Roll for Initiative Counseling {Seattle small business branding session}

As far as I’m concerned, we exceptions and edge cases and oddities are the best kinds of people.

Autism is endlessly fascinating to me, because once you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met…one autistic person. Not only are we not a monolith, as a group we have an incredible range of personalities and sensory needs and preferences and interests.

For example, I’m a high-eye-contact autistic person, because unless I know you very well it’s helpful for me to have the extra nonverbal input from people’s eyes and faces.

Karl Reichert of Roll for Initiative Counseling, however, is a low-eye-contact autistic person, and prefers not to have to look right into people’s eyes.

There’s a lot of theory around the camera as “eye” and as a type of gaze. Not only can the camera’s “eye” (and behind it, the photographer’s eye) pointed right at an autistic person possibly make them uncomfortable, it could make Karl’s autistic clients uncomfortable to have every photo of Karl “looking” right at them as well.

But who says everyone has to look straight at the camera, anyway?

Here are some strategies I gave Karl for a lower-intensity photo session:

• Looking slightly away from the camera lens, such as at the top of my head or shoulder
• Closing his eyes and opening them on my cue just before the shutter snaps the shot
• Interacting with other objects in the environment and simply looking away from the camera

(And yes, Karl is the spouse of Dazzling Spoons Counseling’s Christy Reichert, hence the similarity in their photo environments! They traveled here to Seattle together and we rented the venue for both sessions.)

Here’s some more about Karl and Roll for Initiative:

I have been part of the nerd/geek culture since I first learned to read. I grew up on geek staples such as Batman: the animated series and devouring any horror, sci-fi, or fantasy book I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, being a geeky kid in the middle of nowhere didn’t lend itself to immersing myself in geek culture (this was pre-Internet, and it was even longer before something better than dial-up came along).

Video games and books were my only real outlet and I devoured them, losing myself in Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and a variety of JRPGs, RPGs, FPSs, Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander as much as I could. It wasn’t until I had nearly graduated high school that I discovered like-minded geeks, who introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, Magic the Gathering, and miniature painting, that I finally started feeling like I belonged somewhere.

I roll the dice, fling spells, and try desperately to get creamy blends. I have stood on both sides of the GM screen. I go to anime, comic, and game conventions, so I know what it’s like to be extremely excited about them. I also know what it’s like to be completely exhausted at the end of the day at a convention: feeling anxious, irritated, and overwhelmed by the many people packed into the convention center and wondering why I feel like this when I have been surrounded by all the things in geekdom that I love.

It took me a long time to understand why these things were happening to me: I’m autistic, but I didn’t know it for most of my life. It took even longer to find a therapist who could help me engage in my special interests in a better way—a way that wasn’t just me pushing myself to get to the other side, only to collapse exhausted. I work with clients who have these or similar experiences, because life doesn’t have to be all “fake it ’til you make it” or always having others tell you what you are thinking or feeling

I am a licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) in Washington state and a licensed professional counselor (LPC) in Oregon. I am also allowed to provide telehealth services in Idaho. I earned my master’s degree in counseling psychology from Saint Martin’s University in 2015 and began working as a therapist in 2016. My training focused on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) for adults.

More recently, I have come to understand why I leaned toward such a structured system—many autistic people love structure and routine. I have also realized that DBT is not for everyone and as such have attempted to take a more client-centered approach to therapy. I have done volunteer work with Take This in their AFK room program at PAX West, in order to help support geek culture at one of the most crowded conventions in the state.