What Autism can teach us with Jodi Rodgers

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, cass Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Jodie Rodgers is a qualified sexologist, counselor and special education teacher with thirty years of experience in the industry. She established her private counseling practice Birds and Bees to provide relationship and sexuality counseling that is accessible for everyone. She is passionate that all people should have the right to access services that are inclusive of different.

1:00 Communication and learning styles. You may know Jody as she was featured as the relationship counselor on the award winning TV show Love on the Spectrum, which is now available on Netflix. She has also just published her first book, which is called Unique If You Are in Australia or New Zealand and will be published with the title how to Find a four Leaf Clover If you are in the USA or the UK, Jody Rogers, such a pleasure to have you on the crap in a Happy podcast. Welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me on, Jody. I would say that being featured on a top rating Netflix series and now writing a book are certainly career highlights for anybody.

1:42 But first and foremost, you are a counselor. And a sexologist, specifically working with people with disabilities. That's your day job. So can you please share I would love to hear our guess a bit about your journey and what led you to doing this work. My career started in teaching, so I was a special education teacher and at that point, so in the nineteen eighties, late nineteen eighties, when I was working in a high school that was a segregated high school, and there was a really big focus on you know, employment after people finished school, or you know, daily living skills, and I just was really conscious that there was not a lot of talk about adult relationships and intimacy and sexuality, particularly for disability. So it was just something that was I was sort of always aware of. But then I started noticing just simple things cast like you know, I remember a student lost a parent while I was teaching, and there's no access to grief counseling for them. They were a person with an intellectual disability, and so there wasn't access to that. You know. I think when we talk about access for people with disabilities, we we forget that access isn't just about ramps. It's accessed information. And for me, having access to sexuality education and relationship counseling became fundamentally important.

3:09 So I never planned it. I didn't wake up, you know, in my twenties going oh, yes, so I'm going to be a sexologist and relationship counselor. It wasn't like that. It just was, you know, life just led me along this path and I just sort of put my money with my mouth. It's basically got the qualifications to do that and set myself up in private practice, thinking maybe I'd give myself six months to see if it was a needed thing, and I just haven't looked back. Yeah. Wow, I love that that It's just a case of just following that curiosity and it eventually leading to where you are now. I think that's a great story.

3:50 So Journey in the series Love on the Spectrum that focused specifically on people on the autism spectrum. But the work you do, I assume is broader than that. Or do you specifically work with people with autism? No, no, No, I work with any single person that may communicate differently, or learn differently, or have a difference in the way that they process their senses. So I work with with cognitive disability, with acquired brain injury, people with acquired physical disabilities, autistic people, any person that needs to have counseling and therapy modified to match their individual communication and learning needs.

4:34 Yeah, and Jody specifically talking about relationships, you highlight some of this, you know obviously on the on the TV show Love on the Spectrum, which is obviously captivated people. But what are the some of the challenges that they face. What is the you know, the key work that you're doing with people in terms of relationships and sexuality. If we're talking specifically about autistic people, there's a lot of difficulty just in developing relationships for autistic people. And that's a huge generalization because we have to remember that autism presents very, very differently across the whole spectrum. But you know, some of the things we see as people might have a lot of social anxiety and have difficulties initiating relationships with other people, or they may have difficulty understanding the reciprocity of relationships back and forth that we all have to do. In relationships, people can have very specifically, you know, specific expectations of other people, and as we know, expectations are really complex in relationships and just communication. Like when you think about it, intimate romantic relationships, and we talk intimacy, we're really talking about not just physical intimacy, but emotional intimacy. The capacity to be highly vulnerable another person takes a lot of trust, and for many autistic people that's quite difficult to develop a level of trust with another person where they feel they can really be

6:04 their authentic self. And it's so necessary, you know. That's the thing that's been highlighted, I think is that we relationships and belonging and connection is a fundamental human need. And that's the work you're doing, isn't it. It's like it is a human right, you know, it should be accessible to everybody, regardless of differences. I think that's what's really been highlighted in the TV series. It's just done so I feel I'd love to hear your thoughts, but it has done such a good job of portraying the humanity you know of these people are no different from the rest of us. They want the same things that we want.

