventually arrived, it was unambiguous and divided into six neat categories which roughly translate as: “excellent”, “very good”, “good”, “sufficient”, “admissible” and “inadmissible”. The mark would usually sit in red at the top. School was a clear system of roles and structures, and I even had my own imaginary classroom for a while, giving imaginary students imaginary notes in a very real, paper log.

Only later did I understand that school had also offered me a contract. Be good enough, be clever enough, be useful enough, be the teacher’s pet, and perhaps the adults will protect you and step in when navigating social relationships with classmates becomes difficult. Many late-diagnosed autistic high achievers know that contract intimately. The praise is real. The safety is sometimes real too. That is what makes it so hard to untangle.

How I WrotE a book at 6 AND PROOFREAD IT AT 8 grows out of that contradiction. The same instinct that gave me joy later became a survival system. The same attention that loved noticing mistakes learned to scan the room for danger. The same delight in being precise became a pressure to correct myself before anyone else could.

When the mask works

Masking is often described through visible behaviours: eye contact, smiling, suppressing movement, copying tone, seeming fine. For many autistic people, especially those diagnosed later in life, those behaviours are only the surface. Underneath is a constant background calculation.

How much should I say? How much should I hide? Did I answer too quickly? Did I sound rude? Am I being too much? Have I corrected myself in time?

The tragedy is not always that the mask fails. Often, the tragedy is that it works brilliantly, for years. People praise the performance and mistake it for wellbeing. You become impressive, reliable, articulate, productive, “easy”. The outside keeps saying you are doing so well, while the inside is running calculations no one can see.

In the show, masking becomes the architecture of the room. Bells, blackouts, repeated cues, applause, silence, a red pen and the pressure to continue begin to train both performer and audience. Rather than give a lecture about masking, the piece aims to make the machinery felt: the cue, the correction, the reward, the tiny adjustment made before anyone else has noticed a thing.

This is also why theatre feels like the right form. Performance was there before strategy. I made little plays as a child, improvised with my brother, pulled classmates into school productions, and loved the strange social magic of rehearsal. Looking back, I think I loved rehearsal rooms partly because they made social life rhythmic. People repeated things, trying again without pretending the first attempt was wasted. Timing had rules, the room had a task, and each person had a role. The outside world became quieter for a while.

It would be so easy to say that masking invented the performance instinct. It didn’t – it recruited what was already there, for a different purpose. A child who enjoys announcing a storm, showing what he has noticed, pulling attention towards a pattern, can become an adult who reads the room with frightening speed and performs legibility almost too well, using the exact same instruments that had given the child joy.

Pattern literacy and late legibility

One of the strongest joys of autistic attention, for me, is the feeling of a pattern clicking into place. A repeated sound returns slightly changed. A word has the right number of letters. A gesture appears again with a different cost. Something that looked incidental starts behaving like structure.

I have always done this with songs. If I love a song, I can spend hours reading interpretations, chasing a lyric that seemed simple and then suddenly a trapdoor to deeper meaning opens. Regina Spektor does this for me. Dorota Masłowska does it in Polish in a completely different way, especially through Mister D.: she treats language as material, something to bend, dent, chew, overheat, make funny, make ugly, make sing. I love language most when it starts misbehaving.

That is the kind of attention the piece rewards. I love the moment when a second look discovers something the first one only brushed past.

The show has a visible story, but underneath it runs a score of numbers, repetitions, near-misses and returns. A first viewing can follow the narrative, humour, sound and recognition. A second viewing makes other things visible. The title already hints at that: writing and proofreading, first draft and second look, creation and correction.

Some meanings arrive late. Some signals are easy to miss if you only value immediate legibility. And sometimes, even if it is uncomfortable, you realise that your first reading was not the whole reading at all.

I keep coming back to this because we, autistic people, are so often described as the ones who miss social cues. I am more interested in the gap between neurotypes: who is expected to read whom, who gets called unreadable, and who is asked to do the translating. Research around the “double empathy problem” and autistic facial expressions supports what many autistic people have known socially for a long time: misunderstanding does not travel in only one direction.

I chose the subtitle carefully: an autistic mathematical tragedy of words. Yes, it is six words. Obviously. But each word is carrying something. Autistic is the perceptual origin. Mathematical is the way the feeling is organised: repetition, recurrence, missing middles, almost-rightness. Tragedy is the system that rewards the mask until the person inside it disappears from view. Words are the material I have loved, used, hidden inside, translated through, and been corrected by.

Polish, correctness and the grammar of calling

The piece is also an argument with, and celebration of, the Polish language: its grammar, intimacy, exactness, correction and untranslatability.

In Polish, many of us grow up hearing: “Tak się nie mówi” – “that’s not how you say it.” My private response now is: I just did, though.

I understand where the reflex comes from. Polish is not an endangered language in the straightforward demographic sense, but many Polish people inherit an endangered-language mentality. For generations, correctness was tied to survival: a country repeatedly invaded, partitioned and corrected by foreign powers learned to guard its language as one of the places where national continuity lived. In that context, “tak się nie mówi” is never only about grammar. It can carry pride, fear, class, shame, patriotism and the red pen all at once.

That can produce beauty, but it can also produce fear.

The danger is what happens when that cultural reflex enters the body. You correct the sentence. Then the accent. Then the face. Then the posture. Then the enthusiasm. Then the grief. At some point, correctness stops being a tool and becomes climate.

Polish gives me theatrical tools English does not give me in the same way. Polish has seven grammatical cases, which means that nouns and names change form depending on what they are doing in a sentence. English used to have a richer case system too. Old English would have recognised the idea. Modern English still has traces, but Polish keeps the system much more visibly alive.

One of those cases, the one that’s always listed last, is wołacz, the vocative: the form used when you call someone directly. Mama becomes mamo. It is a tiny change, but the whole grammar leans forward towards another presence. Mamo does not merely mean “mother” – it reaches towards her.

The play depends on that difference. A word like mamo carries comfort, urgency, dependence, longing and fear of being watched. English can translate the information. It cannot carry the same grammatical angle in one word.

My interest in untranslatability is not only literary. I have worked as an interpreter in mental health and detention centres, where someone’s trauma and confusion have to pass through my mouth into a language a clinician, lawyer or official can act on. A word can change how a person is heard. A hesitation can matter. A cultural concept can shrink if the room has no place for it.

That experience has shaped the bilingual structure of the piece. Polish and English are two pressures inside the same body. Polish carries childhood, intimacy, music, embarrassment, grammar, correction and home. English carries escape, performance, freedom, distance, and the place where I learned to pass as native enough to become harder to catch.

A grassroots neurodivergent team

This project did not begin with institutional branding. I wrote the script as a new name on the theatre scene, then sent it cold to theatre professionals who openly identify as autistic or neurodivergent.

