It won’t surprise anyone who either is, or has worked with, an autistic adult to hear that the workplace is an extremely problematic environment for most of us.
Autistic unemployment is the highest or second highest of all disability groups – alternating with unemployment in those with intellectual disabilities. Currently only 16% of autistic people are in full time employment while 77% are unemployed and most want to work. As an article by the London School of Economics puts it: “Something is going seriously wrong in the workplace for autistic people to be so disproportionally unemployed”.
Unemployment is not just about getting a job. Autistic people do encounter difficulties in the process of getting employment, but in my experience as an autist without intellectual disability working with other autists without intellectual disability, the greater problem is not so much finding employment as surviving it.
Few of us can sustain full-time work, and very few can sustain full-time work employed in a neurotypical environment. But even part-time work in a neurotypical environment can present major problems. Why is this, and what can we do about it?
Not by changing our autistic selves but by understanding ourselves better, and helping our employers and co-workers to do the same. Self-advocacy is confusing and exhausting, and that is where a therapist with good understanding of autistic people can make all the difference.
Being listened to without assumptions and without gaslighting can help us identify what is and what is not sustainable, what damages us and what nourishes us and, within the bounds of possibility, arrange our lives accordingly.
Course Content
Presenter
Max Marnau is a person-centred therapist 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. Among whom she counts both autistic people and survivors of abusive cults.
Her parents quite consciously did not transmit their culture to her for fear of making her an outsider. That’s quite funny, given that she’s autistic! She sees herself as a second-generation exile who never quite fitted anywhere, and that may have made her particularly vulnerable to the attractions of an apparently friendly and supportive cult with clear rules.
With the understanding that she is autistic came the discovery of her tribe, and Max has become an “out, loud and proud” autistic psychotherapist, activist, writer, and trainer.
