An Unwanted Hill to Climb: The Challenges Autistic Adults Face in Social and Occupational Settings

As the parent of three diagnosed autistic persons, and as the founder of Life Guides for Autistics | NeuroGuides, I’ve devoted untold numbers of hours to serving autistic persons and documented around three thousand hours of direct one-on-one coaching with autistic persons in service through our non-profit organization. In doing so, I’ve gathered a great deal of empirical evidence as to the challenges autistic adults face in social and occupational settings.

Autistic persons, who have been a vital part of our combined social history and civilization, have been subjected to unwarranted, unnecessary discriminations and lack of appropriate engagement from the majority of neuro-typical humanity.

Based on anecdotal evidence, the overarching challenges facing autistic adults in today’s culture are three-fold. They are an ongoing state of disconnection, lack of understanding between autistic and non-autistic persons, neurological processing differentiations, and the reality of sensory processing disorders, among other co-occurring conditions.

Among most autistic persons, there exists an overarching confusion about social conformity in all cultural constructs. In other words, neurodivergent or autistic persons, seem to operate in a…