Understanding Autism: A Foundations Series Rooted in My Six-Point Framework 🌱
Hello friends,
I want to share something that sits right at the heart of my work.
Over on the DGH Neurodivergent Consultancy website, I’ve been developing the Understanding Autism series; a growing collection of articles that explore Autistic experience with depth, care, and intellectual honesty.
This series forms a core part of my six-point framework for supporting Autistic people; the framework that underpins my consultancy, training, writing, and community work.
You can explore the full series here:
How This Series Fits Into The Six-Point Framework
The six-point framework is built on a simple but radical idea:
You cannot meaningfully support Autistic people without first understanding Autistic experience on its own terms.
The Understanding Autism series lays that foundation.
Each article unpacks one of the key experiential domains that the framework later translates into practical support, environmental change, and relational practice. This includes:
Sensory Processing & Experience
Not as a list of sensitivities, but as a relational experience between bodymind and environment; essential to understanding distress, shutdown, and capacity.
Monotropism, Attention, and Energy
Including critiques of spoon theory and a deeper exploration of energy accounting, focus, and demand; all central to sustainable support.
Masking, Meltdowns, and Shutdowns
Reframed away from behaviour management and toward meaning, safety, and communication.
Autistic Burnout
Positioned not as individual failure, but as a crisis of connection; to self, environment, identity, and support systems.
These pieces form the “why” beneath the framework. The six points themselves provide the “how”.
Together, they offer something many professionals and families are missing. Not just strategies, but understanding that changes how support is conceived in the first place.
Who This Is For
This series is written for:
Professionals who want to move beyond surface-level autism training
Educators and clinicians seeking frameworks that actually map onto lived reality
Families who want to support without controlling
Autistic people looking for language that resonates rather than pathologises
It’s theory-informed, lived-experience-led, and unapologetically neurodivergence-competent.
Working With Me
If this series resonates, it’s often because it reflects the same thinking I bring into my professional work.
I offer:
Training and consultancy for organisations and services
Talks, workshops, and courses grounded in the six-point framework
Strategic support for teams wanting to shift from compliance-based models to relational, ethical practice
You can contact me directly via the website, or simply reply to this newsletter to start a conversation:
This work is about more than understanding autism. It’s about reshaping the conditions in which Autistic people are expected to survive, and creating ones in which we can actually thrive.
Thank you, as always, for walking alongside this work.
Warmly, and with greetings for the new year,
David