6:45 I think that is one of the most remarkable things that came out of the series Cass because when at first aired, so many people were saying, but I experienced that. You know, I am anxious and I go on day or oh, I desperately want a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a partner. I think that people looked at autism as being something so removed from themselves, and I think the relatability of the show actually saying, hang on, every single person wants this. And it may not be that every single person wants a life partner, but every single person needs to have connection with other people. We all need it and we do it in very very different ways.

7:29 But I think that that's where a lot of the success from the show came from, because people are just sitting in their lounge room all of a sudden went oh right, I'll get it, you know. I just it allowed people open people's eyes up to autism. But I think it opened people's eyes up to just we're all pretty similar. We're all seeking that same thing exactly. And I think the thing that really struck me to was, I know you said about how it can be really difficult to be vulnerable and have that trust. But I just loved some of the sheer honesty, like the no filter yes with some of the people on the show, with on the autism spectrum, like just it's kind of refreshing to have that level of truth being expressed because the rest of us are all just you know, bloody trying to pretend or something put on a show, and they're just like, no, this is this is how it is, and this is how I feel.

8:25 I thought. I just loved it. I feel like there should be more. It's one of the it's one of the best things, well, one of the great things. I mean, I've learned many, many things from a lifetime hanging out with autistic people. But the autistic people just say it as it is, and neurotypical people we do a lot of dancing around each other. There's social ants around each other, and autistic people are very good at just saying it exactly as it is because they don't really get the social nuance of why we do that. You know. Sometimes I've had clients come to it. They're perplexed, you say. They'll say, but if you don't like somebody, why don't you just say you don't like somebody? Or why do people go to each other? Why would people just say it was nice to meet you, Sorry, no thanks. You know, they just don't get the way that we do this crazy social dance around each other.

9:24 Yeah, I think. And there's a big difference. Yeah, And there's a big difference in saying being honest the way that you could see autistic people being honest with what they're saying and being vulnerable. Being vulnerable is when you truly open yourself up emotionally to somebody else. There's a big difference in those two things. But the honesty is phenomenal and it's but also sometimes can be honest in a way that can make things difficult. So you know, if you went on a first date and the first thing you said to somebody was, oh, you've got a massive pimple on your chin, or you know, your breast smells having you brush your teeth, you know, there's also honesty that can be we know sometimes not to say the things inside of our hairs. Yes, yes, So that could cause some difficulties loyal for people.

10:17 So how do you go about teaching that to somebody? Jody like in your work, like, how do you teach somebody who's just like, well. What wouldn't you just say that? How to draw that line and make that distinction between what's okay to say out loud and what's not. The way I explained sometimes to people is that I feel often in my work on a translator. So just like if somebody was a hearing person, but they were fluent in sign language, and then they are able to translate from a deaf person to a hearing person, they're the middle person. I feel that's a little bit like my job, and a lot of my work is actually translating why neurotypical people do the things they do, or what a neurotypical person will expect in terms of our body language and our gestures and our communication, what our expectations are, And a lot of my work is translating that for an autistic person. So then they can actually go, oh, I get it. They might go why that's weird, but it's sort of a back and forth translation. Yeah. Really, I often feel like that's my job is sort of supporting an autistic person to understand a neurotypical person's way of moving through the world, and then on the other hand, supporting neurotypical people to understand the autistic people are just doing it a little bit differently.

11:46 Obviously, this whole landscape has changed significantly in the time that you've been working in this field, Jody, I mean definitely, even now, it feels like, I know it's not the case, but it feels like almost every other person, particularly adult an adult women being diagnosed and that with some sort of neurodiversity, and that being almost like revelationary, like people suddenly their whole life kind of makes sense. I guess, what are some of the shifts and the changes that you've seen over the course of twenty is it twenty years thirty? Yeah, you know, and it's not even botop. Well, we've got to remember that, you know this, we're pretty dumb when it comes to our neurology. We're really really beginning to understand how our minds were. And so when I first started in this field, any person that got a diagnosis with autism had to also have an intellectual disability. Wow.

