Zebras and Horses: Autism Event Online for Counsellors & Psychotherapists.

Welcome therapists and counsellors to the 2025 Vanguard Neurodiversity Training Summer Symposium where you can join us for a day, live, on Zoom.

There are

• workshops,
• presentations
• discussions
• free handouts

all around attuning with increased insights, and doing good therapy with autistic adult clients.

We have a great line up of speakers, with so much of their expertise and insights to share. Here's a quick overview of them, with more detail further down the page.

• Vauna Beauvais. (Autistic person. Therapist, author and broadcaster, and trainer of neuroaffirming therapy). Vauna establishes the intellectual and emotional foundation for our day's exploration of positive autistic identity and therapeutic approaches. It challenges conventional thinking about difference, adaptation, and what it means to thrive. Weaving together evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and lived experience to create ways of understanding the autistic experience, Vaunas session sets the stage for our subsequent workshops on assessment, identity work, life transitions, and authentic self-expression.

• Emma Welsby (Qualified occupational therapist who also does autism assessments). She talks to us about the medical model ways of going about an assessment, and contrasts that with using a relational neuroaffirming assessment based on exploration, conversation and collaboration. Emma gives facts about the standard autism assessment tools. She illustrates from her work the ways that being a neuroaffirming practitioner makes so much of a difference in the quality of experience at such an important time in a late-identifying autistic persons life.

• Eoin Stephens. (Autistic person. Therapist, clinical supervisor, and trainer of neuroaffirming therapy). So much of our work with late-discovery autistic adult clients is about identity and wellbeing. There can be a disruption in self-concept as the person reviews their life and experiences in light of the newfound knowledge of being autistic. Moreover, the person may feel there is a lot to process about going forward in their life. What decisions to make about disclosure, approaching workplace situations, and even whether to pursue an assessment in the first place. Eoin uses Motivational Interviewing as a framework for therapists to draw upon when navigating sensitive, very important areas of adjustment and alignment to new meanings.

• Cheryl Long (Autistc therapist, social worker) talks about the what, why, and how hormaonal experiences and transitions such as the menopause are differently impactful in autistic women (AFAB). Cheryl runs a menopause event for autistic peeople,and tells us her personal story of high-impact realisations relating to perimenopause and being autistic. She discusses with Vauna what , both the new and established research reveeals.

• Natalie Clarke Integrative psychotherapist, and activist, working with the LGBTQIA+ community, non-monogamous people, sex workers, and neurodivergent people) .Being a late-identifying autistic person who is shedding the neuronormative gaze to emerge as their authentic self, is the kind of work we therapists are familair with if we work with autistic adult clients. Natalie talks with us about working with unmasking, not only in regards to neurotype, but also clients who get in touch woth other authentic asepects of identity such as being Queer or Trans, and how these areas of exploraration and emergence may intersect.

• Yolanda Wade. (Counsellor, and a trainer of bereavement training for organisations). Yolanda talks with us about autistic adults and grief, highlighting ways in which there are differences in how loss may be processed, expressed or communicated. Therapists working with autistic adults may at any time encounter a client who experiences loss, and can draw upon the insights from Yolandas neuroaffirming-focussed session today.