The replies surprised me because they were so specific. The prospective collaborators recognised the logic of the piece before I had fully learned how to explain it: “I’ve never seen autism staged this precisely before.” “This resonates deeply.” Or my favourite kind of response: “I read it once, I had no idea what it was doing, I read it again, and I started noticing so much more. I love patterns!”

That is how the team gradually formed: experienced freelancers gathering around a strange, exact thing because they recognised its logic. Some are attached to institutions in parts of their lives, while all of us are also independent artists and makers trying to survive in a difficult cultural climate. The project is grassroots in that sense. It is being built by people choosing to hold the idea because they understand something in it.

The show is a one-person story carried by two bodies: the speaking performer and a silent Black Figure, performed by Almaas Bokhari. That second body is crucial because masking is rarely a single surface. There is the self performing legibility, and there is the self witnessing what the performance costs. Some lives need more than one body to stage truthfully.

The sensory score is part of that truth. Sound, light, silence and timing are more than decoration. A blackout can be a cut in perception. A bell can become a behavioural cue. Silence can be active pressure. Breath can carry information before language catches up.

Because the piece uses sensory pressure, the access thinking has to sit inside the making of the work. Abi Turner is part of the team as Sensory Dramaturg / Access, thinking with us about how the room feels: what the audience knows before they enter, how intensity builds, where warnings sit, how previews gather feedback, where earplugs and arrival information belong in the artistic contract. That preparation gives the piece permission to be intense without abandoning people inside the intensity.

The piece is also funny. It has to be. Autistic precision is funny. Polish-English slippage is funny. A child discovering the literal underside of an idiom is funny. Then the laughter changes weight. Timing becomes management. Wit becomes a way to stay in the room. Many people know that version of humour too: the joke that buys you another minute of being acceptable.

Why this matters now

More neurodivergent stories are reaching stages, screens and public conversation now. That is exciting and long overdue. I also think visibility can become another kind of smoothing when the only acceptable version of autistic experience is the one that has already been translated into familiar terms.

I want theatre that can hold autistic beauty and autistic cost in the same structure. Pattern joy and burnout. Language play and language loss. High achievement and collapse. Humour and pressure. Recognition and discomfort. A mind that creates beauty and pain using some of the same tools.

For neurodivergent audiences, especially tired high achievers, late-diagnosed adults and people who have spent years looking fine from the outside, I hope the piece offers precise recognition: yes, the pattern was real. The work you were doing was real. The effort counted, even when no one could see it.

For non-autistic audiences, I hope the piece offers an invitation into one autistic person’s perceptual world while refusing the familiar release of the diagnosis story: the idea that once autism has been named, understood and applauded, the audience’s work is done. The piece is interested in what remains after recognition: the habits of looking, rewarding, correcting and simplifying that do not disappear just because the right word has finally been spoken.

I am also interested in what can happen around the piece after people have seen it. One idea is a small “Just something I noticed” online forum space, where audiences could share patterns, echoes, hunches and tiny discoveries from the work. Autistic attention is so often treated as excessive: too detailed, too intense, too pedantic, too much.

I like the gentleness of this phrase: “Just something I noticed”, exactly 21 letters. It sounds small, almost apologetic. But for many autistic people, noticing is how the world becomes organised, beautiful, funny, frightening, bearable. I would like the project to end by making more space for that kind of attention, without asking it to apologise for itself.

The Crowdfunder is live now and runs until 21^st August 2026, with donations still possible after that date. Support during the campaign window is especially helpful because it builds momentum, visibility and confidence around the project’s late-2026 rehearsal R&D, access work, technical development, documentation and by-invitation London previews.

If you know people who need to hear about this project, we will be very grateful for personal shares.

Learn more from Maks

Crowdfunder campaign page

Collaborators:
Almaas Bokhari (Black Figure)
Megan Brewer (Associate Director / Co-Artistic Director of Halfpace Theatre)
Abi Turner (Sensory Dramaturgy / Access)
Rebeka Dió (Movement)
Calum Perrin (Sound)
Daisy Simmons (Light)
Maja Lach (Stage Management)
Ella Cerys Mae Simpson (Graphic Design / Props)
Edalia Day (Crowdfunder Animation)

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With nearly two decades of experience in private practice, Mamood brings extensive expertise in wholeness by design, trauma-informed practice, multicultural competence, and social change. His current focus is on driving meaningful change in professional standards within the helping professions, advocating for more inclusive and responsive training frameworks.

Mamood hopes to attract neurodivergent advocates to join #TADF to advocate for curriculum change that embeds neurodiversity as standard throughout helping professions, instead of viewing it as an add-on.

Mamood writes…

For many years, I have lived and worked within psychological helping education systems that, often unintentionally, decentre those who are most vulnerable, marginalised, and positioned outside dominant social norms and structures.

Through both lived experience and professional observation, I have witnessed the pain this creates, not only for students navigating training programmes, but ultimately for the clients they go on to support. Time and again, I saw difference, neurodiversity, different beliefs, and other intersecting identities treated as additions, accommodations, or afterthoughts rather than fundamental aspects of human experience.

Eventually, I reached a point where I felt compelled to ask a different question: What would happen if we designed training from multiple centres rather than a single dominant perspective? What if neurodiversity, alongside the social context and other forms of difference (as well as normativity of course!), was not merely included but embraced from the very beginning? What if our curricula, teaching practices, and training systems were built on the understanding that variation in minds, bodies, experiences, and ways of relating is not exceptional but expected?

This question led me on a journey that lasted approximately five years. During that time, public awareness of neurodiversity was growing, but meaningful integration within counselling and psychotherapy training remained limited. My goal was not simply to identify the problem but to find a solution that could create lasting, systemic change.

I am pleased to say that I found an answer I call the Wholeness Solution, one that has the potential to transform how we understand experiences, relationships, learning, and practice. The challenge now is not whether a solution exists, but whether individuals and institutions are willing to advocate for and implement it.

If you want to advocate, join the #TADF WhatsApp group

In this blog, I want to share that solution, the thinking behind the solution, and how a more holistic and equitable helping curriculum can be created by design. I will explore how embedding neurodiversity and other intersecting experiences from the outset can create positive ripple of transformative change for students, tutors, training organisations, and ultimately the clients who rely on us. Rather than viewing neuro-difference or any difference as something to accommodate, this approach recognises diversity (as well as recognising normative cultures), as a source of knowledge, growth, and relational understanding, an essential foundation for ethical and effective practice.

Solutioning the New Curriculum: Neuro-Context and Equity by Design

What would it be like if neurodiversity were fully embedded throughout the curriculum of every helping profession, rather than being treated as an add-on or afterthought? Whether in counselling, psychology, social work, nursing, medicine, education, or public human services, what would change if neurodiversity was woven into learning from the very beginning?

