Being Autistic and Being a Therapist
In some people’s mind the title of this blog just describes an impossibility, a contradiction, like being tone deaf and being a singer, or like the proverbial fish on a bicycle. I was a bit worried for a while myself back in November 2012 when I (a practising therapist of many years standing) discovered that I was a full-strength, undiluted autistic, and always had been. What worried me, as you may have guessed, was that autistic people supposedly have NO EMPATHY. Whereas therapists are of course famed for their empathy (at least in theory – you could get one on a bad day). So where did that leave me? Well, I resolved this problem the same way that I resolve many of my problems, by educating myself though judicious reading (well, I am autistic). It didn’t take me long to discover that the “autistics have little or no empathy” trope had begun to fall apart once people started to look a bit closer at it – and especially once autistic people started to look a bit closer at it… To