Counselling for different ways of being
Exploring neurodiversity and counselling via a walk in the woods
This is the unabridged version of a keynote I delivered at the International Conference on Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy, June 3rd 2023. You should be able to access a video of the talk from the conference site after the event (I cut out about 5mins of content to allow for a Q&A at the event, that I’ve kept in below, and added section headings. The images are from the slides I used in the talk).
Update September 2023: an audio/video version of this piece is now available here: https://youtu.be/irIruFqFTMc
Introduction
I’m Sonny Hallett. I’m a person centred counsellor based in Edinburgh. I’m autistic. I’m also trans, mixed race, and grew up living between China and the UK.
Before training as a counsellor, I’d been very involved in the autistic community and the broader neurodivergent and disabled communities. I co-facilitated support groups for people coming to grips with their autism diagnosis in adulthood, worked on autism and mental health research, and co-founded and chaired AMASE, the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh.
I’m also very interested in outdoor work, I spend a lot of time out in the woods looking for mushrooms, bugs, and birds, and I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what we can learn from both biodiversity and neurodiversity, how we can make better connections with our environment and the many varied beings around us.
I’d like to invite you to explore with me some of these threads that I’ve been following and connections I’ve been making, particularly around how we might challenge and adapt our counselling practices, and perhaps even how we think about counselling, and ourselves, in the context of neurodiversity, to really embrace all our different ways of being.
Setting out on a walk
As is quite usual for me, I had a lot of ideas for this talk, and I was starting to get quite overwhelmed — my friend sent me this meme as I was trying to describe my process:
In order to try and pull the ideas together, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I find that walking helps me feel more connected when things seem too scattered or I get too ‘in my head’.
So I’m going to take you on the story of this walk and the writing of this talk.
Neurodiversity
The first thing I started thinking about as I set off was how to get across the idea of neurodiversity. Neurodiversity describes the diversity and variation in ways of experiencing and being in the world — that includes all of us: people who are more neurotypical, that is closer to the average expected way of being, and people who fit the diagnostic descriptions for things like autism, ADHD, tourettes, etc, and people who experience the world differently in other ways, such as being synesthetes, processing memory or images or sound in different ways, and so on, and people with acquired neurodivergence, such as though trauma, or via deep meditation practice.
In this talk by the way, I mention autism quite a lot specifically, and also ADHD, because those are neurotypes and communities that I have worked in the most, but a lot of what I will talk about also applies much more broadly to many different and minority ways of being. It is important to me that you do not go away with the impression that neurodivergence is just a shorthand or synonym for autism or ADHD.
So, I had this thought of going to the woods and photographing a bunch of different plants, and using that to illustrate biodiversity, and by association neurodiversity. But as I travelled through town to get to the woods, I was struggling with the sensory overwhelm of the streets around me. Noisy buses, people, ambulance sirens.
Sometimes when I’m feeling overwhelmed, I look for pavement plants. And as I walked through town I was reminded that there is huge biodiversity in the pavement plants too, in the greenery in our cities. There’s not really a delineation between the human and the natural; we are all a part of the things that grow around us. Looking at the pavement plants made me realise how much this urban diversity is a great metaphor for neurodiversity in our society as it currently is.
Our cities and towns are generally designed for certain types of humans — humans who don’t mind the noise, for example, the smallness of space, the expectation of travelling from A to B at a socially acceptable speed (and knowing where you’re heading). Similarly they are designed to allow for certain types of plants — trees that line the streets and go straight up, flowers that are decorative and low maintenance and stay in their planters, hedges that hedge.
But noticing the pavement plants reminds me that all different kinds of life exist, even when they have to crack through the concrete and contort themselves into funny shapes to live. They find a foothold, and grow, but often go unnoticed unless they pop up somewhere really weird or cause a nuisance.
Similarly neurodivergent people — that is people who don’t fit with neuronormative expectations, can often find ourselves scrambling for footholds and pushing through cracks with enormous effort, while going unnoticed unless we cause a problem or do something really exciting and unusual.
Neurodivergent people and counselling
In 2018 I worked with the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh on a piece of research titled “Too complicated to treat: autistic people seeking mental health support in Scotland”. (See also on experiences of talk therapies: www.autisticmentalhealth.uk/counsellingreport)
We found through that project that autistic people in Scotland were being routinely denied access to mental health support purely for being autistic, as well as being disbelieved by mental health professionals when they were in distress, and finding services just inaccessible even when they were offered support.
One of the big reasons we did the research, and publicised the findings as widely as we could, was because while the lack of support, and pitfalls of accessing therapy while neurodivergent, was already well known within our communities — every single one of us has stories about it — the practitioners we spoke with about this problem, from GPs to NHS regional directors, to people involved in mental healthcare provision, didn’t realise that there was a problem. They didn’t notice that autistic people were falling through the gaps, and when they were challenged by individuals, they were often disbelieved.
A year before that report came out, a very different, much bigger study reported that there has been a more than 75% reduction in flying insects over the last 27 years. How many people noticed that too, until it was pointed out?
Thinking about monocultures
I got a notification on my phone as I was walking to the woods, thinking about all this, that it was National Bee Day, and Lidl was giving out free seeds for bees. It reminded me a bit of supermarkets announcing Quiet Hours for World Autism Day. I think that these are not in themselves bad gestures, and perhaps they slightly acknowledge through implication that there aren’t enough good habitats for pollinators, or enough accessible day to day spaces for neurodivergent folks. But I think it would be a mistake to think that these gestures can lead to any kind of solution.
I worry that focusing only on specific versions of any population — whether that’s bumblebees or autistic people with specific access needs — doesn’t really help us to understand diversity, and why we might be creating environments that might be so hostile to it, and what we might need to do differently to change that.
