As an autistic person-centred psychotherapist, I have spent a lot of time thinking about empathy. Not simply what empathy means, but what happens when two people experience the world in quite different ways and then try to understand one another. It feels so important to me because so much of the traditional conversation about autism suggests that autistic people can’t empathise. I know from my own experience that this is simply not true, at least not for all autistic people. It just doesn't capture the huge variation in how autistic people experience and express empathy. More importantly, it can create a situation in which autistic people are judged according to whether their internal experience is visible in ways that other people recognise. It’s not that we need to make autistic people better at empathy, but rather to acknowledge that communication differences can create barriers to understanding, and what we see on the outside cannot be extrapolated to inner experience. This is where Milton’s (DATE) Double Empathy Problem becomes relevant, both in how we understand autism and in how we think about the therapeutic relationship.

The Double Empathy Problem challenges the traditional idea that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people result from something lacking within the autistic person. Autism has historically been understood through a deficit-based framework, with difficulties in social communication located within the autistic individual. The Double Empathy Problem offers a different possibility: when people have substantially different ways of experiencing, interpreting and making sense of the world, both people may experience difficulties understanding one another. In other words, the difficulty may be relational rather than something that exists solely within one person. That doesn't mean that autistic and non-autistic people cannot understand one another, nor does it mean that communication differences don't create genuine challenges. Rather, it invites us to consider that those challenges may arise from difference rather than simply from deficit.

As an autistic person, I recognise how uncomfortable it can be when other people decide what my behaviour means without asking me. Looking away might be interpreted as disinterest, needing additional processing time as avoidance, being direct as bluntness. Yet none of these necessarily tells you what is happening internally within me. For many autistic people, difficulty expressing empathy in a ‘socially acceptable’ form isn't necessarily the same thing as not experiencing empathy. Autistic people can experience and express empathy in many different ways, and these differences can be wrongly mistaken for an absence of empathy altogether.

This is important in psychotherapy. As a person-centred psychotherapist, I see the therapeutic relationship as something we create together. I bring my own assumptions and ways of understanding into the room, just as my client does. When working with an autistic client, being autistic myself does not mean I automatically understand their experience. Autism isn't a single experience, and I cannot assume that my internal world is the same as theirs. Equally, I don't want to assume that communication difficulties belong entirely to the client. I need to consider my own contribution: am I communicating in a way that makes sense to them? Am I allowing enough processing time? Am I asking the client to adapt to me simply because I am the therapist?

This matters because therapy can become another place where autistic people feel they have to mask and perform. Many autistic people have spent years monitoring their eye contact, facial expressions, tone, body language and conversational timing. If therapy treats these differences as problems that need correcting, it can reinforce the very experiences that brought someone to therapy. I don't want therapy to require someone to become more convincingly neurotypical in order to be understood. A client's eye contact or emotional expression should not become more important than what they are actually communicating.

This is where I find the person-centred approach particularly meaningful. Carl Rogers placed importance on attempting to understand the client's phenomenological world: their unique way of experiencing themselves and the world around them. His description of empathy includes understanding the client's private world “as if” it were our own. For me, that “as if” is crucial. It acknowledges that I can never completely know another person's experience. Even when I share an identity or experience with a client, I cannot assume that our experiences are the same.

The attitude I want to bring into the therapy room is therefore not, “I know what this is because I understand autism,” but, “I don't know exactly what this is like for you, and I want to understand.” This leaves the client as the authority on their own experience and allows me to bring knowledge and curiosity without turning either into certainty.

For me, person-centred empathy is therefore closely connected with curiosity and humility. Rather than deciding that a behaviour represents avoidance, resistance or disengagement, I can ask what it means from the client's perspective. Rather than thinking, “I know why you're doing that,” I can ask, “What's happening for you right now?” Or simply, “Have I got that right?” That question leaves space for the client to correct me. It acknowledges that my understanding is provisional rather than absolute.

Being person-centred doesn't make me immune to misunderstanding, and being an autistic therapist doesn't make me immune either. What matters is how I respond when misunderstanding occurs. If I notice a rupture, I can become curious rather than assuming the client is the problem. If a client tells me I've misunderstood them, I can listen. I want to acknowledge my assumptions and allow myself to be changed by what they tell me. Perhaps the strength of a person-centred approach isn't that it prevents misunderstanding, but that it provides a way of responding to it.

So, can person-centred psychotherapy hold the answer to the Double Empathy Problem? I wouldn't say that it has solved it, or that it is automatically the right therapy for every autistic person. No therapeutic approach can remove the fundamental difference between one person's experience and another's. What person-centred psychotherapy may offer is a particularly useful way of responding to that difference: with curiosity rather than certainty, and with a willingness to ask what is happening between us rather than deciding who needs to be fixed.