12:53 So to really back then in the eighties and nineties. It was you know, if you had a physical disability or you had an intellectual disability, but we really weren't looking at people's social you know, the way they interacted socially, or how people's regulated their emotions or we didn't really look at that. And so what's happened during the course of my lifetime in this area is that we've actually started going, oh, hang on, people do interact in different ways, or they process things differently, or they have a specific need for saneness, or so it's shifted in that way.

13:38 I think we've got to we've began to understand much more about how the human mind actually works, which is brilliant. I personally think that at some point, probably not in my lifetime, but at some point we may not actually use the language that we use now of autism or or you know, this person's got obsessive compulsive disorder, or this person has you know this or this. I think that we'll in some point in our future, they'll probably just scan our brains and they'll say, oh, cass, yes, you prefer to do things in this way. You're a little bit rigid in your thinking in this or you know, your emotional regulation is in this way or you know, I think that they will see that neurodivergence is they'll look at it differently. I just believe it will be looked at it in a very very different way. And I think particularly because diagnostically, so it was really only in the nineteen nineties that we started saying, oh, hang on, you can be autistic but not have an intellectual disability.

14:45 So that gave a massive shift in diagnosis because then we had at that point was called Aspergers, which is now just called autism level one. But we started rethinking that you could be you know, of average intelligence to extremely bright, but you could also be autistic. So a lot of people don't know that in Australia we actually only started thinking about autism high function that that sort of no Asperger's level one autism is being a disability in two thousand and five. So before that people couldn't even access anything that was available. And then the shifts happened again. So I love it. I love watching the shifts happen. And one of the shifts that has been very conscious of that it was always it was always kind of boys and they used to say, you know, it was four to one boys. That was the old scale that they used to talk about, But that was because diagnostically, boys were presenting much more easily. You know, it would be the boy in school who just couldn't sit, steal or and I'm talking about children that didn't have an intellectual disability. So then, because we were only looking at the presentation of what a boy would do a man would do. But now we're going to hang on, women actually do this differently. So it's just been another shift in understanding our neurology and how our neurology works. Yeah.

16:18 So yeah, but it does sound like, you know, people say that, but everybody's got autism. No, not everybody has autism. It's just that we're starting to understand human neurology way better than we ever did, and we will continue to understand human neurology every single month, every year. We'll get a better understanding of ourselves. Yeah. It's on a bit of a path of the moment, isn't it, where there's this balance between people who really value having that understanding of oh, this is why I've always struggled with this, or this is why I've always done things this particular way. It makes so much sense balanced against the rest of the population going well, I'm a bit like that too, like what have we all got ADHD and kind of trivializing it.

17:10 Yeah. Yeah, And I think that that's the complexity because people say, oh, everybody's a little bit on the spectrum. No we're not. It's an autism spectrum, and you have to present, you know, it has to be that in the areas that they're looking at diagnostically, which at the moment they look at seven different areas, and you have to struggle, you have to have difficulty, and it's got to be clinical. It can't be you know, I'm disorganized. Oh yeah, well that's a little bit autistic. No, it's not a little bit autistic. I'm just disorganized. You know, there is specific things. If you are autistic, you are struggling in your day to day world. You are struggling and really needs aught and you really need help. And it may be that you're struggling in your relationships. It may be that you're struggling and having employment. It may be that you're struggling because you can't actually be out in a CRAYD or process. You know, sensory information is just overwhelming. But it's not. Everybody's a little bit on the spectrum. We're not. We're all we're all on the human spectrum. We're all different and we all do things differently, but we're definitely not all autistic.

18:24 I think, you know, similarly with ADHD, I'm and disorganized, I'm one focused. What does that mean I've got ADHD. It's the same sort of thing, isn't it. And I feel like sometimes those people that have done such a stellar job of masking, you know, just in order to fit in for so long, that people sometimes don't realize how much they've been struggling. And I don't think and they don't and we don't. Yeah, one hundred percent of growth, your cass. And I think that's when somebody makes a flippant comment like that, I say, do you know the dark side of this? Do you know the hardship of having a d HD? You know? Did you struggle in school? Did you were you so hyper focused in one area that the rest of your life slipped away into chaos? You know? Do you understand that this isn't just something we can talk about by saying I'm a bit disorganized or I get easily distracted.