A quiet hour a month or even week in any given supermarket isn’t really going to help many neurodivergent people get their groceries — it just seems to imply that change is possible but somehow not popular enough, just as now that people are going back to in-person work many disabled people are struggling again to fight for flexible and remote working, or accessing other events remotely. Seeds for bees doesn’t seem to have increased people’s interest towards anything flying that’s not a bee (notably I’m part of several facebook gardening groups where folks regularly ask things like ‘how can I keep bugs out of my garden?’).
When everything is a monoculture, diversity can look scary, wild, out of control. It’s understandable, but it’s unsustainable. To reconnect with diversity, we need to expand and rewild our thinking, and change our practices on a fundamental level. We need to notice and challenge the things that we take for granted.
I got into counselling training after doing that piece of research I mentioned earlier, along with another project on autistic people’s experiences of talk therapies, because I wanted to find out what was going wrong in therapy that was leading to so many autistic and other neurodivergent people falling through the gaps.
Through my training I discovered some wonderful modelling of congruence, empathy, and warmth from some of my trainers, and ideas and experiences that really helped me make connections with things I’d learnt from neurodivergent and queer communities, and helped me open up transformatively to connecting with others in deep meaningful relationships. That was the great part of my training experience, and now I love being a counsellor. But the other part of my training experience, and something I continue to see in counselling communities, is a monoculture in expectations around therapy, and with it a fearfulness towards difference.
I suspect some of you might be thinking that this assessment feels a little unfair. Surely counselling is all about connecting with difference? Understanding different perspectives and ways of being? Being in another’s frame of reference? I want to show you what I’m trying to express a bit better by asking you to imagine a garden.
I wonder when imagining a garden how many of you pictured a lawn? Here’s a google image search page for ‘garden’:
You can see a number of the pictures have lawns. Lush neatly mown green lawns are such a normal everyday sight for a lot of us that hardly anyone questions it — but that is a monoculture, and a tightly controlled one. There are whole aisles in garden centres dedicated to lawn care — products that maintain this monoculture, kill weeds, remove bugs, keep grass tidy and short and the right shade of green. Don’t get me wrong, lawns can be lovely to sit on, freshly mown grass smells delicious, and for many of us might be familiar and evocative of summer picnics, or days in the park. I’m not saying there couldn’t be a place for lawns.
But when we get too used to seeing monocultures, we forget that there can be anything else. We don’t notice what is being pushed out in favour of the familiar sameness we have gotten used to. Diversity becomes worrisome and weird and unfamiliar.
For a bit more tech fun, here’s a Midjourney AI imagining of ‘counselling room’:
The AI has looked at thousands of images labelled counselling, and this is what it thinks counselling rooms look like.
Incidentally here’s one of just ‘counselling’ as a concept:
What if the things that feel familiar and comfortable to us in counselling, what counselling looks and feels like, how we are as therapists, what if they are also reinforcing a monoculture? Who and what ways of being have we unconsciously made unwelcome in our spaces?
Letting the pictures grow
At this point on my walk, planning out this talk, I’ve finally reached the woods. It’s lovely and sun-dappled and full of life — plants, birdsong, buzzing insects.
Now I feel less constrained and overwhelmed, and I can start thinking more about some of the ways I believe we could rewild our practices, expand our understandings of diversity and difference, and make the ways we work more welcoming of that diversity.
Some years ago I experienced quite a difficult mental health crisis. I realised that I was autistic at 28, and while that new understanding brought with it a lot of helpful learning, growth, validation, and a wonderful community of other people like me, I was struggling with the impact of failing at being neurotypical for nearly three decades, the trauma of that, of having grown up not trusting my own experiences of the world, not even having models or language for understanding why I had meltdowns, or couldn’t process sound when others could, or didn’t understand what was going on socially, or got feverish after going to the supermarket. I felt that neuronormativity had robbed me of myself; of my innate and intuitive coping strategies and connection with interests and autistic joy.
For me at this time, being out in nature became how I learnt to gradually reconnect with myself, and find solidity in the person that I am. Obviously this will be different for many neurodivergent folks — not everyone finds it helpful or accessible to be out in nature, for many reasons, but you do also see many related experiences, such as in autistic biographies like Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, or Katherine May’s The Electricity of Every Living Thing, or Dara MacAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist. Here’s an illustration I made as part of a comic some years back about what having that space has meant to me.
I believe that my locus of evaluation was so far outside of myself that I barely existed to myself — I struggled to know how I felt, what I liked, my sense of realness as a person. In my memories of back then, being around others was like moving through a fog, constantly uncertain, operating giant stupid puppet limbs, reality feeling fragile and threatening to dissipate at any moment.
As I connected with the woodland, hills, and coasts around me, it was like I was able to connect more clearly and viscerally with my own feelings and who I am. There were coastlines that I rushed to when I felt trapped, woods I lingered in when I felt scared, hills I climbed when I felt joyful. My feelings and experiences have been made real and recognisable to me by the landscape around me. I could reconnect with and reclaim my inner world in a way I’d never been able to before, and with that came greater confidence in myself, and joyful discoveries of what I like and what kind of a person I am.
These connections were invaluable for me, and they were also supported by therapy and support work that validated the way I communicate and how I made sense of my feelings.
A monoculture of language
In therapy, there is often an expectation that we talk about feelings, and use emotion words. A lot of neurodivergent people (autistic, ADHD, but also a lot of folks who are different in other ways) can struggle with connecting with or identifying our emotions, or communicating them using emotional vocabulary. Our research found that some autistic people were told that they weren’t engaging properly or weren’t suited to therapy because they couldn’t use the necessary vocabulary, or didn’t meet normative expectations around connecting with their feelings. Some felt that they were failing at therapy because their counsellor kept using or insisting on emotion words that didn’t make sense to them.