Imagine a learning environment where neurodiversity and neurodivergence are naturally embedded in the way we understand ourselves, others, and the helping relationship. An environment where organisations, services, access pathways, and processes are designed with neuro-context in mind from the outset. Rather than being retrospective accommodations, but rather services become responsive, conscious, and genuinely designed to serve the people who use them.

The benefits are not difficult to understand. A curriculum, and the wider training environment that supports it, that is neuro-context aware can improve student experience, increase proficiency and confidence in practice, enhance accessibility, and ultimately lead to better client outcomes. It can also help reduce inadvertent harm caused by systems and practices that fail to recognise different ways of thinking, processing, communicating, and being.

The question, then, is how helping professions can move towards this vision of systemic change.

This question has occupied my thinking for the best part of five years. A foundational part of the answer lies in the curriculum itself, where professional identity and understanding begin. Along this journey, I experienced a number of light-bulb moments that ultimately led to a solution. In this blog, I will describe that solution at a high level. To date, it has been adopted by around twenty training providers.

What gives me hope is that the solution is both practical, now tried and tested, and relatively low-cost to implement. The #TADF provides the resources, on demand training and materials as a community project. It does not require training providers or tutors to abandon their existing theoretical approaches or styles of helping. Instead, it offers a framework that can be integrated across different modalities and disciplines, creating a more equitable, accessible, and neuro-context-aware curriculum by design.

Curriculum as-is

You arrive on the first day of your course induction. The first training session, ethics, begins by discussing ethical dilemmas without considering the client’s personal or broader context. Humans are humans, after all. This approach then overlooks the ethical considerations of adapting clients to social norms, the ethics of the medical versus social model, providing accommodations, or customising informed consent based on difference. Of course, neurocontext could apply to any topic such as group dynamics, sexuality, eating disorders, relationships, grief, theory, skills, or even supervision. Neurodiversity is either not mentioned or is referenced only in relation to learning needs, accommodations or later training.

Neurodiversity is often positioned as something separate, something we will “get to later on.” However, that “later on” is too late. The opportunity to embed it from the outset is missed, leaving neurodiversity framed as an “Other” category or group. In education, this mirrors how marginalised people are at risk of exclusion. Furthermore, these approaches can constrain neurodivergent students from expressing their authentic selves, as they are encouraged to fit universalising norms.

On the other hand, rather than decentring or centring neurodiversity within the curriculum, a multicentred approach to the curriculum is adopted. This approach meets and understands individuals and prospective clients in their own experience, embedding context as a foundation for learning from day one.

How, though?

Solutioning the change

Historically, this has been a well-known issue identified over the past 50 years in many textbooks: that “diversity” or I would argue “normativity” is not embedded in curricula or is frequently treated as an afterthought. In my research, I could not find a simple, accessible, or coherent answer to the question of how to embed neurocontext, or more generally self or broader context. This challenge initially appeared complex. How do we do it? Do we need to rewrite all modules, assessments, and theory? What do we add or take away?

The answer emerged slowly over time, and, fortunately, it gradually formed through an organic process. Of course, this was not only about neurodiversity, as the issue of “add-ons” exists across many intersecting areas, including mind and body, worldviews, knowledge systems, equitable organisation and practice, language, power, decolonisation moves, intersectionality, and anti-discrimination practice. The challenge, therefore, was how to address the gaps without continuing to treat them as additions or afterthoughts within curricula.

The solution and rationale emerged over approximately five years, culminating in the writing of my book A New Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: Embedding Context, Diversity and Equity. The book describes an augmented baseline approach to helping curricula and has been adopted by nearly 20 tutors across organisations, alongside accompanying free learner and train the trainer resources. A key part of advocating for change has been producing a resource that describes an embedded curriculum, which can influence professional culture when adopted by teaching organisations and tutors.

The emergence of the solution unfolded through six organic stages

First, experience and its phenomenology, as well as how problems are conceptualised, are formative across many factors that are often seen as add-ons. This led to an important breakthrough in developing a fully context-embedded view of the self (see Figure 1).

Simply, the model describes inner, interpersonal and spatial relationship as being formed of six interrelated intersecting high-level contexts: Worldviews, Identity, Contexts (Cultures), Knowledge, Embodiment (Mind body styles and experience), and Time orientation (Accumulative).

Rather than relying on a universalised model, this day one view incorporates areas that are often missed, including those typically addressed only later. A lower-level model of experience was developed to ensure dimensions of experience accounted for neurodiverse traits. For example, sensory, motor, emotional, stress and trauma, communication styles, or executive function are part of embodied patterns for all and they may be more normative or different. So rather than adopting a generic universal model of experience neuro-context is made visible as base of learning.

Second, I realised that although there are many theories and educational curricula, there is, across most disciplines including counselling and psychotherapy, a common ground of knowledge that is widely applicable. While this may differ across schools and modalities, it forms the base of learning. This insight supported the development of an augmented common curriculum and thus book structured around shared knowledge pillars: self and professional development, conceptualisation, relationship, skills, and organisational practice.

Third, I realised that the framework of the self-experience (figure 1 and its lower level description) can be used to systematically evaluate and embed neuro-context within this common ground of knowledge. This becomes a powerful evaluative transtheoretical framework for producing embedded knowledge. For example, simply asking questions like what might be usually missed if we consider an aspect of neuro-context when describing relational styles, self-care, group dynamics, or lived-in cultures. This framework was applied in the development of the New Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy book.

Fourth, the experience model frames the relational scope (Ref 1) and contextual embedded relational frame of reference (see Figure 2) from the first day of teaching, learning, and assessment. Since neurodiversity, along with other aspects of identity, is understood relationally, the model shifts the focus from a universalised approach to an explicitly personal and contextual one. Relationships are viewed in multiple ways such as neurocontext to neurocontext or even more granular, communication style to communication style, sensory to sensory, etc. This ensures that students are supported to hold the whole person rather than fragmented parts. The whole relational model thereby supports self-development, relationship building, skills, exploration, and neuro-affirming practice.

The pedagogy

Fifth, the solution includes a tried and tested pedagogy for teaching, learning, and assessment. Students and tutors (with a train-the-trainer phase prior to facilitation) are given an experiential induction day covering the whole framework, which is then embedded within their understanding of self and carried throughout the course. It is used as a reference point in handouts, on walls, and within module materials, alongside the book as a core text where needed. By exploring themselves as embedded in context, they come to understand how neurocontext is also embedded within them, and this carries forward into all aspects of training, assessment, supervision, and research. Ultimately, changing the culture of the training. Sit back and relax and watch how the curriculum becomes intrinsically embedded.

