The Difference Between Autism Counselling and Coaching is Overstated
In my new book ‘The Autism Dialogue Approach Handbook’ (Routledge, 2025), I suggest that autism dysfunction should be reconceptualised as relational rather than individual, where relational refers to the environment, or other people or both. This isn’t simply repeating the social model of disability, it goes deep, and is backed by social-cognition philosophies such as the work of Lori Hogenkamp with her Stress Adaptation Theory (linked to her ‘Peripheral Minds of Autism’) and Hanne De Jaegher’s work on autism, Enaction and Participatory Sense Making.
Without conjecture we can assume Carl Rogers, the originator of the person-centred approach, was inadvertently alluding to Enaction theory when in his pragmatic yet enigmatic way, famously said, “What is most personal is most universal.” One has to see the limits of the person-centred in the light of relational-centred care – and there’s lots of potential for thinking and work to do there. Bringing these emerging thoughts into the helping professions, I invite Michael Bader’s Psychology Today article “The Difference Between Coaching and Therapy Is Greatly Overstated” (2009), where he challenges the commonly held distinctions between coaching and therapy, arguing that both professions often overlap in practice, despite claims that they differ significantly in focus areas such as past versus future orientation, treatment of mental illness, and the nature of client relationships.
So what do the words ‘coaching’ and ‘therapy’ mean in terms of autism and the relational, and where can the practitioner currently situate themself at both the personal and the universal levels to be more at one with their environment, thus aiding healing and growth in the autistic client?
Bader suggested that the general distinctions between coaching and therapy are more about professional identity and market positioning than actual differences in practice. The Autism Industrial Complex (Broderick, 2022), which has commercialised autism, takes this notion further, negatively encouraging therapeutic approaches that view autistic individuals through a deficit lens, aiming to ‘normalise’ or ‘fix’, not only devaluing the uniqueness of neurodivergent experiences but also creating barriers to authentic self-expression.
In looking at definitions of identity, markets, commercialism and power, I often consider how these compete with more equity-based values in the recovery (therapy) and discovery (coaching) spaces and in bringing these together, I highlight the common denominator: Dialogue.
Does the distinction between coaching and therapy lie more in regulatory frameworks, scope of practice, and professional identity than in how practitioners actually interact with clients? Both therapy and coaching aims to help clients move toward greater well-being and fulfilment. Bider suggests the overlap is most evident in areas like life transitions, stress management, or career challenges, where the line between psychological support and personal development becomes fluid.
Sounds like inner-city autism to me.
‘Dialogue praxis based on equity gently unfolds the answer – together’
I also think this is a clue to the polarising tendencies, which seek to destabilise power, including of autistic/non-autistic; helper/helped, as well as therapy and coaching. A simple question to ask in these situations is where is the power? Dialogue praxis based on equity gently unfolds the answer – together. Autism is an opportunity for mutual, personal (and impersonal) and universal / systemic growth.
It’s practical to focus on how these differences play out in the practice room, particularly, as we suggest, in terms of the autistic person’s function and dysfunction being relational.
Another clue is in Rogers’, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change”, because in Dialogue, the ‘I’ is also the relational.
In Dialogue we ask, what are we thinking together?
Governing bodies like BACP, UKCP, NCPS, ICF and EMCC (and their respective insurance and training companies) grapple with the fact ‘counsellor’, ‘therapist’ and ‘coach’ aren’t legal or protected terms, therefore anyone can refer to themselves as such. There’s a need for regulatory frameworks in order to at least distinguish the trustworthy from the charlatan and enable comprehensive career pathways, and particularly for those with lived experience. As autism and neurodiversity awareness increases, so does the need for serious Dialogue around what we are all thinking in terms of recovery and growth (to what ends), where we are all going with such emerging new frameworks, movements and cultural shifts and, perhaps crucially, more dynamic ways of living and being alive.
Jonathan Drury
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