Hi, MY NAME IS ALI.
I am a National Board Certified Counselor and a Licensed Professional Counselor of more than 10 years. Since the beginning of my career, I have worked with Autistics in private practice and in community mental health clinical settings. The more I learned about Autism, the more I began to see similarities in behaviors in my own family members, and in myself leading me into becoming the Autistic Autism therapist that I am today.
My Approach
At my core, I am a research-based, person-centered, narrative therapist. I love stories; hearing people’s stories, learning new approaches to storytelling, reframing stories to explore new perspectives, and pulling a story into reality to see the impact stories have on our lives. Where stories end, research begins on a scientific level to understand what humans function the way humans do. If there is something I can lose 20 hours a week to, it is learning new information, devouring research studies, and figuring out how to apply new information to practice. I particularly love when I combine these two together - sharing what I have learned with others to enrich the story.
The Autistic Community has had my heart from the beginning. In my office desk I still have a small pressed flower that a non-verbal, level 3 Autistic boy gave to me on my first day of ABA training; he came up to me, handed me the flower and said “you’re nice” shocking nearly everyone in the room. I mandated reported that night and had the program investigated for abusive behaviors with tears in my eyes while holding onto that flower, and changed my trajectory toward therapist instead of any behavioral approaches. As the Autistic Community, we deserve better than a behavioral method to control us and force us to comply with societal standards we do not agree with. There is always a valuable and important reason for behavior - a story behind the surface - and compliance does not reach nor aid in the process of discovering that story.
I have lost jobs, left positions, and fought to advocate for the Autistic Community throughout my career and will probably continue to do so. In launching this podcast of videos and audios, books on neurodivergence, connecting the Autistic community with resources and supportive services, I hope to help share information I wish I had known when I felt alone and weird. For me, for my family, for the community, I want to become a voice in the momentum of this Autistic movement.
Weird and all, I hope you will join me.