Autism and School Trauma

I'm a trauma therapist. I work with people who have experienced terrible things. Natural disasters, war, and awful things which other people have done to them.

My work is helping them to make sense of their experiences in a way which allows them to keep living and move on with their life. For it's not just what happens to us which matters, it's our perception of what happens to us. It's the way that we experience events, not just the events themselves.

This means that when I meet a person for the first time, I can't tell how their experiences will have affected them. I've met people who have full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder to a 'near miss' traffic incident where no one was hurt. And I've met people who have lived through events like a tsunami, and who have somehow managed to emerge with their sense of inner safety intact.

The way that we experience the world matters. The way that we make sense of our experiences matters. And that's something that many autistic children struggle with. They experience things in a different way - and they find it hard to make sense of what is happening.

Autistic children can be vulnerable to trauma.  To them, the world often feels confusing and unpredictable.  They find it harder to make sense of what is going on and they often experience things as too noisy, too much, too bright.  Then there is how other people react to them – not only other children, but also adults meeting them with a lack of understanding. 

Autistic adults tell me that they felt that they were wrong to feel the way that they did. ‘Everyone else is okay, why aren’t you?’ they are told.  ‘Just stop making a fuss’. 

All of those things can come together to mean that school can be a hard place for autistic children. But there are things that adults can do to help, and that’s what I talk about in this webinar. 

It is recorded if you can't make the time

.