how can autism present?

Social Understanding 

Autistic people often understand, develop and maintain relationships in a different way to non-autistic people.

Autistic people may have differences in their use of non-verbal language, such as gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice and often experience maintaining eye contact as very uncomfortable.

Autistic people may interpret language used by others literally (figures of speech and metaphors).

Autistic people may experience challenges in predicting and interpreting the behaviour and communication attempts of others and confusion about the way other people behave and how they are expected to behave in return.

Flexible thinking, information processing and understanding

Autistic individuals may have differences in attention, interests and learning style and have different ways of being flexible: autistic people often say they feel safer and more comfortable with routines and structure which lessens uncertainty.

Sensory Processing and Integration

Autistic people may experience differences in the way they are impacted by sensory information in their environment and from their internal bodily senses including: balance, coordination and interoceptive awareness. Often living with, and experiencing, an ‘alternate sensory reality’.

It can be helpful to consider autism within these categories: social aspects, communication, interests, change and sensory sensitivities (National Autistic Society, 2024). Not all autistic people will experience things in the same way. These categories are just to demonstrate and not to generalise to all autistic individuals.

autism is a ‘spectrum’

Autism is referred to as a ‘spectrum’. This means that every autistic individual is unique, with a wide range of strengths, challenges and support needs.

Our understanding of autism has grown and developed considerably over the last few years. Because we have learned so much more about how autism can look so different in each individual, there is better recognition of how the diversity of autism is expressed. Every experience of autism is equally valid, and having diversity in the world is so important!

The saying ‘if you have met one autistic person, you have met ONLY ONE autistic person’ is helpful as it reminds us that every autistic individual is wonderfully unique, with their own strengths, challenges, interests, social preferences, sensory preferences and thinking styles.

The two pie charts below show how unique each individual is.

These pie charts show how some people may be impacted by some things a lot (coloured in more) and others not so much (coloured in less). If you were to draw a pie chart for every autistic individual, they would all look different.