Call to action: Advocating for change

Sixth, in addition to the above components, resources for train-the-trainer and self-training are part of the solution and available, along with free-to-use and shareable images and training guidelines. Recognising that training providers have cost barriers, these resources are designed to be on demand with free support.

Can you help?

As we move forward, we need your help. We have formed a #TADF advocacy community of tutors, and individuals that supports the development of a fully embedded curriculum, particularly within helping professions. If you wish to contact me or join the community in developing strategies, actions, and support for change, please email and join the group on WhatsApp.

If you are interested in the next whole-solution induction day and want to move towards a by-design approach to the whole model in self, see: https://www.tadf.uk/courses/wholesolution

What now? We need advocates…

References

[1] Ahmad, M. (2025). A new introduction to counselling and psychotherapy: Embedding context, diversity, and equity into practice. Routledge.

[2] The Anti-Discrimination Focus (TADF). (n.d.). The Wholeness Solution for Training, Curricula & Practice. Retrieved June 7, 2026, from https://tadf.co.uk/ [ See Whole Solution Resources ]

Learn more from Mamood

Book: A New Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: Embedding Context, Diversity and Equity [ Routledge books ]

Course: Wholeness Solution

Embedded curriculum resources: www.tadf.co.uk and on demand training

Contact Links:

Email: ma@tadf.co.uk

Linkedin: Mamood Ahmad

Join in as an #TADF advocate: email in or just join the WhatsApp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kgdm6g54knvFVwMQ002jp0

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July is Disability Pride Month. It exists not because people have to be proud of their disabilities (though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that), but…

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Kim Mears is a neurodivergent speech and language therapist who has multiple identities. She is a wife, a mother, daughter and friend. She also identifies as an AuDHD narrator and information sharer who loves learning, unlearning and disrupting.

Their new book, Exploring Semi-Speaking as a Communication Identity: A Reflective Practice Guide, is out today.

Hat and Kim write…

What is Semi-speaking?

Over recent years, there has been an increase in information and shared knowledge that has come from the lived experiences of the autistic community. Semi-speaking is a term that has emerged through discussions mainly within the autistic community. Many people have shared their experiences of sometimes not having access to mouth words and/or finding speech exhausting and effortful.

Many of our contributors are advocates within the autistic community, who have shared their own experiences of being semi-speaking, as well as neurodivergent professionals who empower the people they support to explore their communication identity through a neuro-affirmative approach. We feel very fortunate to have so many contributors who have shown so much enthusiasm to this project including Dr Alyssa Zisk who wrote the foreword and supported us in our writing and information gathering.

In our book (Richardson and Mears, 2026) we propose the following working description of semi-speaking:

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Her most recent book – We Need to Talk About Autism and Parent-Carer Blame – is a research-informed and compelling exploration of the complex issues of parental blame within autistic families. It includes lived experience testimony and advice for both parents and professionals around how to navigate issues to deliver the best outcomes for children involved.

Alice writes…

I think it is hard to comprehend what parent-carer blame is, unless there is a personal connection to receiving it. For many casual observers, the concept of parent-carer blame may be dismissed as yet another label through which parents excuse their bad parenting. For autistic families however (and many other families of disabled people), parent-carer blame is an alarmingly common experience which often brings about escalating and devastating consequences for their family unit over the longer term.

I define parent-carer blame as the propensity to dismiss or reframe autistic need through the lens of parental failure or fault. Within autism-related public service provision, autistic families report being blamed for autistic-ways-of-being, rather than being competently supported and understood. Blaming narratives often emerge when a parent-carer is navigating support or provision for their autistic child.

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Marion founded Aurora Autistic Consulting to help all kinds of organisations, including schools, workplaces, NHS, and charities, to support Autistic people and their families in a neuroaffirming way.

They also run webinars open to all on a wide variety of topics, and are proud to host Autistic Pride Aberdeen. Their children’s picture book, Morven’s First Autistic Pride, is out today.

Marion writes…

Standing in the rain after finding out that I am officially Autistic I had two immediate thoughts.

My first was:

“Oh sh!t, that means I’ll never be good socially, and that’s ok cause I never was before.”

And secondly:

“I want to put on Autistic Pride in my city.”

My first thought was largely joking with myself. I had managed to muddle by for 39 years and at the time I didn’t really understand Autistic communication as a part of Autistic community and culture. The second thought was a serious one, and I followed up on it.

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We’re often told that CBT isn’t suitable for Autistic people. Is this true?

CBT stands for cognitive behavioural therapy, and it’s a huge umbrella term for dozens of different techniques covering everything from cognitive restructuring to behavioural experiments to exposure and habituation.

The CBT cycle (pictured) is based on the idea that a situation prompts thoughts, behaviours, bodily sensations and emotions. They can all feed into and reinforce one another. For example, if your body is indicating that you’re anxious then you may recognise the emotion as anxiety and get more anxious thoughts, which then increase the bodily sensations, etc. Many people feel things in their body before they are consciously aware of a thought or emotion, but this isn’t the case for everyone.

CBT suggests that by changing the thoughts or behaviours, the others also change. This is true in some cases, and CBT can be helpful for many people if used appropriately in relevant situations. The problem is that it frequently gets used wildly inappropriately. It’s like trying to use a frying pan for every job in the kitchen - of course it isn’t going to work. That doesn’t mean the pan is defective because it can’t slice an onion or dry the dishes. (And someone isn’t defective if none of it works for them either!) There is no universal Autistic experience, and nothing that will or won’t work for every Autistic person.

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When completing a CBT cycle, it might look something like this:

Situation:

• Agreeing to go to places that don’t meet my sensory needs, or staying longer than I want to.

Thoughts:

• I’m selfish if I express my needs.

• Other people matter more.

• I’ll be ruining the day for everyone if I say I want to leave now.

• No one else seems bothered.

• I just need to get over it.

• I’ve been in noisier and busier places before and I survived.

• Why can’t I just act normal?

• It really shouldn’t be bothering me that much.

• I used to be fine, I’m just being silly.

Emotions:

• Anxious

• Irritable

• On edge

• Frustrated

• Sad

Bodily sensations:

• Feel like everything is slowing and I’m starting to shut down

• Headache

• Intense feeling in chest

Behaviours:

• Go to the place or stay there when I’m overwhelmed.

• Snap at people because I’m irritable.

• Stop talking, shutdown, or force myself to mask through it.

• Spend the next day alone because it was too much.

CBT could help you to understand that cycle and consider where you could change your thoughts and/or behaviours. As CBT is a really broad umbrella, there are many, many different ways you might try to disrupt the cycle depending on the issue.