Going back to our analogy of monocultures, what if we were to consider the language we use and implicitly expect as therapists through this lens? I believe that there is as much richness in emotional experience and expression, as there is diversity in ways of being in the world, so why would we insist on one form of language? I have noticed neurodivergent folks I work with visibly relax when I say often at the start of working together that we can absolutely throw out the language that might often be expected in therapy, if it’s not being helpful for us or if they prefer something else.
For myself, part of my own difficulty around using this language is because I want to be accurate when I tell someone something, or I risk being misunderstood, which in the past has had really dire consequences, so often the emotional categories just don’t cut it for me. How do I know that when I say I’m sad, you will be imagining the same sadness? What if how excitement feels for me isn’t something that’s within the limits of your experience up till now? Excitement can be frightening; anxiety can be oddly comforting. There are times I have sobbed with excitement at seeing a bird of prey up close, or finding my first of a new and exciting fungus. It is a thrill but it can also be too much.
Back in my talk-planning woodland, I have been lost in thought and absentmindedly touching the leaves along the path. I manage to sting myself on a patch of nettles thinking they are dead-nettles — Latin names Urtica dioica, rather than Lamium album. I find all the forms of naming useful and so interesting, and I like to collect them in my head — dead nettle tells me that this plant looks like a nettle but will not sting me. Lamium tells me that this plant is related to mint and not in fact to stinging nettles. Different names prioritise different experiences or types of information. Imagine trying to describe to someone the plant that stung you using the common name you know, or a description of the sting (perhaps it burns for you, or tingles, rather than stings), and them insisting that they can’t possibly understand you unless you use the proper Latin, at the very least to genus.
Learning about my environment in detail, and about the names of things, also helped me to differentiate my feelings, and crucially also helped me to realise that I have a right to name what I’m feeling in ways that feel right for me. In mushroom foraging circles people talk about getting your ‘mushroom eyes’, and similarly I think with every other category we learn to identify and differentiate, we might start with general categories that look much the same, and the more familiar we get, the more we look, the more diversity in feelings, or fungi, we see.
I saw a lot of white flowers on my walk, for example. What do you picture when I tell you that? A lawn covered in daisies perhaps, or rowan in bloom?
Without having the opportunity to explore them, name them, see how they differ, I might only recall seeing white flowers on my walk, and might feel limited in what I can communicate about what I saw. Having looked at them up close, even without knowing their names I can start to distinguish them and locate them in my felt sense using my own vocabulary — the bell-shaped ones, the uneven shaped fireworks, the four-petaled ones with garlicy leaves, the ones that smell of cat’s pee in the tree, the tiny secret ones close to the ground.
These days I find that I am much more sensitive to whether an environment is richly diverse, because I almost unconsciously hone in to more of the subtle differences in the flora and fauna around me, just as I do with mine and others’ emotional states. It’s almost as if by being open to new names and new categories, I’ve become less limited in what I can see. I often see the same shift in others when they no longer feel limited by expected vocabulary.
As I got into my counselling training, I noticed that the speaker and I were often able to reach a closer understanding through exploring images, metaphors, sensations and stories, breaking down the subtle differences in expectation and understanding, delineations between feeling — whether it was something that described the feeling I was picking up, checking if it felt accurate, or an image the speaker was using.
Imagine anxiety coming in waves, for example, but what kind of waves are they?
Are they crashing waves that are loud and overwhelming, threatening to sweep you away, or endless swells that just keep washing over, exhausting you over time?
Are you a beach or a rock or a tiny crab caught in the swell?
Are you absorbing the waves’ energy or is it smacking hard against you, or tossing you about?
These images, this taxonomy of feeling, this whole multi-sensory world, whether it’s based solely on imagination or literally from the scenery around us, especially if we’re outside, don’t carry the same vague individual baggage (while they can still carry baggage) of emotional vocabulary, or the majority understandings and expectations that come with them.
I also found that other neurodivergent folks are often the ones who are most excited and enthusiastic about using images and sensory metaphors, bringing so much richness and a sense of playfulness to our work together.
I’m not saying: ‘just use metaphors with neurodivergent folks’ (and lots of autistic people can also really struggle with metaphor), and I’m also not saying that nature metaphors resonate with everyone — there are whole worlds of metaphors and imagery people can use. In my own counselling practice with different people, there have been images from the fidget toys I keep in my room, from computer games, smells and textures, internet memes, gardening, animals, types of food, the personalities of the birds who visit the feeder, etc.
Incidentally, there is a misperception that autistic people cannot handle metaphors; that we don’t understand them and take them literally. My take on this is that firstly, many people misunderstand or don’t understand metaphors when they haven’t been taught the meaning of them, or when they have changed over time — just look at how many people say ‘mute point’ instead of ‘moot point’, or ‘on tender hooks’ instead of ‘on tenterhooks’. How many of you might be confused by newish metaphors, like ‘spill the tea’ or ‘throwing shade’?
Also, for me, and this seems to be relatable to a number of autistic people I’ve spoken with, I find that I can get distracted quite easily by the literal and sensory implications of a metaphor to the point where it can contaminate and even obscure the intended meaning. Of course I know what ‘raining cats and dogs’ means, after over three decades communicating in English, but that doesn’t stop me vividly picturing a load of house pets quite concerningly falling from the sky — in my opinion surely quite unlike any rain I’ve ever experienced. But I think being sensorily and viscerally distracted by the imagery, the literal meaning, could be an asset — I could be less likely to take a phrase’s meaning for granted, more likely to want to check out, for example, whether those hooks really feel very tender and tired right now from holding on anxiously, or if they have been struggling to hold a piece of weaving together using an antique set of tenterhooks, concerned that it will all unravel before it’s done.
