Breaking the System (Gently): How Autistic Norm-Challenging Shows Up in Therapy

How autistic people notice what others don’t — and what happens when no one wants to hear it.

Wow, norm-challenging and how it shows up in the counselling room. Pillar three of autistic culture in the autistic culture podcast. Where do I even start with this?!

Norm-challenging is a big part of autistic culture — that constant questioning of “but why do we do it this way?” It’s not about being awkward or difficult. It’s just… we notice stuff. We see the gaps. We ask the questions. We make sense of things from the ground up — and that doesn’t always go down well in systems that just want us to smile and nod.

What does that phrase bring up for you? I bet you’ve got a story or two where you challenged norms (even if it was just in your head all the time and wasn’t spoken out loud!). And I have too.

What happens in the counselling room

What comes up over and over in the counselling room is the question:–

“Is it me, am I going mad here, can you make sense of this issue?”

Followed by a story about how they spotted some issue in their workplace, thought very deeply about it, found where the kinks were in the system, pointed them out, only to be told that: “there are no kinks” or “don’t cause trouble” or “what kink?” or

“WE DON’T WANT TO CHANGE THE WAY WE DO THINGS AROUND HERE, JUST GO AWAY.”

(Though that message is often hidden in polite emails or obfuscating terms.)

And then there we are in the counselling room trying to make head or tail of the whole thing.

Often the client is coming to me to ask ‘what am I missing?’ only for me to say, ‘well, you haven’t missed anything’… if anything, it’s more that they’ve missed the whole point that you’re trying to make. And then we sit there, both of us just discombobulated together, confounded, nonplussed!

Surely I’m supposed to be helping here. I mean, what kind of counsellor am I?! To be honest, sometimes counselling is not about pulling the person out of the dilemma, but getting stuck into the toffee and saying, yes, you are right, and this just totally sucks. It often sucks to see where things are going wrong in the ‘normal systems of doing things’, only to be told, we don’t wanna change it.

In being able to see from the bottom of the sea — all the cloudiness, all the plankton, all the bits and bobs floating about — we autistic people often point and go:

“Oh, look at that! Did you realise the plankton are gathering over there?”

Or: “I know a way to sort out those bits and bobs...”

Images from William Saville-Kent’s The Great Barrier Reef of Australia (1893)

This can go one way or another. Either this is celebrated and you excel in your work, in your relationship etc or you’re accused of being rigid, narcissistic, arrogant etc.

Funny old world isn’t it.

Burnout from being five steps ahead

The other thing is. If you’re a norm-challenger in a dysfunctional organisation with packet upon packet of seemingly normal but actually nonsensical systems, you can burn yourself out fighting every fire that comes your way. Because you’re five steps ahead and know how exactly how to sort it out, and the truth is your brain may find it difficult to let all the plates just fall.

This also comes into the counselling room. Naming this dynamic and asking the question – “So you’re spending all your energy units doing this norm-challenging thing, and you could just keep doing that forever, but what about you? Would you like to use your energy units elsewhere and manage your budget differently?” We have to keep asking the question, what battles do we want to fight and what do we want to let go of.

So on a totally different note….

How do we lean into norm challenging in a way that benefits us?

Unmasking is about living less neurotypically – challenging the ‘norms’ we have unwittingly cast ourselves into. In counselling, In counselling, I often feel like I’m in a kind of gentle cult-deprogramming role — helping people untangle themselves from beliefs they didn’t even realise they’d signed up to. There is a process whereby we name the norms we’ve been living and by identifying them as constructs, we can then decide when or whether we want to remove them and challenge that norm.

What norm-challenging has given me

For me, in my autistic journey it has led to these sort of random treasures. Off the top of my head these are what come to mind:

- Sleeping in my swimming costume (yep, really)

- Rediscovering a love of dolls — especially 1970s Sindy

- Wearing unapologetically sparkly eyeshadow

- Singing randomly at my children (while they pretend not to know me)

- Owning a pink fluffy lama as my support animal

- Sneaking out of boring family events to wander the dark streets with my child

- Breaking the rules of neurotypical counselling (but that’s another essay)

- Saying what I mean — great for me, occasionally alarming for others!

My fluffy pink lama - you can see her in counselling if you want!

Let’s keep talking…

Tell me about norm-challenging in your life. I would so so love to hear your stories.