Afterwards, the cycle might change to something like:

Thoughts:

• My needs are as valid as everyone else’s.

• I am Disabled and there’s nothing wrong with that.

• My needs are different but that doesn’t make them wrong.

• I could suggest a different venue or activity, or say thank you but no thank you this time.

• I could go along for a bit if I really want to, but make it clear I will need to leave after an hour.

• My capacity fluctuates so I might be fine and I might not. I’m allowed to leave if I’m not.

• My sensory sensitivities have intensified with perimenopause. It’s frustrating but it’s the reality and that doesn’t make me selfish or bad.

• Expressing my needs is brave, not selfish, and it models allowing others to do the same.

Emotions:

• Lower anxiety

• Lower frustration

• Acceptance

Bodily sensations:

• Butterflies when I express my needs, otherwise quite neutral.

Behaviours:

• Turn down the invitation, set a time boundary, or suggest an alternative activity.

• Take accommodations such as earplugs, stim toys, etc.

• Step outside when I want a break.

• Leave when I’ve had enough.

The importance of interoception

We’re often taught that there are only five senses. There are eight or more, depending on how it’s conceptualised (interoception, proprioception and vestibular being the most commonly recognised others). Interoception is our body’s internal sense of what’s going on. It’s what allows us to feel the bodily sensations discussed here, as well as things like hunger, thirst, and needing the toilet.

It’s recognised that Autistic people often have more responsive (hyper) or less responsive (hypo) sensory experiences than an allistic person might. This varies across and within senses. For example, one Autistic person may struggle with bright lights and need to wear sunglasses much of the time. Another may love lights and fill their home with flashing and moving colours, but find bright sunlight blinding.

This variance applies to interoception too. Some Autistic people find it very difficult to notice internal feelings connected with emotions, or may not realise they’re thirsty until after they’re dehydrated. Others experience hyper interoception and may feel everything their digestive system is doing, or feel their hair slowly growing. As with other senses, someone may have hyper interoception in one area - such as feeling their blood flow through their veins - and hypo interoception in another whereby they don’t feel their emotions as bodily sensations unless they’re extremely strong.

Some Autistic people are deeply aware of every tiny emotion-related bodily sensation. This can be far in excess of what allistics typically experience, to the point it may be completely overwhelming. It’s vital to avoid assumptions about any individual’s internal experience.

The CBT cycle can be used without bodily sensations where this is more helpful for an individual. For some people who really struggle with knowing what they’re feeling (alexithymia), including bodily sensations can be an unhelpful barrier that stops them engaging with the rest of the cycle. Others find it useful in helping identify what they’re feeling and how it links to their emotions. This isn’t only the case for Autistic people. There are many reasons that people may not feel or recognise bodily sensations beyond sensory differences, such as brain injuries and trauma. The latter can often be a significant factor for Autistic people as well as sensory aspects. No one is wrong for not feeling things in their body in a way that is neuronormatively expected.

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Why is CBT the go-to therapy?

CBT gets touted as the gold standard not because it’s inherently better than any other therapy, but because it’s easy to measure so there’s a lot of research into it. It tends to be short term and follow a set structure for the particular type of CBT being used. Routine outcome measures collect quantitative data. That all means it’s easy to complete lots of randomised controlled trials and form an evidence base.

But research suggests that the relationship between the client and the therapist is more important for positive outcomes than the particular modality that’s being used.

The attitude and positionality of the practitioner is vital. If CBT (or another modality) is used in a neuroaffirming way with a genuine belief that there’s nothing wrong with being Autistic then it can be helpful. The practitioner needs a genuine understanding of Autistic experience, neuronormativity, and ableism. Unfortunately, where this isn’t the case, then many Autistic people report feeling gaslit and harmed. A lot of CBT is manualised and provided as guided self-help which doesn’t recognise most of the differences I’m discussing in this article. People may be pushed to reframe things they don’t want to, and told or given the impression that their thoughts are wrong.

When I use CBT, it’s because the individual isn’t happy with the way they’re thinking or behaving and wants to change one or both of those things. It’s offered with the question ‘Is this thought helpful or unhelpful to me in this situation?’ not ‘Is this right or wrong?’ And the person whose thought it is gets to decide that, no one else. There are so many different factors that can feed into why the answer may be different from one person to another, particularly if someone holds other marginalised identities such as being Black or Queer.

I most commonly offer CBT to a client when they want to address their internalised ableism because they don’t want to think like that and they believe it’s leading them to act in ways that result in further harm to themselves. The example cycle is an illustration of this. We can acknowledge the systemic factors and absolutely not blame ourselves for carrying internalised ableism. It’s totally inevitable living in this society. (And nothing about CBT should ever be about blaming ourselves if used appropriately.) But we still have a bit of agency, however small, to shift it a little.

Neuroaffirming vs neuronormative practice

My Facebook post about CBT for Autistic people led to lots of discussions and reflections about the harm that can be caused when professionals try to push Autistic people into neuronormative ways of being.

Therapists follow ethical codes that require us to only work within our limits of proficiency. But this requires professionals to recognise that they don’t have the necessary skills, knowledge or experience to support a particular client.

Sometimes that’s very obvious. For example, if someone contacted me saying they wanted help with anorexia then I know I’m not the right person to support them.

When it comes to Autistic clients, a therapist may not recognise their knowledge gap. The therapist might never have heard of neuronormativity, monotropic split, or internalised ableism. They may have no idea that Autistic burnout can have very different causes from standard workplace burnout; that research suggests that up to 80% of Autistic people could meet the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of ADHD; and that interoceptive differences can be just as pronounced for Autistic people as they can for all the other senses – or even that interoception is a sense that exists at all!

And even if we do have that knowledge, no professional is past the risk of causing harm, me included. Even with the best of intentions; approaching our work with humility; recognising that we’re constantly learning; understanding that every single client is an individual with varied intersecting identities; and that we can never possibly be an ‘expert’ in human experiences; there is STILL a very real risk of causing harm.

So there are crucial takeaways for clients and for therapists:

• If you’re someone who’s seeking therapy then research suggests that the most important determinant of whether it will be successful is the relationship between you and the therapist.

• The modality or modalities they use are less important than whether you feel safe with them; whether you feel understood and validated; and whether the therapist has the underpinning level of knowledge that’s necessary to facilitate that in the first place.

• It’s perfectly ok to contact a few therapists and choose whoever feels right for you – and to change if it turns out they’re not a great fit after all.

Therapists have what’s known as clinical supervision to review our work; to help ensure we’re doing the best we can for clients; and check that we’re working to ethical guidelines. But these things are highly subjective, and are subject to neuronormative bias in the same way as anything else. It’s one of the reasons that I and others provide ad hoc supervision to give extra support to therapists in their work with Autistic and ADHD clients.