And while we’re talking about communication, what if there are no words at all? Perhaps I learnt to communicate wordlessly first with the non-human world around me. There are times when I am so overwhelmed that I have been unable to speak (you can read a comic about that here), and some of my most memorable and connecting counselling sessions have been ones where very little was said, but much was communicated, shared, and felt.
There was the session some years ago where I couldn’t speak but my counsellor and I sat on the floor and I drew pictures of bugs and plants on a big sheet of paper. Here’s a picture I made between sessions to try to communicate how I was feeling during that time (I’ve often used drawings to try to communicate how I’m feeling, since I was a little kid).
Or a more recent session in my current counselling outdoors, where I could speak, but I felt that a lot more was shared and experienced in the relationship through me learning to build a fire and both of us watching the ember start to take hold, than we would ever have been able to get to through speaking.
For example, I have often struggled with understanding instructions as they were intended, and can feel quite anxious about misunderstanding and doing something wrong. To feel safe enough in that moment to be invited to explore and be playful, and feeling like my own learning process was shared in that space, felt incredibly reassuring and safe — perhaps it has also helped me to feel safer in exploring some of my more difficult internal experiences in that space.
I think it is worth really looking at how neuronormative our communication expectations might be. How open are we to receiving and even modelling different ways of communicating?
In Carl Rogers’ words, empathy is “to sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality”.
Perhaps to do that accurately can be creating and inhabiting a shared and multi-sensory language in each relationship, rather than insisting on one where the power might be seen to (or does) lie more with the therapist.
Empathy and expectations
A lot of this is about the fact that expectations between two individuals can vary wildly, and also that empathy isn’t magic, but we are too often, I think, tempted to believe that it is.
To frame empathetic connection as magical, or something some people have and others don’t, can be deeply disempowering for someone with a minority experience of the world, who might have already been taught all their lives that their experiences aren’t real.
Because none of this is magic, and expectations can vary at the most unexpected times, one of my favourite and most valuable learnings from all my counselling training is that nothing is ever too obvious to state.
My counsellor put this really simply in his own approach to his work — he said, “I try to never surprise anyone”. By stating what we’re noticing, or our intentions in the moment, we not only remove a potentially stressful variable or uncertainty, but also I think model that it’s okay to not know, and it’s okay to be clear.
Now when I walk across the room at the start of a session to close the door properly, I say that’s what I’m doing. At the end of an outdoor session, I state which direction I’m heading in and suggest where we say goodbye.
We take ownership of our own actions rather than leave the other person guessing, potentially feeling like they should just know.
And, while we all have all kinds of expectations about other people, I think my own weirdness has meant that I’ve never known quite what to expect of others. In the past I saw this as another reason why other humans are baffling and inaccessible.
It has been incredibly empowering for me to realise that I can ask, and because I don’t know what I’m ‘supposed’ to expect, I’m maybe less surprised by the answer, potentially helping to invite a more complicated and congruent response.
The Double Empathy Problem
A lot of what I’m describing here relates to the Double Empathy Problem, which I think is a useful concept to get to grips with. The Double Empathy Problem was conceived of by Damian Milton, an autistic academic and thinker. In his words:
“In simple terms, the ‘double empathy problem’ refers to a breakdown in mutual understanding (that can happen between any two people) and hence a problem for both parties to contend with, yet more likely to occur when people of very differing dispositions attempt to interact.
Within the context of exchanges between autistic and non-autistic people however, the locus of the problem has traditionally been seen to reside in the brain of the autistic person. This results in autism being primarily framed in terms of a social communication disorder, rather than interaction between autistic and non-autistic people as a primarily mutual and interpersonal issue.”
Milton, Damian et al (2022), ‘The ‘double empathy problem’: Ten years on’ Autism, 26(8), 1901–1903.
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613221129123
The Double Empathy Problem is strongly supported by a growing number of studies now which look into cross-neurotype communication, showing breakdowns both in information transfer, and understanding and rapport, between people of differing neurotypes (although I think so far most if not all of the research has looked at autistic and non-autistic people). You can read more about some of this research here: http://dart.ed.ac.uk/research/nd-iq/
Damian is talking primarily about autistic people in the earlier quote, but I think as therapists, we can too easily fall into a conception of the world and ourselves where we are the ones who are good at empathy, connection, understanding, and in this dynamic, it can also be all too easy for the locus of any problems that occur to be seen to reside with the person coming to counselling, rather than with the therapist or an interaction in between — especially perhaps when the client is neurodivergent, is open about their struggles with social communication and connection, or emotional understanding.
A monoculture of needs
I’m still out in the woods, but I’ve climbed up onto a path where the trees open out, and I find myself in sight of the Craigs, a series of rocks jutting out spectacularly over Edinburgh, with Arthur’s Seat lost in the low clouds beyond.
When I first moved to Edinburgh as a student in 2005, there was a path that you could take directly below the cliffs, but still above the city, right from one side of the Craigs to the other, but now erosion and the risk of rockfall has made that path unsafe to walk along for many years, and it’s been largely closed off to human walkers. I’m reminded as I look across the valley of a river I regularly walk along with my counsellor in our outdoor therapy sessions. There is a tarmac path along the river’s bank that has also been eroding away, the water trying to reach its natural floodplains when it swells with rain or snowmelt, trying to rejoin with the small oxbow lake that it once formed on the other side of the path. Along the path the local council have placed sandbags, plastic bollards, all manner of erosion-preventing measures to try to save the path, seemingly everything short of… rerouting the path.