19:18 That is not Adhd. It's night, and so I think we have to remember it's beautiful. I love the fact that we've got communities of people who are talking about autism with deep pride, and I love that because it's about celebrating our differences. But we also have to remember that before people can speak with pride, there has to be a lot of courage and bravery because there has been many, many, many years of those people where they have been overlooked and bullied and isolated. So it's very courageous the people speaking of Now. Yeah, when you say that the things are shifting in our awareness is growing, and as it will, I agree with you, like it seems to just be there's this explosion at the moment and it'll continue in our understanding of these differences. How do you feel about the term disability versus difference because I know that some people will even say, well, why do we have to consider that somebody whose brain operates this way is disabled versus well, they just process information differently.

20:24 What's your thoughts on. That language is so complex because I have seen language change dramatically. So you know, at one point when we always said, oh, yeah, they're a disabled person and then it was there a person with a disability, and now it's shifting again to say no disabled person because people will take pride in saying, well, that's part of my identity. You know, I think we're all different. So when we talk about people with differences, well, there's eight billion placibusts, so we're all different, and it is a different But I think we have to the word disability when it is it is that person's identity. Then it's basically saying it's not that they have the disability, it's that society has created the disability because of their difference from the majority.

21:20 But I'm very clued into you know, I'm a therapist cast so every single individual that sits in front of me tells me who they are, and so their identity, whether it's their gender identity or the sexual orientation, or the way they think about the world, or how they choose to call themselves, whether they call themselves a person with a disability or a disabled person, whatever language they want to use, I will use that language too, because that it's not up to me to tell another person what words fit them. It's up to the person to tell me about words fit. Then yeah, that probably didn't answer your question.

22:05 No, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. I think, you know, following somebody's lead is the important thing. I think that we can get tripped up, you know, we can get afraid to say the wrong thing, or who are we going to a fan? And I think that's a good that's a good point. You know, Well, depending on who you're talking to, then maybe you know, follow their lead in terms of the language that they use. I just know that I did a session, and I'm not an expert on neuro diversity, but I was asked to run a just a one hour session just covering some of these differences in a workplace, and there was somebody there who who really had an opinion about just the use of the term just even calling these things disabilities or disorders, you know, as opposed to just understanding these things as you know, just a different way of processing.

22:55 And I thought, yeah, I get that, But also there's a balance, isn't There were also other people need to understand that this is a challenge and this is a struggle for whatever reason, and that sometimes it allowances and accommodations might need to be made. And maybe that is because we've always done it badly, catering for the neurotypical. But yeah, the. Present day, that's still the reality. And it is very, very difficult because for cultural shift to happen, it takes time, and it takes people listening, and then it takes the shift of language. So you know, I'm a sexologist who's also been a sexologist for quite a while, and so I really I had to go through and learn all about pronouns and that the huge, huge spectrum of gender identity and you know, the sexuality identity.

24:04 That took me time. And it wasn't saying or was somebody going, oh no, It just took me time because I was going through a cultural shift and it takes sometimes it takes generations for cultural shift to happen and language to shift and change. And it also depends on environments o cas. So if you walk into a medical facility and you're talking to people who are working within psychiatry and psychiatrists, then they're still working under a medical system with disorder is part of the language of the medical language. If you're talking about an area where you're thinking that's social you know, the social constructive disability, then people would not use the word disorder because they'd say that's medical. They'd use disability. If you are hanging out with my mates down the street, then I would never even say disability because it's not even part of what they we are in my lifetime. So it also depends on the environment you're in. As we know anywhere on the planet, where you go into a new culture, there's a different language, and we can sometimes get it wrong.

25:13 But what we need to do is help people. You know, I quite bagger up all the time, constantly baggering up, and so what I love best is when somebody says, oh, no, you don't say that, Jody. Oh, I have come, but not to chastise me. I don't want somebody to chastise me when I get it wrong. I want them to help me understand so that then I can get it right. And I think we just need to do that for one another. Yeah, yeah, I like that. Jody. You've just published your first book, called You Again. I've started to read it. I'm loving it. I haven't finished it yet. But what I love also about your book is the same thing we were talking about earlier, in that these stories that you share and how they so beautifully express that these people that we call disabled are not that much different to the rest of us. You've done such a beautiful job. Can you tell me thinks about the book and what inspired what inspired the book?

