Autistic Burnout: A Therapists Guide
Navigating Autistic Burnout: A Therapist's In-depth Guide to Supporting Clients
Autistic burnout is an increasingly widespread yet overlooked challenge within the neurodivergent community. As therapists and counsellors, we can educate ourselves on this exhausting state of complete physical, mental, and emotional depletion. Only with proper understanding can we provide meaningful support to autistic clients struggling to manage unrelenting demands and pressures in a neurotypical world.
What is Autistic Burnout?
Autistic burnout stems from the ongoing, grinding stress of trying to survive and thrive day-to-day in a society that chronically fails to accommodate and embrace neurodivergent needs.
Core aspects of burnout include:
Severe fatigue and the depletion of mental and physical energy reserves. Just getting through daily responsibilities and basic self-care feels like too much. Clients describe profound exhaustion.
Difficulty regulating emotions leading to frequent meltdowns or sensory overloads over minor triggers that would previously not cause major issues. Feelings of being overwhelmed, irritable, anxious and sad boil over.
Loss of functional skills in key areas like executive functioning, verbal and written communication abilities, self-care routines, and social capacities that had been previously manageable. It's as if the autistic brain temporarily takes some abilities partially offline to conserve depleted bandwidth and resources.
Heightened sensitivities to sensory input such as noise, bright or fluorescent lights, certain textures, busy chaotic environments. What had been tolerated before now becomes agonisingly unbearable.
Avoiding most social situations and isolating oneself more - lacking the mental bandwidth, energy and motivation to interact. Basic social needs get neglected.
Declines in work or academic performance as cognitive concentration evaporates, motivation depletes, and ability to handle multi-step tasks diminishes.
Factors Contributing to Autistic Burnout
One major contributing factor to autistic burnout is the cumulative toll of constantly exerting effort day after day, month after month to mask or camouflage one's natural autistic behaviors, traits, body language, facial expressions, and communication styles to try to appear "normal" in public. This masking and false self-presentation is mentally draining.
Other common triggers leading to burnout include the sensory bombardment of noisy, crowded, chaotic environments with too much visual stimulation, rigid institutional systems and routines that lack flexibility, judgmental and hostile attitudes from others, and major life changes or stressors such as a new job or move that require monumental adaptive efforts from autistic individuals.
Bullying and abuse can also be catalysts.
The Impact on Clients
Essentially, when the demands regularly placed on an autistic person chronically exceed the energy capacity, sensory and cognitive bandwidth they realistically possess available to meet them, crash - burnout forces an involuntary system shut down as the mind and body signal "I have nothing left to give" to preserve basic sanity and function. It is the autistic brain going into survival mode to avoid complete meltdown.
Yet despite the severe impacts that unchecked autistic burnout can generate - derailing education and career paths when someone has to take extended time off to recover, rapidly degrading relationships with friends or partners who do not understand why someone suddenly has little to give, and most critically, increasing susceptibility to suicidal thoughts due to feeling trapped and hopeless from inescapable stress - it remains a poorly recognized phenomenon among many clinicians. There is much catching up to do.
How Can Therapists Provide Support?
As counsellors and psychotherapists working with autistic clients, it is our responsibility to extensively educate ourselves on the drivers and warning signs of autistic burnout as well as potential strategies to manage it. No two autistic individuals' needs or triggers are identical. Customizing our therapeutic approach is key.
Best practices include:
Help clients tune into the early warning signals their own mind and body exhibit that burnout may again be approaching, such as increased irritability over minor frustrations, loss of previous effective coping mechanisms, amplified sensory sensitivities, a tendency to isolate more, constant fatigue, foggy cognitive function, or repeatedly avoiding social interactions that had been manageable before. The sooner preventative interventions can happen after spotting early indicators, the better the chances of averting a full-blown burnout crash.
Collaboratively work with clients to thoroughly identify potential burnout triggers across home, workplace, or other environments and brainstorm ways to reduce exposure to them whenever realistically possible. Help clients recognise their unique cognitive bandwidth and sensory tolerance limitations so they do not consistently exceed those capacities trying to fit a neurotypical mold.
Explicitly encourage autistic clients to rest and engage in activities that genuinely replenish their spirit without residual guilt or shame. Make clear that taking a step back from overwhelming responsibilities for a time and giving oneself the needed space and permission to partially or fully shut down and recover is not laziness nor weakness - rather, it is an act of courage, self-awareness and self-care. Healing and recharging from autistic burnout takes time, space and compassionate understanding.
Assist clients in setting reasonable boundaries around social obligations and work hours aligned with their realistic sensory and social capacity rather than pushing past those edges repeatedly. Affirm repeatedly that it is okay to say no to activities and interactions that consistently deplete already scarce mental reserves, even if peers, colleagues or family members do not understand. Looking after one's basic health and self-care needs has to come first.
Consider regularly developing simple nonverbal systems or communication tools, like color cards or number scales, that give you rapid insight into clients' stress levels during sessions when verbal communication becomes challenging due to burnout depletion. This provides an important window into their shifting state of mind.
Offer practical problem-solving support if clients are struggling with navigating a specific life challenge, but take care not to impose top-down solutions. Collaboratively present options rather than directives so they retain autonomy in the process wherever possible.
Explicitly give clients permission to stop exhaustingly masking naturally autistic traits and attempting to pass as neurotypical during your sessions unless they prefer it. Provide a safe space. Expending massive effort camouflaging one's authentic self to fit unrealistic social expectations often fosters burnout over the long term.
Proactively work together with clients to build sustainable strategies and skills that can help prevent and minimise future burnout episodes. This includes learning better-coping mechanisms for known personal meltdown triggers, incorporating regular self-guided sensory-friendly relaxation practices, and how to notice subtle early warning signs of approaching crash points well before hitting crisis levels again. Developing emotional self-awareness is key.
Make it clear you are committed to being an unconditionally accepting, non-judgmental therapeutic presence. Internalised shame and the distress of feeling constantly "othered" within broader society is often a major background contributor to autistic burnout. Offer abundant empathy, validation and understanding - not dismissal or frustration.
While individual strategies to cope with symptoms are indispensable, we must also consider how environmental factors and lack of accommodations often underlie clients’ burnout. There are limits to resilience without systemic change.
By comprehensively educating ourselves on the diverse causes and impacts of autistic burnout, as well as tailoring trauma-informed counseling approaches through this lens, we clinicians have an enormous opportunity to drastically improve our clients’ day-to-day quality of life. Our role as therapists is vital in ensuring autistic individuals do get the compassionate understanding and holistic support they need - to not just barely survive each week, but to genuinely build psychosocial resilience, thrive, and live their lives to the fullest as their beautifully authentic selves. And that can happen as we become better-informed guides.