How often do we tend to situate the problem outside of ourselves, try to force our surroundings or expect those around us to bend and change to fit our expectations — only to be disappointed and frustrated? It is a loss (and sometimes potentially our peril) to not try to understand and work with the needs and communication of rivers and eroding hill paths. Your path will wash away, rocks might fall on your head, houses might flood.
I think one of the things I’ve learnt most within neurodivergent and disabled communities, and sharing space with other neurodivergent people, is that first we have to identify and own our own needs, rather than assume that they are the natural state of things. A common consequence of power in relation to the double empathy problem, and also of medical framings around disability and difference, is that access needs are seen as special and exceptional, compared to normative needs (that is, needs that are seen are ‘normal’) that are often unspoken and treated as the default.
Many of us, for instance, might’ve been assessed on our eye contact during training, been told that it is vital for connection. We might expect it, and might read a lot into the lack of it. Autistic counselling trainees can often struggle with this aspect of their training, as many autistic people find normative levels of eye contact difficult, distracting, and overwhelming, even painful.
In our research, many autistic clients said that they preferred not being expected to make eye contact with their counsellors, and often feel much more comfortable sitting at 90 degrees, or side by side, rather than face to face.
What if the monoculture, our expectations, of how a therapy session should look is like the tarmac path by the river — because it seems like the ‘normal’ way to do things, there is no compromise, no examination of whether this is the only way to walk, or the only way to sit in a room. As a result, both the path and the relationship might never feel safe enough to hold up to the test of time.
It can help a lot if we as counsellors are able to be congruent, real, genuine in our human-ness in how we inhabit the space, in how we might be messy, stumble, and make mistakes. What might the monoculture be telling you about what a counsellor ‘should’ look like? Is it one who makes neurotypical eye contact? One who is always calm? One who doesn’t move in ‘atypical ways’?
I’ve always found this bit of history about the national parks in America very thought-provoking — that they exist today partly thanks to Ford and the car industry, which wanted a way to sell the great American wilderness to potential car owners — and sell more cars. To this aim, winding roads were cut through wilderness, and swathes of trees cleared to create perfect ‘wild’ vistas from which drivers could look out across at the supposed untouched but really quite carefully curated wilderness. How might we curate and tame our own wildness, to fit the images of therapist or helper, or empathetic listener? What might be lost, and who might we shut out, when we try to be too slick and professional, in favour of messy but real?
Getting from A to B
I look up from my meandering.
I can get lost in analogies because the world around me is so rich and entangled with my inner world, with ideas, memories, interests, relationships, and snatches of conversation. This is a lostness I value and find great richness in, and perhaps lost isn’t even the right word for it. On my way to the woods this morning, I got google maps to show me the route from A to B.
I’ve lived in this city for most of my adult life, but I still get lost and struggle to follow linear directions without a map to guide me. Something I discovered when I started going out into the woods and into nature was that I wasn’t getting lost anymore, or not half as often as I do in the city.
My walks in the woods are never A to B, I might set out one morning to check out my favourite chanterelle patch by a woodland pond, only to be distracted following the mesmerising dance of peacock butterflies across the field, the knock of a woodpecker I try to spy up amongst the conifers up the hill, violet ground beetles sunning themselves on the rocks. Maybe I do make it to the chanterelles, maybe they’re not ready that day, maybe I go home without ever getting to them because my mushroom bags were already filled with a surprise haul of oyster mushrooms. It’s usually only the journey home through town that I might find confusing and overwhelming.
Thinking in constellations
I’ve noticed working and generally talking with many neurodivergent people, that the way we travel and explore within our minds can also be extremely diverse, and yet especially in therapy a lot of folks will apologise for their scatteredness, or for rambling and going down rabbit holes, for enthusing about our interests, repeating ourselves, or for not getting to the point.
Some people talked about needing to translate their thoughts and effectively slim them down into linear narratives that their counsellors could follow, or they’d be pushed to refocus, or feel unheard or like they are not properly using the space. Clients can describe this as frustrating, that they’re losing vital context and content (and space for personal exploration) in the pressure to translate.
This can be a great example, I think, of unexamined normative expectations on the part of the therapist that can end up influencing the whole shape of a session, and the shape of the client’s own exploration.
One of the ways I’ve found helpful to frame this difference in my own head has been looking at it in terms of linear and non-linear communication, much like my own google maps journeys and woodland explorations.
I also sometimes describe the different thinking styles broadly as ‘thinking in constellations’ vs ‘thinking in narratives’ — constellations being like clusters of ideas joined together across space, forming shapes that might look different to different observers, narratives being like a story where ideas are organised with roughly a beginning, middle, and end so the trajectory is maybe a little more predictable.
A lot of autistic and ADHD folks in particular are perceived as jumping about a lot between topics in the way we communicate, or making links between topics that don’t seem to make sense, because the constellations we see, the links we make, aren’t ones that are intuited by majority ways of thinking and processing. Conversely some folks might also be very rigidly linear, sometimes as a response to being told not to jump about so much.
I have kind of purposefully but also very naturally jumped about quite a bit so far in this talk — this is a pretty accurate representation of how I think, and it takes a lot more work for me to be more linear in how I communicate — but perhaps, hopefully, you have trusted enough in my flow and process so far to be able to follow along with how the different parts all link together.
Assuming this is true (and it might not be), part of this might be because I have relative power in this space, hopefully you are relaxed and listening without too much expectation on yourself — certainly no expectation to respond or summarise, and I’m maybe communicating in a fairly confident way.