26:12 Well, it's funny, you know, because I had never thought about being a writer. It just wasn't in my you know, I've done a lot of academic writing because of the qualifications, but I never thought I write a book because I love people, and in my job, I hang out with people all day long, so I never really to me, writers spend a lot of time by themselves, being deep in their own heads. But I have always been a storyteller always, and I use stories. I use stories when I'm training, I use stories with my family, I use stories with my friends, I use stories if I'm running workshops, and I use stories with clients. And I use story all the time to try and help people have greater understand and greater empathy for other people. So if I'm in a workshop and somebody says, oh what about this Jodie, a whole workshop five hours could be taken up with me going, well, let me just tell you a story about Because I think story allows us to say Okay, I can feel it too, and so really the book, that's what I really wanted the book to do. I wanted to take all of these stories that were in my head and I wanted to get them out as a way of saying, hang on, when you see somebody do something that is so different, when it makes you ponder, or it makes you frustrated or agitated, or you're just thinking,

27:43 hell is going on here? I just wanted to tell us some stories to go. Let me give you a little bit of insight into what you may be seeing, and it's not so dissimilar to something you may have experienced. And that's really what I was hoping to do. Cash. Oh, well, you've done it brilliantly, and you you are a fabulous storyteller, but a great writer. I mean it's really well written. It really is, yeah. The way to you And I was reading it going. Ah, oh yeah, I can see myself in that. You just obviously it's up to the people listening to go and get the book to read it, but I would just say that it's really well done. The way that you present an individual with some sort of difference or some sort of behavior that you might be going well, what the hell's that?

28:29 Like you just said, and then you as you keep reading, you go, oh, actually, yeah, I do that. I might do it in a different. Way, but I do that. I get put off by that in that sort of a situation, or you know, I can see myself in that, and it just creates so much more empathy and just understanding when you can see that there's actually quite a lot of similarity. Yeah. Yeah, And it's been incredible for me because I think a lot of the book I'm also trying to say that it's what autistic people have taught me about everybody else. So it's really interesting in my lifetime. Now I can see, you know, I can be with the neurotypical person and they'll say, no, you've got to stack the dishwasher like this, and be really, you know, no, it has to be done like this. If you do it another way where that could be frustrating to other people, I just look at them and able to say, oh, yeah, that's the little system. There's a reason that they believe that the dishwasher has to be stack off. That may not be my idea, but it's theirs. Autistic people have systems all the time, all the time, but they may not have the capacity to communicate to say no, I need my dishwasher stacked like this. And you know, we're all, yeah, we're all pretty interesting individuals. We're all pretty interesting in that way. But you know, when I was asked to write the book, it was really interesting that I I thought, somebody,

30:01 you know, said why don't you write these stories down? And originally I thought, oh, I have to write a guidebook. You know, am I writing a guidebook to this? And then it quickly came out that there was two things. One, I can't tell another person's story. I'm not an autistic person, So I would never ever tell an autistic person story. That's their story to tell. All I could tell is the story of what a lifetime listening to people who see the world in a different way and communicate in a different way. What a lifetime of that has actually taught me. That's that's what it's really about. And then that stories came out really pretty quickly, pretty fast, and fury this, which was interesting as well. Yeah, but writing was not fun for me, cast isn't it. Na. There was moments that there was moments where I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm so brilliant at this, but that would be brief.

31:00 And then, you know what I loved, probably most about the whole process was the I was able to be reflective. I was able to go, oh, remember when that happened. You know, it gave me a lot of reflection, but I found it quite difficult. I never ever stopped seeing clients the whole time I wrote, because I needed them. I needed them, and that was something else. I realized how much my happiness comes from hanging out with people, and if it's just me and a computer or me and a bit of paper and a pen. I love the process, but it's not where I'll get my joy from. So I'm not a natural writer. I'm a good storyteller, but I'm not a natural writer.

