Understanding Me, Understanding You: A Guide for Supporting Autistic Individuals, Easing Anxiety and Promoting Mutual Understanding

Good communication is central to all relationships, yet the unpredictability of interpersonal exchanges can cause significant anxiety for autistic people and create a barrier to successful communication. Understanding Me, Understanding You is a guide for anyone working with and supporting autistic people. The aim is to encourage the reader to consider how they can create ’autistic spaces’ where there is predictability and trust, enabling autistic people to engage, contribute and grow. It seeks to promote mutual understanding, starting by encouraging the reader to understand themselves, their own beliefs and attitudes and the way that this can influence their behaviour; and then to understand another and, in turn, help them to understand. At its foundation is the ’Triad of Understanding’, a beautifully simple model for successful communication conceived together by social work practitioner, Dr Jackie Robinson, and three autistic co-researchers over a three year period. Jackie successfully created an autistic space that allowed the autistic co-researchers to flourish and achieve.

Susan Allen began her career in hospital pharmacy, and then as a teacher practitioner at Brighton University. She has produced many CPD articles and packages for health-related and wider audiences. She worked as a senior lecturer at the Leicester School of Pharmacy for 20 years, where she developed her own model for consultation and an online skills evaluation and development programme.