Isn’t it interesting how sometimes being in a position of power can make others more receptive and open to our ways of communicating, even if we’re communicating atypically, while being in that position of power can also be a barrier to letting go and listening? What might this mean for the power dynamic in counselling? Or for more and less powerful groups in society?
A study by Brett Heasman, then at LSE (*see this this video: https://youtu.be/TSMF_3f0Q0c) found that autistic people in non-autistic families are far more likely to be working extremely hard to understand the perspectives and communication needs of their family members, than the other way around, but the perception by the non-autistic family members is often that the autistic person is still not trying hard enough. Another study by the same researcher found that non-autistic people were more likely to overestimate their helpfulness towards people they think or know are autistic.
Incidentally, if we were having a conversation, which I often wish we were in these talks, rather than me talking at a bunch of you, I might be able to check that you are following okay, or you might be able to ask for clarification or for me to repeat or rephrase something, much as we might negotiate and check in on a walk to be sure that the pace, terrain, etc, is manageable for both of us.
A monoculture in ways of thinking
In counselling sessions, sometimes our own panic or disorientation at losing the thread of communication and not being able to respond helpfully, especially if our clients explore their thoughts in a very different way from the way we explore our own, can lead us to feel more lost, get frustrated, potentially demand a change in the way our clients are exploring — whether explicitly or implicitly through how and what we respond to, our attending, or what we focus on.
I believe that staying in the client’s frame of reference includes being able to adequately suspend our own. To do that, we need to continually work to be at least somewhat aware that how we process and experience the world, even in very fundamental ways, is not going to be universal, and shouldn’t be seen as default. And to do this, we have to really thoroughly get to know ourselves in the context of diversity, power, and privilege.
The inverse of that Double Empathy Problem quote is that people with more similar dispositions are likely to understand each other more easily and intuitively. If you have found connecting and empathising with other people largely very easy all your life, it is possible that you are part of a neuro-majority, at least in terms of certain key aspects of your experience, and that of the majority of others you interact with.
It is also likely that you have not noticed it, just as straight folks generally don’t need to figure out that they’re straight, and cis people don’t need to figure out that they’re cis. People within neuro-majorities might come to believe that they are innately good at social connection, or social understanding, when they have really mostly just been operating within a normative range that is familiar to them.
Meeting someone who is difficult to connect with might feel like a failure — they might say, ‘well I connect really well with most people, so they must be the problem’, or in therapy, ‘most clients respond really well to this, so this one must not be suited to counselling’.
I see moments of disconnection and misconnection as potentially exciting opportunities — here is someone who may experience something so differently from how I experience it, and by the very act of communicating with me they are inviting me to expand my world and experience to better understand theirs. Some clumsy stumbles along the way might be worth it, surely?
Before I move on from linear and non-linear communication, I want to talk about this image:
I think it’s a stock image used on Counselling Directory, but you may have seen several pictures like it used to represent counselling. Certainly a lot of illustrations on this theme come up when I search the term ‘counselling’ on Google image search.
I wonder how you feel about this illustration? There was a time when I quite liked the analogy it presents — I felt so tangled up and broken and wrong inside, I loved the idea of someone making sense of it all and making it all neat and tidy for me.
Now it kind of horrifies me, because I have grown to know, cherish and love the tangled untamed wildness of my inner world — there is meaning and significance to the way that loop intersects with this knot, how thoughts overlap and wrap around each other. There is safety for birds, voles, insects, in the densest weeds and most of tangled thickets — to them they are familiar, private refuges and secret getaways, places to stash seeds or raise chicks. When I look at this picture now, I see the counsellor as an over-zealous gardener, trying to tidy up what they might perceive as messes, but what I perceive as home.
Of course there are also times when our internal tangles feel distressing, overwhelming, terrifying, like walking into deep dark thorny woods. But I think as counsellors if we can dare to walk in there alongside, rather than try to cut the thorns away ourselves; if we can share openly in the exploration, perhaps we might help to make space for the people we are accompanying to figure out what they need to do to make their internal forests livable — whether it is moving away some of the brambles here, or making a small nest there, or just getting to know it and be witnessed in the knowing, so the shapes of their thoughts feel welcome to exist in the world, rather than like something messy and shameful that must be hidden away or tidied up.
Making our own folklore
One of the white flowers I was looking out for on my walk, which I didn’t manage to find that day, although I did find later in the week, was greater stitchwort.
Greater stitchwort is a very special flower to me, because it represents a way that I found safety while lost in some of my own darkest tangles. I saw it while on a walk in the highlands during a time when I was in deep despair, but at a point in that despair when I realised I did want to pull through, but was terrified and didn’t know if I could. I mean this both metaphorically and literally, because I was walking alongside a deep scary ravine on a remote, uneven and unfamiliar path, I was exhausted, and the light was starting to fade.
Shining along the edge of the path in the last of the light was this mass of flowers, and something inside me, perhaps desperate to grab onto any kind of hopeful thing it could, told me that as long as I followed the stitchwort flowers, I would be safe. The flowers led me all the way for several miles back to a train station, which got me safely home. Now whenever I see greater stitchwort I experience a deep sense of safety and connection with the world.
We all weave our own mythologies and folklore. We all see patterns and make symbols out of the things around us and the things that happen to us, and we can feel them deeply, bodily. I think we use them to understand and look after ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes we might borrow stories that already exist in our culture, such as speedwell flowers representing good luck on a journey, or avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement, maybe especially before an important meeting. Sometimes we are told to follow stories by others and then get into the habit, such as saying ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes.