31:44 Well, you've done a really good job. Let me just tell you you've probably heard that already. I'm just starting to have people read it. I'm just starting to get feed back from people who've read it, and the things that people say to me, I'm like, that's not even what I would have thought. Like a guy. There's a story at the very very beginning of the book about the first person I ever met with. You know, she was a young autistic girl. I was only eighteen, she was six, and it's set. The experience we had was in a swimming pool. And a person I met just this week said, when you wrote the line about the chlorine burning your nostrils, that I just was in that pool with you, and it's something that I was.

32:29 It's so funny because I hadn't even thought that that. I'd never even thought about any of those parts. That I was trying really to get people in the picture with me as well with us. Interesting, interesting because I did too. I was right there in that pool. I could feel it. I could feel the heat of it, I could smell it. So that's a that's really that's a skill. Yeah, it is a skill. Maybe I am a right, Maybe maybe I've shocked herself. It's great, isn't it. I'm about to have a book published and as getting published internationally, and I'm still sitting here to you saying no, I'm not really a writer. I don't think it's sunk in yet. Bardy.

33:11 So, Jenny, in your day to day work, you said that you obviously you are a counselor. This is the community that you particularly work with. You also run workshops who do you run workshops for. I run workshops, So I run sexuality workshops for adults with intellectual disabilities. So they're really fun to have thirty to forty adults with intellectual disabilities in one room for a full day, because I have big expectations that you know, no, this is a day workshop. You're going to hang out for the day, and we do. So. I do a lot of education around sexuality and consent and what sex is, and because as we know, many many statistics of sexual abuse and assault are significant for people within the disability community. So I run worked so that A run workshops so professionals and I don't know anybody who wants me to talk pasts really just you know, broader education for their community.

34:10 You know, it's good for people to know people who are listening. It's good for them to know what the services are that you offer, because they might want to call you up and have you come and run a workshop. Tell a few stories, tell a few stories, tell a few stories exactly. They'll be entertained, entertained and educated. So how did their love on the spectrum thing come about? Somebody just ring you up one day, Jodie and say. Hey, yeah, it was very random, and. What were your thoughts, Well, I would love to know what your initial reaction. My first My first initial reaction was no. So when I was contacted, and it was it was one of those things where somebody had told somebody else about me kind of thing. And then I was contacted by the production team Northern Pictures, who are a brilliant production team.

34:58 But my first reaction internally was no, Why, no way in the hell am I going to be on the TV. That's ridiculous. And there's a couple of reasons for it. You know, one case, I never want to be on the TV, and the second one is that I'm a counselor, and so part of counseling, the true part of counseling is you can you can have every single theoretical understanding. You know, you could have studied all components of what I'm trying to say, just you know, counseling theory. You can have all of that. You can be a genius.

35:38 But the greatest thing about counseling is having a genuine relationship with the person in front of you. Because when the relationship is genuine, it's professional. But when it's genuine, then you can interact with each other in a way that is very real, and for me to go why I can't tell you and be filmed doing something that to me, I hold in the highest regard, that therapeutic relationship I hold very very highly. So in my mind I thought, not, no way in hell, because I won't have a genuine relationship with these people. Weirdly, CAAs saying that every single person, say, Michael, who I'm on the show with Hee and I've been friends now for five years, Tale and I've been friends for three and a half years.

36:26 I maintain friendships with every single because I requested that as well. I said, if I'm on this show with these people, then they need to know that any point after the show, I'm in their lives, not as a professional, just in their life. And yeah, that's been maintained with everybody. But yeah, so I said. My initial reaction was no, but they talked me into it. And they talked me into it basically by saying, it'll be five minutes one episode one these and so I thought, all, I'll do five minutes, but you know it's people don't understand, Well, I didn't understand they film you for five hours to edit to five minutes. So you have to put a great deal of trust in the production company as well, because you have no idea what they're going to edit that that five hours into.

