I’m going to admit something about the realities of delivering autism training as an autistic trainer.
Every time I stand in front of a room or online meeting and talk about autistic meltdowns, a small part of me feels uncomfortable.
Not because I don’t understand them professionally, but because I’m talking about myself.
It’s one thing to say, “Autistic people can experience meltdowns.” It’s another to say, “When I have a meltdown, I can end up sobbing on the floor, unable to move, unable to speak, just waiting for my nervous system to recover.”
As a professional, saying those words out loud feels incredibly vulnerable. There’s a little voice that wonders whether people will see me differently. Will they question my ability? Will they think, “How can someone who experiences that be training professionals?”
Then I remember why I choose to say it anyway.
One of the things I’ve thought about a lot over the last couple of years is what it actually means to bring lived experience into my work. It’s a phrase that’s used so often now that I sometimes wonder whether we’ve stopped thinking about what it really means. Lived experience isn’t just standing in front of a room and saying, “I’m autistic.” It isn’t a novelty or a badge that somehow makes everything I say more valid than someone else’s. If anything, it comes with a responsibility.
I don’t want people to leave my training remembering that they met an autistic trainer. I want them to leave understanding autism a little more deeply than they did before they walked into the room, and that’s quite a different thing.
Sometimes I facilitate training, and sometimes I’m there specifically because I’m the autistic person sharing my experiences. Those are very different roles, and I genuinely love both of them. When I’m facilitating, I’m still completely myself. I’m not masking or pretending not to be autistic. The difference is simply that the session isn’t focused on me. My role is to guide discussion, create a safe learning environment and help other people make sense of the content.
When I’m delivering from a lived experience perspective, however, I’m deliberately opening the door to parts of my own life that many people would probably keep private. I’m talking about sensory overload, communication differences, exhaustion, meltdowns and the ways autism and ADHD shape my day-to-day life. That kind of openness asks something different of me, and perhaps that’s exactly why it matters.
If all people ever hear are textbook definitions, autism can remain something abstract. A list of traits, a diagnostic manual, a collection of myths that are quietly replaced by a different set of myths.
One of the things I feel quite strongly about is not replacing one stereotype with another. I don’t want people to come away thinking autistic people are fragile or unstable because we can experience meltdowns. Equally, I don’t want them to think autism is some kind of superpower that automatically makes us exceptional.
We’re people.
We have strengths and we have support needs.
Often, we have both at exactly the same time.
The same person who occasionally ends up sobbing on the floor because their nervous system has reached its limit is also the person who coaches neurodivergent adults, delivers training to professionals, speaks confidently to organisations and helps design services to improve autistic people’s lives. To me, those things aren’t contradictions. They’re simply the reality of being human.
I think that’s also why I keep talking about meltdowns. Not because I want people to feel sorry for me, but because I want people to understand that meltdowns don’t happen in isolation. They happen in environments that are overwhelming, after prolonged stress, when communication breaks down, when sensory demands become too much, or when a person has spent too long trying to cope without the support they need.
If my vulnerability helps one professional think differently about the person sitting in front of them, perhaps they’ll be more likely to ask, “What does this person need?” instead of “What’s wrong with them?”
If it helps one autistic person feel less ashamed of something they’ve hidden for years, then perhaps they’ll be a little kinder to themselves too.
Something else I’ve realised is that lived experience isn’t a one-way street. People often thank me for sharing my experiences, but the truth is that I learn just as much from hearing theirs. Every autistic person I meet gives me another perspective, another piece of the puzzle, another reminder that there isn’t one autistic experience—there are millions. My own story isn’t representative of everyone, and I would never want it to be. It’s simply one voice among many.
Maybe that’s what lived experience really is; not being the voice. Just being a voice that’s prepared to say, “This is what it’s like for me.”
Sometimes that’s uncomfortable, and sometimes it’s emotionally draining.
Sometimes I finish a session knowing I’ll need some quiet time afterwards to let my nervous system settle again.
If those uncomfortable conversations help people understand autism with a little more compassion, a little more nuance and a little less fear, then they’re conversations worth having.
Sometimes the most uncomfortable stories are the ones that help people understand the most—as long as I remember to look after my own nervous system afterwards.