A monoculture of stories
I believe that one of the things normative society can take from many neurodivergent people at an early age is the right and space to weave our own folklore, and make our own stories about the world. The magical thing about folklore that is socially accepted, even expected, is that no one expects it to make sense, no one asks for a rationale — it is just the ‘done thing’ that everyone does. For people who are different, we are often asked for rationales all the time for things that just feel right, or make internal sense. Alternatively, we are told that these are just behaviours, evidence of a pathology, and make no sense at all, and that that is why they are pathological.
Autistic children are often pathologised, for example, for playing in ways that are immensely satisfying to them, but don’t fit with the stories society likes to tell of how ‘normal’ children play. How many kids could tell you why they like to play with a toy the way they do? What is wrong with lining things up by shape and colour, rather than telling a story with dolls or pretending to drive a car?
When we aren’t allowed to weave our own stories, and we are made to follow others’ stories that don’t fit and make no sense to us, we can become hurt and confused, and come to doubt our ability to learn about ourselves, our feelings, and our environment. We come to believe that we can’t be experts in our own experiences.
When the world went into lockdown in 2020, and meetings went online, most of us had no stories for how we should socially interact in an online environment. This was disorienting and worrying for a lot of people who are used to in person social interactions where they knew the rules and were comfortable with them. For me, it felt weirdly liberating and equalising, because so many others were experiencing the social confusion I’d experienced in almost every social situation up to that point. It felt like an opportunity to learn together and work together, to make new rules and tell new stories. I’m not really sure that happened, but I do feel like some things have been a little more accepted in helpful ways, such as being able to type thoughts and questions, or just more acceptance (though still not really enough) of diverse communication preferences.
Writing new stories
A lot of my work with neurodivergent folks seems to come back to reclaiming our stories, figuring out what we have lost, and what we want to get back or retell. I feel that there is a lot of overlap here, as there is in many parts of this talk, with queer experience, as someone realising that they are gay or trans also has to come up against the fact that the stories around them, that they are told, and see in the media and elsewhere, mostly do not reflect their experiences.
For me, realising that I am queer has meant a process of actively trying to figure out and rewrite the stories I want for myself for relationships, sexuality, gender, love… it can be an exciting process but it’s also terrifying and really difficult, because deviating from the stories I grew up with means doing everything I can to learn about and expand my imagination beyond the bounds of those narratives, while fighting against the shame that comes with internalised biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so on — and all of this in a society where deviation feels increasingly dangerous.
My experience of doing this for my neurodivergence has been very similar, and with about as little helpful public representation, because of the ways autism for example can be stereotyped and talked about, even when the messaging is relatively progressive or aims to be accepting. I was very fortunate on this front in coming to figure out my neurodivergence amongst very neurodiversity affirming people who have thought a lot about diversity and difference, including my partner Fergus, their mum Dinah Murray, and the wonderful community that is Autscape, an autistic-made and led autism conference and retreat, so I’ve been surrounded by very deep, nuanced and complex explorations about all of this that counter the more dominant pathology paradigm narratives from even before I received my autism diagnosis (which was framed very pathologically).
Reclaiming our sensory worlds
I have found that for a lot of us entering into neurodivergent communities, the gentlest and most empowering ways to start to shift internalised ableism, and along with it the shame and fear around feelings of being weird or wrong or broken, and to begin to write our own stories, is through reclaiming our sensory worlds.
Some of my most cherished memories are of shared sensory and physical exploration and neurodivergent joy: passing a shining spinning object around us in a circle and delighting in the pressure of it as it rolls down our arms, as well as the mesmerising reflections as it moves. Trying on really good noise cancelling headphones for the first time and excitedly comparing how some of us found the silence to be like the deepest, softest calm, while others found it deeply strange and unsettling. Feeling the joy of shared unfiltered info-dumping (sharing all the info) on a current passion, while being able to move and bounce and generally let our bodies fully inhabit the enthusiasm we are feeling, and be validatingly witnessed and even mirrored in that joy and excitement in return.
As a counsellor, I have found that facilitating this reclaiming process can involve working to be as sensitive as I can to the ways the people I work with respond sensorily to the world around them, including in all the small things, and especially things they might dismiss as ‘time wasting’, ‘childish’, or feel self-consciousness about enjoying, such as being lost in the texture of a soft blanket, or playing the same song again and again, eating the same safe foods, expressing joy and excitement through flappy hands, and so on.
Also things they might struggle with sensorily but have been taught it’s not okay to struggle with, such as scratchy clothes, uncomfortable noises, difficult food smells.
I often share my own sensory preferences and aversions, including narrating my sensory world as it comes up in the session, if it feels relevant — such as needing to take off a jumper because its texture is messing with my auditory processing.
I might invite folks to explore sensory memories or moments of neurodivergent joy that they remember from childhood, which can help us to reconnect and reclaim some of the intuitive ways of being that were soothing, in tune, and helpful for us that we have lost.
Finding safe ways to reconnect
Sharing and exploring our sensory worlds I think also connects us with the world that we share around us, and with the moment. So often neurodivergent people I’ve spoken with (and I include myself) can feel that we get stuck too much in our heads and in our thoughts, because we have always had to give reasons and rationales and meet demands to explain ourselves or understand others through deduction and rote learning, or because the world has been so overwhelming and out of control.
Finding safe ways to reconnect our senses to the world outside of ourselves can be an act of reclaiming space, as well as being grounding. It is also something clearly real that we can share in a counselling session — the smell of a cup of coffee or the sound of a bird on the roof — a counter and anchor to the sense of artificial or other reality-ness that counselling rooms and counselling relationships can sometimes feel like they float in.
On my personal therapy walks I have felt a sense of grounded realness in being able to share the experience of the terrain, the weather, the texture of the soft foam inside a split reed, the call of birds interrupting our talk.