We’re all still learning, and I gain enormously from attending genuinely neuroaffirming supervision. It should be a space for reflection, unlearning, and being honest and vulnerable about your practice and self. Somewhere you can approach mistakes or lack of knowledge with accountability, humility, curiosity and a desire to do better, rather than with shame or a need to hide or excuse them. Viewing ourselves as experts can hinder reflection and our ability to acknowledge when we get it wrong.

Neuronormativity punishes mistakes and treats them as a personal failing and something that must not happen. Neuroaffirming supervision recognises them as a natural and inevitable part of being human – and something to acknowledge, take accountability for, and as a springboard to do better.

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Work with me

What I offer:

Online counselling for adults (18+). Sessions usually take place weekly, fortnightly, or on an ad hoc basis.

Rewind trauma therapy for PTSD symptoms can be carried out as part of counselling work or as a stand-alone therapy.

One-to-one neurodiversity discussion for anyone wanting to understand more, and ad hoc clinical consultation and supervision around neurodiversity for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, education professionals and others.

I offer a free, 15-minute online video call for anyone who is interested in supervision, counselling or rewind trauma therapy with me and would like to find out more.

Please get in touch via contact@jadefarrington.com

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She’s also the best-selling author of Unseen Minds: A Therapist’s Guide to Multisensory Aphantasia and Invisible Cognitive Differences, which became a #1 new release on Amazon and has topped charts on multiple occasions.

Sassy’s work combines lived experience with professional training, helping therapists, coaches, educators and mental health professionals recognise and adapt for clients whose inner worlds don’t work in the ways traditional approaches often assume.

Sassy has multisensory aphantasia which means she can’t visualise and can’t internally imagine sounds, smells, tastes or touch. As she experiences anendophasia (wordless thinking) and anauralia (the silent part of aphantasia), she has no internal monologue and doesn’t hear her thoughts. SDAM means Sassy can’t relive or re-experience memories and doesn’t usually remember events from her life, except for basic facts. She also experiences alexithymia, struggling to notice what she feels or to feel bodily sensations.

Sassy describes her inner experience as dark, silent and often flat.

Sassy writes…

I remember sitting in therapy, doing exactly what I thought I was supposed to do. I was trying, really trying, but I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. As the therapist was supporting me to try to move on from trauma, we were looking backwards and they were asking me to see the event, to go back to the memory, to visualise, to picture that younger version of myself. I was asked to imagine a safe place, to notice what came up and to listen for what part of me wanted to say.

At the time I didn’t understand that I wasn’t able to do what was being asked of me. I didn’t know that some people really can see pictures in their minds, hear inner voices, replay memories with sensory detail or mentally travel back into moments from their past, and that I couldn’t. I just knew that what I was being asked to do was hard and that I didn’t really understand it. I left that therapeutic relationship feeling frustrated and broken, believing that I wasn’t right for therapy.

It was a pattern that repeated itself until I eventually thought that I was “unfixable”. Therapists thought I was resistant, blocked or disconnected. Some even questioned if I was trying hard enough.

Much later on, when I knew about aphantasia and my other cognitive differences, I discovered two things: One that my experience wasn’t unique and many people like me had left therapy feeling more broken than when they started and, two, that therapists aren’t trained to support people like me.

This is where I think the conversation needs to get much bigger.

More than no mind’s eye

People usually discover aphantasia through social media and something called the “picture an apple” test.

You’re asked to think about an apple and picture it in your mind. If you can see it clearly and as close to real as possible, you’re a number 1 and if you can’t see an apple at all, you’re a number 5. This very simple image is intended to show the differences in visual vividness but is often talked about as the aphantasia scale but what it’s really showing is the Phantasia scale with hyperphantasia, vivid imagery, at one end an aphantasia (no imagery) at the other.

The idea that some people can’t visualise still surprises many people but, for many of us, this is not just about the ability to ‘see’ an apple.

For me, it’s not only visual because I have what is often called multisensory aphantasia. I can’t voluntarily create internal images, and I can’t hear a song in my head. I can’t summon the smell of the sea, I can’t imagine the taste of lemon and I can’t recreate the warmth of a hug or the texture of velvet.

That doesn’t mean I lack imagination, or that I’m uncreative or disconnected from life. It just means that I experience my inner world differently. It means that my thinking doesn’t arrive as internal sensory experience.

I know things. I understand things. I connect ideas. I recognise patterns. I feel deeply. I can write, teach, speak, love, grieve, build, dream, plan and create.

I just don’t do those things through mental pictures, sounds or sensory replays.

For a long time, I had no idea that my experience was different and that is part of the challenge with invisible cognitive differences. You can’t easily compare inner worlds so we each assume our way of thinking is normal because it is the only one we have ever known.

If your mind has always been dark, darkness feels normal. If your mind has always been silent, silence feels normal. If your memories have always been factual rather than relived, that feels normal too.

Until someone casually tells you they can picture their childhood bedroom, or hear their mother’s voice in their head, or replay their wedding day like a film and then suddenly you realise that people weren’t speaking metaphorically after all.

The moment of discovery can rewrite your life

When I discovered aphantasia and SDAM, it felt like someone had turned the lights on around my life, even though my mind itself stayed dark.

So much suddenly made sense.

Why guided visualisations never worked. Why “safe place” exercises felt confusing rather than soothing. Why memory-based therapy made me feel ashamed. Why I could know something happened without being able to revisit it internally, why certain grief conversations felt impossible to explain and why people seemed to hold shared memories in a way I simply didn’t.

SDAM is less well known than aphantasia, but for me it is just as important. It affects the ability to vividly re-experience personal past events. I have facts about my life, but I don’t have mental home movies. I can talk factually about my wedding day, but I can’t replay the film of it, connect to any emotional memory of that day, or step into and relive it. I know I have experienced painful things and joyful things, but I can’t step back into those moments and relive them with sights, sounds, feelings and sensory detail.

That changes your relationship with your own past, and it doesn’t mean the past doesn’t matter or that shared events are unimportant, it just means they are held differently.

For some people, this can create a sense of freedom from painful memories, but for others it can create grief or disconnection or confusion.

Therapy often assumes an inner world

This is the part I care about most.

Many therapeutic approaches ask clients to work with internal images, inner speech, thought capture, sensory recall, autobiographical memory or imagined future scenarios.

Whilst that’s not inherently wrong, and those tools can be powerful for people whose minds work that way, for many of us they are a barrier to receiving the support and help we need.

Without the right training, when clients can’t picture a safe place, imagine their future self, or go back to that memory, visualise the younger self, listen to their inner critic, replay what happened, they are seen as avoidant, defended, resistant, dissociated, unwilling or not ready.

