Rethinking Grief Support for Autistic Clients and Patients
Grief Action™ 
Too often, the grief of autistic clients is misinterpreted and disenfranchised. This World Autism Day, let’s discuss why professionals must do better.
Some grief goes unrecognised not because it isn’t real, but because it doesn’t fit the mould clinicians and professionals expect.
It doesn’t look like the grief that professionals were taught to recognise. It may not be expressed in “emotion words.” It might look like shutdown. Or scripting. Or a hyper-focus on facts that, to a neurotypical observer, seems devoid of emotion. But that interpretation says more about our biases than it does about the client.
Being World Autism Day on April 2nd, it’s time to confront a discomforting truth: Grief in autistic clients is often unseen, misread, or misdiagnosed. The absence of expected expressions — crying, verbal rumination, or classic affective cues — can lead professionals to overlook what’s happening beneath the surface.
Let’s be clear: Autistic people grieve. But the systems we work in aren’t always designed to recognise that grief, let alone respond to it meaningfully.
What Are We Missing With Grief And Autism?
The clinical gaze still privileges neurotypical modes of emotional expression. Linear narratives. “Insight.” Eye contact. Emotional language. Autistic clients may grieve through monotropism, which is intense, focused attention on certain themes. They may process grief through routines, scripting, or visual imagery. They may not have the words. That doesn’t mean there’s no feeling.
The concept of alexithymia (a difficulty identifying and articulating emotional states) is overrepresented in autistic populations. But this isn’t a deficit. It’s simply a difference. In grief work with clients and patients, alexithymia invites a slower, more attuned approach, one that prioritises co-regulation and observation over verbal processing alone.
And then there’s the double empathy problem, the well-evidenced idea that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people aren’t about autistic deficit, but mutual misunderstanding. When clinicians misinterpret silence as avoidance, or emotional flatness as detachment, it reflects a failure of our frameworks, not a failure of the client.
We also need to reflect on the dominant grief models clinicians are exposed to. Many of these models were developed with neurotypical populations in mind. Worden’s tasks, Neimeyer’s meaning-making, and Stroebe and Schut’s Dual Process Model often rely on verbal reflection and emotional disclosure as markers of progress. For some autistic clients, this may not reflect how grief is preferably processed.
How to Offer Grief Support Within a Neurodivergence-Informed Framework
🗣️ Stop asking, “Are they grieving?”
Start asking, “How does this person grieve?” Assume grief is there. Then get curious.
🗣️ Create structure without rigidity.
Grief disrupts predictability. Autistic clients may need scaffolding—timelines, visual supports, transitional cues—to help integrate grief into their daily lives.
🗣️ Support regulation before exploration.
Emotional labelling won’t land if the nervous system is overwhelmed. Begin with what is tolerable; routines, visual journaling, or movement-based grief work.
🗣️ Be aware of your language.
Terms like “closure,” “acceptance,” or “healing” may feel meaningless or even offensive. Grief for autistic clients might be processed through repetition, information-seeking, or non-verbal forms. Honour not only that, but also the differences that occur between and within individuals in the autistic community.
🗣️ Don’t pathologise autistic special interests.
They are not avoidance. They’re anchors. After a death, they might become grief rituals, memory holders, or stabilisers in an unstable world.
Rethinking Grief Support: What Autistic Clients Need From Clinicians and Professionals
Professionals often worry that they’re “not trained in autism.” But this worry can become a form of avoidance. You don’t need to be an autism expert to be a safe person. You do need to:
Know your blind spots
Regulate your assumptions
Stay curious about difference without turning it into dysfunction
You also need to interrogate how systems dismiss the grief of people who don’t conform to normative expectations. For example, the grief of an autistic adult who loses a pet, a mentor, or a familiar routine might be seen as “overblown”—a perception rooted in neurotypical value judgements about what’s grievable.
We also have to hold space for cumulative grief. Many autistic individuals experience layered losses — friendships lost due to misunderstanding, exclusion from rituals, misattunement from others. These losses often go unnamed, but they compound over time.
And there’s a silence in our field around autistic people grieving other autistic people, or the loss of online communities that provide authentic connection. These griefs may be dismissed as less valid simply because the relationships were formed outside traditional social norms.
Professionals Must Do Better with Grief And Autism
The grief of autistic clients is misunderstood and disenfranchised. Our role isn’t to teach autistic clients how to grieve “normally.” It’s to understand how grief moves through the world, the body, and the system of each differently grieving individual. If our models can’t accommodate that, it’s the model that needs changing.
Because unrecognised grief in autism doesn’t disappear. It just gets buried deeper.
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Categories: : Grief Action, Grief Literacy, Impolite Truths, Neurodivergence