It can sometimes be so much harder to make headway into the deeper, more emotionally complex, more painful stuff, when we haven’t even had a chance to reclaim and rediscover how we feel bodily about our environments, what small moments might bring us calm, quiet, or joy, and to feel safe enough to be in company while reacting and responding authentically and less guardedly.
Here is a sequence of images I made in the morning before going for this walk:
I’d bought a coffee from a cafe, and to be honest I was procrastinating getting started — I was feeling a bit stressed out at the expectation and anticipation of trying to string these thoughts together, and whether I’d be able to do a good enough job of it.
As I held my coffee and swished it about in the cup, the light reflecting off the surface danced and moved about. I let myself spend quite a while just enjoying the dance, being mesmerised by it, and slowly my mind cleared and calmed.
At this point my feet have taken me back to the edge of the parkland, to up to the road leading back into town. Along the path I can see the pavement plants reclaiming the concrete.
There isn’t much space for them, but they are surviving and making the most of the world and circumstances their seeds found themselves in. They have an irresistible drive to exist and grow and be, and they know what they need to do it. Pavement plants in windy exposed places tend not to grow too tall, they stay close to the ground and develop tough thick stems, keeping their flowers close. The ones that get a lot of bright sunlight might develop red pigmentation to help protect the leaves. Shiny leaved and early flowering scurvy grass, adapted to the coast, makes the most of the other plants’ lack of salt tolerance by coming up where gritters have gritted city streets in late winter.
These moments of claiming space are small, but they are significant for each plant’s survival. Similarly I think that for a lot of us in minority populations, we sometimes need to find and reclaim the small, safer, growing moments that we can, while dealing with the knowledge that it is not always safe to be fully out and open as ourselves in the neurotypically-built world, and that it’s a calculation we’ll keep having to make and figure out — but it helps to be able to take the shame out of it.
It can be dangerous for autistic people to get overwhelmed in public — meltdowns can lead to traumatic medical or legal intervention. It isn’t always safe to express neurodivergent joy or move in ways that feel authentic to us, much as it still too often isn’t safe to be out as trans, or gay.
A monoculture of therapy
This leads me to wonder about some of the very fundamentals of what we might think counselling is for, or what our job is as counsellors. The monoculture here might be in expectations around recovery, or regulation, or healing as an individual endeavour.
The story that is sometimes told about therapy is that it is about the individual figuring out themselves and becoming happier, more regulated, healed from their trauma, but how does that work for someone who is still continually encountering the trauma of being an oppressed minority? Or someone for whom the world is just sensorily overwhelming a lot of the time? What if we are exhausted from having to constantly figure out and write our own stories, because none of the existing ones include us?
It feels so important that each of us as counsellors work towards real and nuanced understandings of the power and expectations at play for different minority experiences, as well as how they might intersect. Perhaps that can also help us expand our ideas around what therapy is for, could look like, and what our role might be.
For a lot of us, what can be most healing and helpful isn’t figuring out how to fit into society, or how to be regulated like a neurotypical, but being able to grow, experience joy, find community, and perhaps even feel solidarity, fury, and a drive to change things, help make safer neurodivergent spaces, not feel so ground down by shame, to love and support each other.
Why we ‘label ourselves’ (and why you should learn about us)
I’ve come across many counsellors who are critical of what they think of as people ‘labelling themselves’ or being ‘restricted by labels’ when it comes to neurodivergent ways of being like autism and ADHD. Often these same counsellors will say that they would rather not learn about these identities, or the broader contexts and experiences related to them, because they want to take each individual as they are.
I can understand the good intentions behind this perspective, and I definitely sympathise with a suspicion of labels that might sound like they have been externally imposed and are grounded in a pathology and deficit based understanding of people — and there is a lot of damaging crap out there about autism and ADHD.
But to refuse to learn about what our identities mean to us, is to miss a huge chunk of the context of who we are as individuals and the world we inhabit. What being autistic for example means to me is finding a community, and stories that finally resonate with my experience, and finding validation and understanding, and ways to write better stories for myself, and reclaim my weird ways of being.
Saying you do not recognise these labels is to insist on existing in an alternate reality where neuronormativity no longer dominates, and all ways of being are included and valued, which is a great goal to work towards, but not the world we currently have to live in. To me it feels like the neurological equivalent of saying you don’t see colour when talking about race.
Nick Walker, in her book Neuroqueer Heresies, quotes Carl Deutsch: “Power is the ability not to have to learn.”
Monocultures can be powerful, and having power in a monoculture can blind us to the things we don’t know and can’t imagine yet. It can make us complicit in the oppression that leads to minorities being hurt, erased, and left unsupported.
Relative power can even hide from us things we could learn about ourselves, such as a person who has been able to get by in public places just about okay discovering that noise cancelling headphones actually make a huge positive difference to their energy levels.
We need to learn about biodiversity to know how to welcome more pollinators and other life into our gardens, and we need to learn about neurodiversity to be more welcoming of different ways of being in the spaces that we share. The planet benefits from the richness that biodiversity can provide, and our society benefits from the richness of many different skills, ideas and perspectives. We will never learn to see the world differently, if all we ever want to look at is lawns.
Epilogue
At the end of my walk, I had this handful of leaves:
I took them to the nearest cafe, bought a cup of tea and a croissant, and laid all the leaves out on the table in front of me, arranging and rearranging them based on shapes, textures, feelings… As I arranged them I felt calm, quiet, lost in the world of everything I had experienced and thought about, while other patrons walked past, chatted, or worked on their laptops, some glancing over at my project with curiosity or interest.
The tangle of my thoughts and ideas were coalescing, turning into the constellations of this talk. I leant back from my leaf constellation, opened my laptop, and started to write.
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