Of course in some instances that might be right, but sometimes the client is simply being asked to use a cognitive process they do not have and that distinction matters.

When a therapist doesn’t know that aphantasia or SDAM exists, they may interpret an access issue as a psychological block and that can cause harm.

Not necessarily loud, obvious harm, it’s often quieter than that, but a slow accumulation of shame, a feeling that you are unreachable or a sense that everyone else received an instruction manual for being human and yours is missing several pages.

I spent years in therapy feeling like that.

Lived experience should lead to practice change

I am often asked to share my lived experience, and I do because it matters.

Stories help people understand what abstract terms actually mean in real life. They help professionals see the human impact of what might otherwise sound like a niche cognitive curiosity, but lived experience should not become the whole conversation.

I don’t want professionals to simply hear my story, feel moved, and then carry on using the same tools in the same way. I want the story to lead somewhere.

I want it to change the questions therapists ask at assessment. I want it to change how guided exercises are introduced. I want it to change how “resistance” is understood. I want it to change how we think about memory, imagination and emotional processing and I want it to change training.

Why? Because the issue is that many therapists are still qualifying without being taught that these cognitive differences exist and that means clients with aphantasia, SDAM, anendophasia, anauralia or alexithymia may sit in therapy rooms every week being quietly misunderstood.

The question that could have changed everything

Looking back, there is one simple question that might have changed my whole experience of therapy:

“When I ask you to think about the event, what actually happens in your mind?”

Closely followed by:

“Do you see it as images? Do you have a voice in your mind? What are memories like for you? Do you re-live them or are you just aware of facts? What helps you access emotion, meaning or memory?”

These are not complicated questions, they do not require a specialist assessment and most importantly, they do not diagnose anyone. They simply open the door and help bring an understanding that there are no assumption being made here. Those questions would have told me “I know that not everyone thinks the same way and I just want to understand how your mind works because I’m not going to assume your mind works like mine.”

That in itself can be deeply healing.

Therapists don’t need to become an expert overnight and small adaptations really can make a huge difference.

Instead of saying, “Close your eyes and picture a safe place,” a therapist might say, “Some people like to picture a safe place. Others prefer to describe one, write down what safety means, use an object, focus on a real location, or notice what helps their body feel more settled now.”

Instead of saying, “Go back to that memory,” they might ask, “What do you know about what happened, and how does it affect you today?”

Instead of saying, “Listen to your inner critic,” they might ask, “Are there words, thoughts, beliefs or patterns that show up for you, whether or not you hear them internally?”

Those questions are a great start to open doors to better understanding, but they really are just the start.

Where the conversation needs to go next

Aphantasia awareness is growing, which is wonderful because more people are discovering that they aren’t broken. More people are finding language for experiences they could never explain, and more researchers are exploring what this means for memory, emotion, dreaming, trauma, creativity and identity.

This is great, but awareness alone is not enough. We also need application.

We need therapists, counsellors, coaches, educators and mental health professionals to understand that invisible cognitive differences are not rare curiosities sitting on the edge of practice and that they are already in the room.

That is why I do the work I do, when support is built on assumptions that exclude us, those assumptions need to change.

Ask, don’t assume

If there is one thing I would love readers to take from this piece, it is this:

Get curious and ask, don’t assume. If you’re having a conversation and you’re using internal imagery to describe something, ask if internal imagery is available to them. If you want to know what someone was thinking, in that moment, ask if they hear their thoughts or if the even think in words. Ask what helps them access emotion, safety, meaning and understanding.

Even if the questions sound strange ask anyway, because none of us has direct access to another person’s inner world. We only know what minds can do when we become curious enough to ask.

For those of us with dark and silent minds, being asked can be life-changing and can help us to feel seen.

It can turn years of self-blame into understanding and can turn “I am failing at this” into “this needs to be adapted for me.” For professionals, it can turn good intentions into genuinely accessible practice and that’s really the work I want to see now.

Learn more from Sassy

Aphantasia Academy

Book: Unseen Minds: A Therapist’s Guide to Multisensory Aphantasia and Invisible Cognitive Differences

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Glimmers can be thought of as the opposite of triggers. Instead of heralding unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and traumatic memories, they bring joy.

Deb Dana first used the term to describe “micro-moments of regulation that foster feelings of well-being.” Occupational therapist Bec Secombes went further, categorising them as “a satisfying sensory delight that fills someone with fervent ecstasy.”

Glimmers can be anything, and they’re unique to every individual. A glimmer to someone may be unpleasant or even a trigger to someone else. They can stimulate any sense, be they sounds, textures, sensations, tastes, smells, internal feelings, or sights.

They might bring back happy memories, transport us to a safe place, or make us feel a strong sense of joy or contentment. We may feel very connected or smiley. Anything or anyone can be a glimmer. They come from without and within.

Some Neurodivergent people can be more attuned to glimmers, just as they may be more responsive to triggers. It’s important to know your triggers, and knowing your glimmers is really useful too!

They don’t erase our triggers and aren’t about pretending everything is ok, but making space for glimmers and embracing moments of joy can be especially valuable during difficult times. These three resources may help you on that journey.

A NEURODIVERGENT APPROACH TO EMBRACING YOUR GLIMMERS

Ebook by Teo Byrne & Jade Farrington

The term ‘glimmers’ still isn’t widely known, but they’re something everyone experiences to a greater or lesser degree.

Many Neurodivergent people have sensory or processing differences which mean that glimmers may be more or less accessible.

Triggers might feel overwhelming, paralysing, frustrating, or isolating. Glimmers on the other hand, are the moments that can make you feel seen, heard and in tune with the world around you. These moments may be brief, but they’re powerful.

Glimmers are more intense than simple feel-good moments. They serve as powerful reminders that we are capable of thriving, even in a world that can sometimes feel overwhelmingly difficult. These moments of joy offer us, our children, and others around us, the opportunity to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us. Learning to find and embrace them can be a positive boost to our mental health and overall well-being.

Teo Byrne of and I created this ebook to help people explore, understand and embrace their glimmers. It’s designed with Neurodivergent people in mind but can be utilised by neurotypicals too.

Paid subscribers can download it at the bottom of this email, or it can be purchased individually here.

GLIMMERS JOURNAL

Book, ebook and audio book by Deb Dana

If you enjoy journaling, recording, or spotting patterns then Deb Dana’s Glimmers Journal is designed to support you in becoming aware of people, places and events that bring glimmers via a six-step framework:

• SEE - Find your cues

• STOP - What are some glimmers you found?

• APPRECIATE - Notice the feelings your glimmers bring

• REMEMBER - What are you drawn to?

• SHARE - What is a way you want to share your glimmers?