37:21 Yeah, that's what I was thinking. That would if somebody had approached me, that would always be my concern, like, how do I know how this is going to come across in the editor version, because there's so much that people don't see. I was really scared. I was really scared because I knew enough to know that with anybody I was with that we had been miked up and filmed for many, many hours, and so when and then I didn't know what they were going to do with it. And I think because I was living in you know, back the Bachelor World, Love Island, you know that we know what they do with that. So but this isn't it's not reality television, so it's a doco series. It's nothing scripted, there's no there was never any competition. We were never told what to say or not say. I met every single person for the first time when I knocked on their doors. That's the first time I've ever met any of them. None of us were paid to be on there because we're all being ourselves. There was no casting, It's just us and so it's genuine in that way.

38:26 But yes, they did a great job. Yeah they did. You must have sense that they were very pure in their intentions. They had good intentions in making the show. Yeah, And one of the things I saw very quickly was the respect that the production company gave to the autistic people on that show and the support that was offered to them. And if any of the people on the show said I want to break, it was given straight away. There was always checking in are you okay need this? If they it was very very respectful. And so because I saw that, I also knew, I really knew that what they were wanting to do was they really wanted to educate the community on autism, but they wanted to do it in a way that would hook people in. And I think that they got it right.

39:23 They got went hang on, everybody, we're all into this dating at the moment. They'se dating, thats are going wild. Everybody's interested. So it was like wanting to give a presentation of autistic people to a big wide community. But they really you know, if it had been let's do a show on transport training and people catching a bus. It just couldn't have had the same call. No, you know it just it was the hook that got people in because we've all experienced it, we all know it. I was going to ask how much time did you actually get to spend with the people on the show, and like, were you actually a to do like, you know, genuine work because we only see this little five minute snippet.

40:05 Oh yeah, definitely, so hours and hours and they'd be built up too. That was really funny because I can remember, I don't know if you've seen the part of the show cast, but there's Calvin, who's a really great friend of mine now, and there's his dad, and they're a Chinese family, a male household with just the two of them. And so when I went to the house, what people saw was me working with Calvin to say when somebody enters the date. They saw a snippet of it, and the feedback for that was, oh, you know, Jodie's trying to teach neurotypical social skills and why the hell is she getting him to pull out the chair and stuff like that. What people didn't see was the discussion of them about their culture of respect to women. And you know that's the thing. People, I only get to see this new thing. And if people haven't experienced being on television or know what editing's like, even audio editing, people think that you just get filmed for that that five minutes, and that's the reality. It's not the reality. Any reality.

41:18 Television is not reality. Yeah. So yeah, but I I was with them and that was a beautiful thing. Because I was filmed with them, I got to you know, follow up with them, and then it became friendships. So you know, I have maintained friendships. Actually I caught up with Michael and Tayo just yesterday. We were hanging out together in Sydney. So's it's lovely. Yeah, it's really really lovely. Yeah. Such rewarding work, Jodie, I feel like I just must be such. I mean, I'm you know, I do counseling and stuff as well and coaching. But so I know, but it seems like you must you must really love your job because it seems like very rewarding work.

42:01 Yeah. Yeah, I really. Well, if you're a counselor, you know this case, if you're a counselor and you didn't like your work, you shouldn't be doing it. You shouldn't be there. You have to really love people, you have to be really curious about people, and you have to have a belief that every single person on the planet has good in them and that we're all striving to be our best selves and some of us just need a little bit more help. Yeah, yeah, you know, and we need to connect with each other. So sometimes a counselor or a psych or sometimes there can be the only people that people tell their whole truth to you exactly, and it can be very liberating to tell your whole truth to somebody. Yeah, but now I am very, very very lucky.

42:46 Yeah, you've found your calling, that's for sure. And you found it at a young age, by the sound of it. Jody, I really congratulations on all of it, and I just think it's such it's such good work that you're doing, and it's just so so lovely to see the level of education and awareness being raised in the wider community, and you've done a really great job of contributing to that. So thank you, Thank you, Cas. That's lovely. Thank you. You can find out more about Jodie's work at her website Birdsandbees dot com dot Au. Her brand new book Unique is out next week in Australia. You can pre order it right now. Love on the Spectrum, of Course, is available on Netflix. It is really heartwarming television. I recommend it if you haven't tuned in already. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sending me your messages on Instagram about what you.

43:37 Would like to hear on the podcast. Always really open and interested in your input, and I can't wait to catch you next week for another episode of Crapy to Happy