To connect with colleagues trained in Attachment-Informed EMDR-trained and with experience of working with Autism, please take a look at the EMDR Focus Directory, and search for ‘ASD’ in the speciality search section above the profiles.

Welcome to our embryonic EMDR Focus pages looking with time to explore the opportunities and challenges of EMDR with clients on the Autistic Spectrum, particularly those at the High-Functioning end.

It’s a subject that’s close to home for EMDR Focus Director Mark Brayne, pretty much as high-flying as they get in career terms as former BBC and Reuters foreign correspondent and now EMDR Europe Consultant and trainer in advanced EMDR.

It was only in 2020, at the age of 70 and after a lifetime of well-masked inward emotional struggle, that Mark secured a formal diagnosis as Autistic, formerly known in this form as Aspergers – that’s Hans A in the picture at the top of this page, who first identified this experience in his work before and during the Second World War in Vienna.

Autism, it should be added, is better understood not as a “Disorder”, as defined in the DSM-V, but as a way of experiencing the world and self – differently and distinctly so from that of what are now understood in this discussion as “Neurotypicals”, or people, most probably, like you, dear reader.

Colleagues are welcome to browse a couple of blogs written by Mark on having confirmed that he’s Aspergers, first just before lockdown in 2020, and the second published in the autumn of the same year.

We hope they give you a sense of what it can be like on the inside of an Aspie – recognising that, as they say, if you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism.

We’re all distinct and different.