• INTEND - Set an intention

The journal helps you to sort glimmers into five categories: nature; people and animals; art and science; embodied; and flavours. While it isn’t Neurodivergent-specific, it does not pathologise difference and recognises that “there is no right or wrong way - just the way of your nervous system.”

It can be worked through in chronological order; by category; or as glimmers appear for you.

Deb Dana is best known for her work on polyvagal theory. The journal rounds off with an explanation of the autonomic nervous system and how it connects with glimmers.

You can get a copy here.

THE SPECTRUM SLOTH GLIMMERS SOCIETY

Facebook group by Julie Webb

The Spectrum Sloth Glimmers Society Facebook group offers a friendly space to share your glimmers, and you can gain lots of inspiration from others if you’re trying to work out what your glimmers are.

The group is likely to be especially helpful for those who enjoy visual glimmers as members share lots of photographs and videos, particularly in nature. This makes it a valuable resource for those who aren’t able to get out and about themselves, but appreciate images and shared joy with others.

You can request to join here.

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Work with me

What I offer:

Online counselling for adults (18+). Sessions usually take place weekly, fortnightly, or on an ad hoc basis.

Rewind trauma therapy for PTSD symptoms can be carried out as part of counselling work or as a stand-alone therapy.

One-to-one neurodiversity discussion for anyone wanting to understand more, and ad hoc clinical consultation and supervision around neurodiversity for counsellors, therapists, mental health practitioners, education professionals and others.

I offer a free, 15-minute online video call for anyone who is interested in supervision, counselling or rewind trauma therapy with me and would like to find out more.

Please get in touch via contact@jadefarrington.com

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Anne writes…

Early in my autistic advocacy work, I was invited to a radio show. I remember riding up the elevator to the studio with my security badge pinned to the lapel of my favourite overcoat--a soft gray, snap-front I’d gotten on sale and wore for special occasions. I always felt good when I wore it. And I felt good that day, on the elevator ride.

The producer greeted me outside the studio. “I’ll take that,” she said, grabbing my coat before I could object. I walked into the interview without my i.d. badge or my confidence, as the host launched into a series of personal questions. It was an incredibly awkward 10 minutes, where I kept pivoting back to my group’s work and the host kept circling back to personal stuff. Worst of all, he was clearly irritated I wasn’t giving him the script he wanted.

In the cloakroom alone, I grabbed my wonderful coat—so gray, so cozy—and beat a quick path out of there.

Since then, I’ve met many who fall back on that easy hack: Ask the guest to share personal stories or “lived experience” and let the clock run out, never talking about policy change or broad issues affecting the community.

Indeed, in many policy meetings in Canada, this is the first question out of a politician or staffer’s mouth: Tell us your stories. By the time the first constituent has finished recounting their own trauma, a second constituent might be able to toss in a few words before the short meeting has ended and the group is ushered away from the halls of government. The politician can say she “listened to constituents”—but it was without any meaningful policy discussion.

To understand this dynamic (and develop better practices), we need to learn about representations of autistic people in the earliest days of our advocacy.

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If you only visit on the 1st of the month to view the webinars and resources in the Neurodiversity Newsletter, you may have missed these:

#1 Finding Your Neurodivergent Community Online

Originally published in February, this guide to online communities is updated as new submissions come in. It’s helped many of you to find a space where you can learn, connect with others, and show up more comfortably as yourself. Paid subscribers can download the directory as a pdf.

#2 Is the AuDHD Mind at War with Itself?

You’ve probably seen the social media posts and memes reflecting the clash of neurodivergences experienced by those who are both Autistic and ADHD. This article resonated with many of you who experience being AuDHD rather differently - as a monotropic neurology that is far easier to understand and conceptualise when we step away from the categories of the DSM.

#3 Three Essential Articles on Neurodiversity

There are some articles that don’t seem to age, and that stay current long after they’re published. They get right to the heart of the neurodiversity paradigm, and help communicate the message of the civil rights movement that developed alongside it. This piece breaks down three you won’t want to miss.

#4 Three Essential Ideas for Exploring Monotropism

Monotropic people, which includes Autistics and ADHDers, focus more of their attention on fewer things at a time compared people who are polytropic and can more easily switch their focus. Research indicates that people who are both Autistic and ADHD tend to be the most monotropic of all. This article helps you explore what it could mean for you or those you support.

#5 Neuroaffirming Care Through Hard Times

I joined Stacey Innes on the Children Lead The Way Podcast to discuss the heart breaking experiences of so many neurodivergent children at the hands of totally inadequate systems. We talked about the reality families face when school is no longer safe and caregivers are totally depleted - and how a neuroaffirming approach can help rebuild trust, regulation, and connection.

#6 Spotlight on Queer, AuDHD, BIPOC Experiences with 子晴/TQ Yeo

The way people experience being Neurodivergent - and the way others pathologise and police them - varies hugely due to intersecting identities. Most research and lived experience content from Autistic ADHDers centres on white perspectives and carries the privilege of this, often excluding those who are racialised. TQ shared why they are collating a book on Queer, AuDHD, BIPOC experiences and offers the chance to pre-order a copy to support its publication.

#7 Three Essential Concepts for Understanding Autistic Experience

The double empathy problem, Autistic masking, and monotropism are just three of the ideas I consider to be an essential (but by no means anywhere near exhaustive) part of learning about what it means to be Autistic. This piece offers simple explanations, along with signposting to find out much more.

#8 Spotlight on Anti-Oppressive Practice with Somatic Psychotherapist Nyck Walsh

Nyck Walsh, author of Neurodivergent Somatics in Therapy: An Anti-Oppressive Model for Whole Person Care, discusses intersecting identities and neuroaffirming, anti-oppressive, somatic counselling. Nyck explores the importance of approaching the work through a systemic lens, and dismantling systems of oppression.

#9 There’s No Such Thing as “ADHD-Friendly”

Neurodiversity-lite narratives often present neuroffirming practice as a tick box exercise incorporating set strategies for different neurotypes. This piece challenges the idea that those who share a neurotype need the same thing, and reminds that true neuroaffirming support involves recognising everyone as an individual with their own profile and needs.

#10 Spotlight on The Myth of Normal with Elly Chapple, Human, Writer, TEDx Speaker, and Founder of the #FlipTheNarrative Movement

Elly Chapple reflects on the pathologisation of human experience, and the myth of the ‘normal’ person. As the Deaf mother of a Deafblind daughter, Elly considers what it takes to truly walk alongside someone instead of expecting them to meet the neat frame. She challenges the system that prizes standardisation and forces people to bend to its shape instead of adapting to recognise and meet individuals where they are as unique humans.

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May is Apraxia Awareness Month. Apraxia is one of the most common reasons why people may be Non-speaking and struggle with motor control. You can find relate…

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