By Elaine Nicholson of Action for Asperger’s

As a pioneer of autism-specialist counselling, I have counselled autistic individuals of all ages from aged 3 to 84 years of age.

I have counselled three-year-old non-verbal children. I have counselled those autistic individuals who are locked-in and need screens with words on them that they, my clients, use a facial movement to operate to convey their message.

I have counselled professors, actors, rubbish collectors, shop workers, engineers, and numerous Silicon Valley types. I have counselled the rich and the poor.

In all, I have given over 20,000 hours of my professional time to the counselling of autistic lives over the years and continue to do so.

Additionally, I have worked as a counsellor in numerous types of organisations, from the charity I founded, www.actionforaspergers.org, to my private practice, mainstream schools with SEN units, SEN specialist schools and SEN higher education colleges.

Growing number of counsellors

While many counsellors and psychotherapists find autism and Asperger’s syndrome a complex and recondite area, thankfully, the number of counsellors working with neurodivergence is growing, and furthermore being embraced.

In 2008, I recognised through my counselling training and my personal familial experience, that autistic individuals and their families were being forced to fit, round-peg-square-hole, into psychotherapeutic models that were designed for typical thinkers, those whom we in the autism community refer to as “neurotypicals”.

My master’s degree in 2012, entitled ‘An evaluation of a bespoke model of counselling for lives that have become adversely affected by Asperger’s syndrome’, changed that typical learning trajectory for me and for my 30 or so colleagues, as well as those whom I have trained in my model from outside organisations such as IAPT…

The learning never stops because the face of autism is perpetually changing as more autism is discovered and future generations come to the fore. The current statistic of 1-2% of the global population identifying as autistic is set to rise, therefore.

Different idiosyncrasies

Experientially, I have observed many of the different idiosyncrasies and characteristics that autistic individuals display, with some more common than others.

For example, Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory). His idiosyncrasy of wanting the same chair every time made him stand out from his less fussy housemates, who were happy to sit wherever.

Then there’s the autism characteristic of poor eye contact; most people know autistic individuals will struggle to look you in the eye.

Autistic individuals are characteristically black-and-white thinkers. They struggle to do the grey-area thinking that so much of our mainly neurotypical society dictates we should.

Autistic thinkers are detailed thinkers and often struggle with “big picture” thinking, though it’s not that they “can’t” do that kind of thinking: it simply doesn’t come intuitively to them, but they can learn academically how to improve those weaker areas of self.

Autistic adults may cut themselves off from their parents

What I have noticed over the years is that autistic children can grow into autistic adults who have arbitrarily cut themselves completely off from their parents. They estrange themselves. They start hating their parents.

My job involves diving deep into a person’s psyche, of course, and when I have gently explored an individual’s reason or reasons as to why they have cut a parent or parents off, the answer appears to me to be inane, with the punishment seemingly incommensurate with the original crime or crimes.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Martha’s story

Martha, an only child in her mid-thirties, started to hate her parents at age 16. Why? Because father insisted that she learn how to play the violin when she wanted to play the electric guitar.

Martha dreamed of joining an electro-pop band in the future, and she had held this dream for years since discovering the genre that is early 80s music.

Martha protested to her parents at the time that she did not want to learn the violin, but her parents considered and later told her that learning the violin later in life would be harder for her, whereas learning the guitar at a later age would be easy, they thought.

Needless to say, Martha disagreed, but her parents stood firmly together on their decision that their daughter progress with violin lessons for the last of her two senior school years. Martha did as she was told, but resented her parents deeply, especially father, whom she saw as the driving force of the two parents.

Fast forward to her mid-thirties, and her mother dared to send her a note of affection saying: “You are adored”, but it wasn’t signed.

Inordinate rage

Martha came to a session with an inordinate amount of rage and fury. “How dare she!” she exclaimed, as if her mother had committed a heinous crime by daring to send a card. No amount of explanation around mother’s reaching out, or Martha perhaps embracing the notion of forgiveness where her parents were concerned was going to be tolerated by her.

