There are several duties or tools that our mentors can use as required.

• Personal Experience

  • Autistic people think differently and have atypical life experiences. Sharing our experiences can communicate that we are not alone. We can also share what we learned (upon request).

• Psychology

  • We can share psychological principles that might be relevant. For example, "It's easier to do a task by breaking it down and learning one step at a time." We’re not going to make a treatment plan like a therapist would or an educational plan like a teacher would, but they can serve as tools you might want to try.

• Accommodations

  • We can share ideas about how to take care of our autism. Behaviors like stimming and explicit communication are autistic culture and support our autism. For those of us who are around non-autistic professionals but not actually autistic people, we may not be aware that we need these behaviors accommodated and that it’s okay to do them.

• Validation

  • Relationship is #1. To maintain this we validate all emotions and experiences. It is behavior that can be right or wrong, but it is not a mentor’s duty to judge.

  • We actively listen to what the client wants to say and do not steer the conversation to our own goals for them. In fact, we will not pressure the client to talk about or work on anything they do not explicitly ask for.

  • We will not give praise which is typically fine in moderation, but when received in excess (such as in a treatment plan) makes the purpose of our behavior to comply with others’ expectations. Instead we give feedback on how a behavior positively affected your life.

• Questions

  • The only questions we ask are ones that clarify or expand on what the client is talking about. We do not use questions to make points or as a disciplinary strategy to trigger thinking, both of which we tend to view as aggressive.

• Consequences

  • When the client wants help with decision making, we can work together to brainstorm options and possible outcomes of each option. We will not give any advice.

  • We will also not give manipulative feedback. For example, on issues of disclosing one’s autism, we will describe both the benefits and challenges. To expose only the benefits would put pressure from our bias for autistic pride. Many of us are used to hearing about only the challenges from practitioners, exposing that they have the opposite bias.