SAAIL Project-"Supporting Autistic Adults' Intimate Lives"-Monique Huysamen & Marianthi Kourti

During this fantastic episode, Mona has an opportunity to talk to two amazing researchers who are in the UK doing groundbreaking work to better understand autistic adults intimate lives.  Monique Huysamen and Marianthi Kourti share some of the findings from their phenomenal qualitative research study that is focused on learning what autistic adults want and need in their intimate lives.  This study included an analysis of a multitude of government documents on autism, interviews with 20 autistic individuals and on-line focus groups with 50 autistics individuals.  

Learn more about what the autistic adults shared: what they like, what they want to be different and what some of their challenges have been. Many of the adults shared how they didn't know how to do relationships or intimacy because they had no guidance.  Unfortunately, as autistic children become adults they may feel more isolated and begin to lose some of the supports they had through school and government agencies.  Some of the participants talked about both the challenges and joy of sensory differences and understanding both.  Others addressed how they might be more comfortable exploring in different ways in their intimate lives.  In addition, others shared the importance of finding a community where they could feel safe and comfortable.  For some, this might be in the BDSM or Kink community, where the communication patterns were more direct and the boundaries clearly stated.  

In the future, Monique and Marianthi will be creating toolkits for the autistic partners and non-autistic/neurotypical partners to help more autistic adults and their partners live their best intimate lives.

Note: we apologize for the technical challenges we had during this episode.  We were also disconnected from one of the guests at about 1/3 of the way through the episode, but were able to reconnect with them.   

You can contact Monique and Marianthi through the SAAIL website at: https://autlives.wixsite.com/research  or on Twitter @autspace

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