In Martha’s mind, she is “forever done” with her parents, despite my best efforts for her to see how they, her parents, might have seen things differently, wanted what was best for her, and lacked any malicious intent.

I tried suggesting that Martha work on strategies to do with forgiveness, but her position was rigid, her mind was made up. Martha had no sympathy or empathy: for her, the parents were wholly at fault. To Martha, she was the victim while her parents were the perpetrators whom she blamed for her becoming an accountant and not the pop star she still longed to be.

Photo by Trần Toàn on Unsplash

Dane’s story

Dane (27) was another autistic individual who shut his parents out. Dane’s parents had a warring relationship and they eventually separated as lockdown began in 2020. However, as Dane hit his teenage years, his Asperger’s father did both covert and overt parental alienation with his son, disparaging the mother on a regular basis.

When Dane returned home from his second year of university, by accident his mother discovered that Dane had been taking class A drugs. The by-accident part of this is when mother stumbled across his journal, the size of a mobile phone, and picked it up thinking it was her phone.

As an auto-reaction, she opened the notebook, but also, as a skim reader, she read the abbreviation of a class A drug (incidentally, she worked for a drugs counselling organisation).

Mother’s big-picture thinking was that a) Dane could die b) Dane could spend up to 7 years in jail and c) Dane would have a criminal record and never fulfil his dreams of working in tech abroad.

Mother shared with me that her “heart hit the floor”, and after consideration as to how best to broach the subject, she begged her son: “Please, Dane…don’t do drugs”.

Hate campaign

Dane was enraged, not sorry, guilty, or remorseful. He was enraged because his mother read his notebook – his private possession.  Mother explained that she only saw two pages of the book, but for Dane that action was unforgivable: she had touched his private goods and shouldn’t have done so.

Dane’s Asperger father didn’t help, either. He shared with his son: “Well, mum likes wine and that’s a drug.” Between the two of them, a hate campaign developed towards the mother and her occasional wine intake.

By the time Boris Johnson finished his stark “stay at home” warning, his mother had left to stay at a friend’s home. Dane’s parents are now properly divorced. He has sent a harsh message to his mother: “Don’t contact me ever… write me out of your will… I never want to see you again.” The mother is heartbroken. She lamented: “How can I unlove my son?”

Photo by Raamin ka on Unsplash

Cheri’s story

Cheri is an autistic 21-year-old. She appears much younger than her years. She refers to her parents by the first names she has created for them – Maeve and Bert.

Though I must strain my ears to hear her very quiet voice in the counselling sessions, she is inside bitter and angry with her parents for moving her to the UK from her beloved country of birth – Italy – when she was 13.

Cheri said: “They lost their right to be my parents when they did that”, and, needless to say, she struggles with theory of mind – seeing things from her parents’ position at the time. Father had to move from Italy because his firm dictated that he work for the UK branch of the company. He had no choice unless he wanted to be out of a job.

And yet Cheri is a most warm and loveable girl to her toys (plushies) that accompany her to the sessions. Her plushies have names and characters and they are spoken to as if living.

I wonder how she can carry so much enmity, but she does, and for this reason I am going to leave the suggestion of a rapprochement for another six months. I need to gain more of her trust before I even mention the “parents” word.

Phenomenon of estrangement

Adult autistic/Asperger children and their estrangement from their parents is a very real phenomenon that seems to be gaining momentum. These children do not feel any sense of duty to love a parent.

I often reflect on the times I hated my mother: they were manifold as a teenager especially, but we always “got over it” and now, as she is an elderly, potentially dying mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, I’m glad we did.

The care that I am giving my three-year-old mother (she has regressed to behaving as if very young) is paying her back for all the times she fulfilled my needs when I was too young to care for myself. That’s what we do as adult children.

My heart bleeds for them

Observing this estrangement phenomenon from my vantage point as a counsellor, hearing the innermost stories of my clients, my heart bleeds for them. It bleeds for both the estranged parents and the adult child with hate in his/her/their heart.

The names in this article have been changed and the photographs are for illustrative purposes only.