ABOUT

My name is Susan and I am a retired occupational therapist living in Tempe, Arizona. I received my M.S. degree in Occupational Therapy from Western Michigan University in 1968 and my M.Ed. degree in special education technology in 1995. I was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum in 1999. Most of my career has been spent in school-based practice. Frustrated with the pull-out medical model of providing OT services in the school setting, I developed and, with the support of my fellow therapists, administrators, parents and teachers at Loudoun County Public School system in Virginia, initiated an educationally relevant model of therapy services that worked with both the teacher and the student within the classroom setting. Over the course of my career I pursued certifications in treating sensory processing disorders, completed training in a therapeutic listening program and, later, focused on evaluating and treating executive functioning difficulties (areas that I struggled with myself). After my diagnosis, with the support of my husband, I became active for the next 10 years in the autistic community as an organizer and presenter at Autreat, an educational retreat conference created and run by autistic adults. Jim Sinclair, founder of Autreat and an autism-rights movement activist, and I created Making Sense of Autism, LLC. We provided workshops and inservices to schools, clinics, and presented at conferences on how to understand and work effectively with autistic individuals. I contributed some of my poems and narratives, which I wrote after my diagnosis, to the book "Women From Another Planet: Our Lives in the Universe of Autism" in 2003. The poem that I wrote to explain my autism to my husband can be found at the link below. I was invited to be a Keynote and Breakout speaker at Autism/Asperger Conferences in Phoenix and California between 2004 and 2011. I was a co-presenter in a congress-mandated training of all Vocational Rehabilitation counselors in the state of Arizona on Autism Spectrum Disorders in 2008. I authored an article in the Autism Advocate magazine in 2009 entitled “What We Don’t Know (About Relationships) CAN Hurt Us”. I retired from practicing occupational therapy in 2009 to become a caregiver to my husband with Alzheimer's. I have remained active in the autistic community, however, as a co-host in an autistic adult support group in Phoenix. I am currently working on developing what I perceive as a much-needed Neuro-Strengths (TM) Based Support for Autism Framework. This website is my attempt to share this approach, and exchange ideas for implementing and improving it, with those parents, therapists, and educators who are looking for a strength-based, neurodiverse-friendly, measurable method for creating team-coordinated goals that focus on what the autistic individual WANTS to achieve that will enable them to function more effectively and comfortably in their current environments. The philosophy for the Neuro-Strengths (TM) Based Support for Autism Framework comes from personal experience as an autistic individual and professional experience as an occupational therapist who worked with autistic clients. I grew up trying to “be like everyone else;” I succeeded in masking but at the cost of never developing a sense of “self” which led to symptoms of post traumatic stress. When I was finally diagnosed in my early 50’s, I learned that there were other options of how to think and behave, which radically changed my life for the better.