Knowing and accepting your own strengths and weaknesses is helpful in feeling good with yourself. Therefore, people with autism are the first ones to be entitled to receive correct, valid and useful information about their disorder. Despite the many years of experience in explaining autism to parents and professionals, explaining it to the person himself or herself is a rather new challenge. Based more on our experience with especially so-called 'high functioning' adolescents and young adults than on theories we developed a method and a practical tool, a workbook, to face this challenge. Explaining autism is not easy.
Autism is an abstract concept and a puzzling disorder.
It is not a coincidence that so many autism societies choose a puzzle for their logo. If even specialists and researchers are arguing about the concept, then we must try to avoid spreading the confusion amongst people with autism. People with autism find it difficult to communicate the way we do. They understand the spoken language differently and have troubles finding out what we mean, because what we mean and what we say is not always the same. Therefore explaining autism in a verbal way, talking about it, can lead to wrong conclusions and meaning on their side.