Aucademy’s Dr Chloe Farahar is often asked many questions where the answer is often the same. These questions asked that have the same answer, include:
- “I want a diagnosis to understand myself”
- “I want to stop masking”
- “I want to understand my family member/student/child”
The answer to these questions is: It’s important to build your self-advocacy skills, which include:
- Learning your Autistic profile;
- Learning what rights you have – legal and human rights;
- And learn how to communicate your needs and rights and set boundaries with others
For anyone asking “How do I build my profile?” or “How do we help Autistic people with their profile building?”…
Starting to build knowledge of your profile so you can build self-advocacy skills:
We advocate for building self-advocacy skills, which includes:
- Learning your needs/personal neurodivergent profile;
- Knowledge of your rights;
- Conveying those needs; asserting your boundaries/expectations (confidently; telling people what your needs are/what your profile is – in your way, e.g., augmented and alternative communication methods)
In this way, you may also come to naturally take control of your Autistic mask (see our YouTube for more on masking and what it really is).
1) Learning your needs/personal neurodivergent profile:
Please feel free to start building knowledge of your neurodivergent profile by delving into Aucademy’s resources, that’s why we created them! You can start here with the resources further down this page.
Aucademy and Aucademy’s Ben of Autisticality have made resources to help us build knowledge of our profiles and to assert our needs and set boundaries with others based on our profile.
Look to our Aucademy resources here:
And use Ben’s Autisticality resources and book – https://www.autisticality.co.uk
If you are Kent and Medway health and social care staff, you can contact KMPT to access the Aucademy webinars, which help build some basic Autistic profile and diversity knowledge for staff to support Autistic patients and clients.
And this NHS CHECK tool has versions for healthcare settings; employment settings; and education settings.
The checklist has been designed to help make health appointments, training sessions, and employment meetings comfortable and accessible for neurodivergent people.
The checklist focuses on five main areas:
- Communication
- Health
- Environment
- Change
- Knowledge
Download the CHECK healthcare tool here.
Download the CHECK employment tool here.
Download the CHECK education tool here.
Dr Farahar has also made a tool based on the SPELL framework – where you can put your name in the centre and start to fill in how each of the SPELL letters relates to your profile and needs.
SPELL is an approach used to support Autistic individuals that emphasises a holistic, person-centred understanding of Autistic experience. Each letter represents a key principle:
S – Structure is about our need for:
- Predictability and clear expectations
- Which helps reduce anxiety by creating clear, organised environments
- It involves creating consistent routines, visual schedules, and clear instructions
- And supports understanding of what’s happening now and what will happen next
P – is for Positive (Approaches):
- such as focusing on an individual’s strengths, abilities, and potential
- and it moves away from deficit-based models of understanding Autistic experience
- It’s about celebrating an individual’s talents and unique perspectives
- and about building confidence by recognising and nurturing personal capabilities
E – is for Empathy:
- And asks people around us to have a genuine understanding of the individual’s experience and be curious without judgment when the person can’t perspective take
- Empathy is about listening without judgment
- and recognising that Autistic individuals experience emotions deeply
- and that people should validate our Autistic feelings and perspectives, even if they’re not what the person expects
- empathy is about understanding communication might look different from neurotypical expectations
L – is for Low Arousal:
- which is about minimizing sensory and emotional overwhelm
- and creating calm, supportive environments
- by reducing stimuli that might cause stress or sensory overload – this includes how people interact with us, their tone of voice, and how much information they provide etc.
- Low arousal can mean providing quiet spaces and sensory-friendly settings
- and recognising and respecting individual sensory sensitivities
L – is for Links:
- and is about ensuring consistent support across different life domains and situations and services
- it’s about creating connections between various support services
- and maintaining continuity of care and understanding
- Links is about helping individuals build meaningful relationships
- and supporting transitions and maintaining supportive networks
Download for free the SPELL tool Dr Farahar made:
And with everything you start to learn about yourself, including the information you put into the CHECK and SPELL tools, you can use Dr Chloe Farahar’s copyrighted wellbeing and commutation plan to build your profile and share it with relevant people like your doctor; teachers; employer; friends and/or family (please contact us to licence the use of Dr Farahar’s profile tool).
2) Knowledge of rights
The next step in Autistic discovery and self-advocacy skill building is to have knowledge of your rights as an Autistic person (check the specific rights in your country, Aucademy are largely based in the UK).
We need to learn and be aware of our:
- Personal rights;
- Community rights;
- Our rights under the Equality Act in different settings (education/employment);
- Etc.
In the UK, you can get started by searching our A-Z resource page for the terms “legal”; “rights”; “adjustments”; “self-advocacy”.
3) Conveying your needs; asserting your boundaries/expectations
Once you have some idea of your needs and profile, as well as your rights, we can start to build boundary-setting skills – and this takes practice!
We recommend when you’re ready to build boundary-setting skills that you watch our video on how to do this:
Aucademy bitesize: Building boundaries (as part of self-advocacy) on YouTube