Part One: When the Mind Speaks in Images Autistic Knowing in the Therapy Room

By Michelle Labine, PhD

November 2025

As an Autistic therapist, one of the most reliable ways I understand what’s unfolding in a session doesn’t come from structured thought or linear reasoning. Instead, it comes as an image sudden, symbolic, and quietly precise. What’s interesting is that for most of my life, I never knew this was different. I genuinely believed everyone thought this way, that people naturally carried inner landscapes and symbolic flashes that stitched meaning together. I assumed that seeing emotional truth in shapes, colours, textures, or scenes was just how minds worked. It never occurred to me that I was navigating the world through a cognitive language that wasn’t shared, or even understood, by most people around me.

Because I didn’t yet know I was Autistic, I didn’t have a framework for why translating my inner experience into spoken language often felt clunky and imprecise. The images made perfect sense inside me they arrived whole, vivid, layered with emotional information. But the moment I tried to put them into words, something essential got lost. It felt like taking a three-dimensional landscape and squeezing it into a narrow, one-dimensional sentence. I could sense the direction, the emotional resonance, the relational pattern embedded in the image, yet describing it felt awkward, flattened, almost like speaking a second language I hadn’t fully mastered.

This mismatch between the richness of my internal knowing and the limited tools of spoken language followed me for years. I understood things deeply and quickly, but not always in the linear way people expected. I felt truth all at once, in flashes and impressions and symbolic scenes that felt as real as memories. But I often stumbled when asked to explain how I knew, or why I sensed something was important. I didn’t have the words then. I only had the image.

It wasn’t until my diagnosis that all the pieces began to click into place. I learned that many Autistic people process information through associative pattern recognition: an ability to see connections across time, emotion, memory, sensory detail, and relational energy in ways that don’t rely on step-by-step analysis. For me, those connections have always surfaced as images. It is how my mind organizes complexity, how it understands the deeper story beneath what is being spoken.

In the therapy room, this way of thinking has become one of my greatest strengths. When a client is sharing, I’m not only listening to their words. I’m taking in the rhythm of their speech, the way their breath changes, the tension in their shoulders, the repetition in their narrative, the emotional wobble hidden inside a casual statement. My brain gathers all of those signals conscious and unconscious, verbal and nonverbal and holds them simultaneously. I don’t break them down. I don’t sort them into categories. I feel them, sense them, absorb them. And then, out of that internal constellation, an image emerges. This is how my neurology reflects truth back to me and how I map meaning.

When an image arrives, it becomes a container for the session that helps me track where we are emotionally and where the deeper work might be leading. Sometimes I share the image with the client, and it resonates instantly, giving shape to something they’ve felt but couldn’t articulate. Other times, the image stays with me, shaping my presence, my questions, my attunement. It helps me hold the complexity without needing to untangle it verbally right away.

What I once thought was a strangeness, or a quirk, has become something I now understand as a profoundly Autistic form of intelligence. It is not mystical or abstract or “woo.” It is a legitimate cognitive strength, a nonlinear, sensory, symbolic way of recognizing patterns that have emotional and relational significance. Learning this has softened the self-doubt I carried for years about why communication sometimes felt awkward, or why I struggled to explain things that felt so clear internally. I don’t question my mind anymore. I trust it. I trust the images. I trust the way my brain gathers information beneath conscious awareness and reflects it back in a form that is whole, coherent, and resonant.

Part of my Autistic embodiment is knowing through metaphor, pattern, image, and emotional coherence. It is a way of perceiving that is powerful, gentle and exact; this inner image-making has become something I honour deeply.