Autism, Mormon Culture, and Love on the Spectrum: What I Keep Thinking About as a Clinician
By Dr. Kristy Money, Neuropsychologist & Media Manager, MMHA
I’ve been watching Love on the Spectrum again this season, along with the rest of the world, it seems, because it’s remained in the top 10 tv shows on Netflix for months, and I keep coming back to Emma’s storyline.
Partly because she’s from Provo, which always makes things feel a little closer to home professionally, and I went on dates at her age at some of the same places she does. Like tulip-gazing at Thanksgiving Point and making snowmen in Park City, because I spent five years at BYU and went on more dates than I want my kids to know about. But mostly because it’s one of those portrayals that lingers long after you’ve watched it.
When you work with autistic clients long enough, you start noticing that autism never really shows up alone. It always shows up inside a family system, a community, a set of expectations about what a good life is supposed to look like.
Emma’s story is a pretty clear reminder of that.
For therapists working with Mormon or LDS clients, this probably feels familiar. Even when clients aren’t talking explicitly about religion, Mormon cultural structure tends to sit in the background of a lot of developmental questions: dating, marriage, family roles, sexuality, adulthood, worthiness.
A lot of the autistic clients I see are spending years trying to figure out something like:
what is actually mine, and what did I just absorb because it was around me?
They usually don’t say it out loud. But that’s what we end up circling in session.
And in Mormon contexts, that question gets layered on top of a pretty structured set of expectations about relationships and life milestones. Some people find that grounding. Others find it confusing. A lot of people find both at the same time, depending on the day!
Purity culture tends to come up somewhere in that mix, in the overall emotional environment some people grow up in around sexuality, worthiness, modesty, and staying ‘good.’
For autistic clients especially, I’ve noticed that these messages can stick in a very literal way. Not because they’re rigid people — they aren’t. But they often learned early on to take rules seriously in order to function socially.
So when expectations are implicit or emotionally loaded, things can get tangled pretty quickly.
Watching Emma, I found myself thinking about development: identity development, specifically. The slow process of figuring out what you actually want when you’ve spent a long time learning how to be what you’re supposed to be.
That’s not unique to autistic people, of course. But it does tend to show up in a very particular way with them, especially in structured religious environments.
As clinicians in Mormon mental health spaces, I think a lot of our work ends up sitting right there in that tension. And I don’t think that process is something we need to rush or simplify. If anything, it gets clearer when we slow it down.
I’d be curious what other therapists are noticing with autistic clients in LDS or post-LDS contexts, especially around relationships, sexuality, and identity formation. It feels like this is coming up more often. If you’ve got a story to share or a perspective along these lines (or a different line!), please consider sharing it with us by presenting at our annual conference. The deadline for conference proposals has been extended a week to June 8. Please add that deadline to your calendars especially if you’re like me and if the deadline isn’t written down I’ll breeze right past it.
We want to hear your voice!