On Being an Autistic Therapist - Paperback

by Max Marnau (Editor)

This book is about working as autistic counsellors and psychotherapists. It is a collection of stand-alone chapters put together by members of the international online collective Autistic Counsellors and Psychotherapists (ACP).

It shares their main aims: to tackle the lack of appropriate therapy available to autistic clients and to challenge the common stereotypes about autistic people, which are still very much alive and can bar them both from therapy and therapy training. But, because the writers have lived experience of the issues they are working with, they are also writing about ways of working most effectively and helpfully with autistic people. And that is what makes it unique.

Each chapter describes both how the writer perceives and processes the world and how they work with clients. Their stories provide incontrovertible evidence that the existence of autistic therapists, far from being problematic or even a contradiction, is quite simply normal. And that neurodiversity, just like biodiversity, enriches, broadens and benefits all. It offers readers - autistic, allistic, therapists and would-be therapists, clients and would-be clients - the chance to meet the contributors and see them as humans, therapists and supervisors. Their hope is that, in its small way, this collection may give readers the understanding that they need to join them in changing the world.

Author Biography

Max Marnau is a person-centred therapist, artist and poet living in the Scottish Borders. As the autistic daughter of refugees from Hitler's Nazis, she feels a particular affinity with all the exiled, the othered and the displaced. Her special interest is Gaelic language, poetry, and music. Circumstances made it possible for her to train as a counsellor in late middle age, having previously volunteered for Samaritans and Cruse Bereavement Care Scotland, and that was where she immediately found her niche. Since qualifying, she has worked for various charities, for a university counselling service and, since 2013, in private practice. Since discovering that she is autistic, she has branched out into training, writing and, for her the most important of all after her work as a therapist, the foundation of the international online peer group Autistic Counsellors and Psychotherapists, which now has some 1500 members.