Self-Disclosure and Self-Advocacy: A Process for Family and Systemic Therapeutic Dialogue
摘要
This chapter details the crucial processes of self-disclosure and self-advocacy for individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), particularly children and adolescents, to facilitate their successful integration into various community settings. Self-advocacy involves individuals speaking for themselves to ensure their needs are met and rights respected, thereby maximizing their potential. However, effective self-advocacy necessitates prior self-disclosure, where individuals learn to articulate their unique characteristics, including strengths, abilities, difficulties, and challenges. This is particularly complex for people with ASD due to impaired self-awareness and communication difficulties, which are core aspects of the disorder. The chapter emphasizes that self-disclosure should ideally begin in early childhood, fostering self-awareness and familiarization with one’s traits through an integrative process with therapists and parents. This long-term process involves multiple stages, including defining abilities and difficulties across various environments and eventually conceptualizing them under a diagnostic term. Self-advocacy requires both child readiness—built on a developed emotional, cognitive, and communicative infrastructure—and crucially, environmental readiness, which involves preparing the community, including peers, teachers, and authority figures, to be accepting and understanding of autistic traits. A multi-axis, integrative dialogue, involving therapeutic, family, professional, educational and community interactions, is essential for building this supportive infrastructure and enabling individuals with ASD to effectively explain their needs and behaviors. The success of these processes relies on collaboration and a common language among all involved parties.