Nanuet Business Spotlight: Mental Health Coaching for Autistic Adults

Every local business has a story worth sharing with the community. The plan behind this series at Patch is to shine the spotlight on all our favorite local businesses, and to learn a little about the ones we may not know that well.

This is as much about supporting local businesses as it is about celebrating the places and faces that make our community special. Click here to get to a simple form where local business owners can answer a few quick questions to be part of this ongoing feature.

Our spotlight today is on Susan Cortilet Jones.

Business: Discovering Your World, P.C.
Owners: Susan Cortilet Jones, MS, LMHC
Website: discoveringyourworld.com
Address: 40 Eagle Ridge Way, Nanuet, NY 10954

How did you come up with the name?
After moving to the Rockland area in 2005 to work for Jawonio with adults in various positions mostly related to employment and education, I began to receive calls from a group of people and their family members who had been off the radar. Adults with high functioning autism were a mystery to many, even the service communities that were designed to work with them. Though, the specific population I was working with at the time was focused on mental health, I received desperate calls for help with these young adults in transition from high school to college and their loved ones. These young people were ‘falling off the cliff’, dropping out of college and stuck at home unable to find employment. As I began to immerse myself in meeting them, getting to know autistics and their families, advocated with providers and educators, I realized that their was a pioneering effort emerging with the statistics exploding, often with a diagnosis coming later in life. Then, it crystallized; I saw this ‘Tsunami’ appearing on the horizon and focused my effort on creating a model or business that was private, intended to eliminate the bureaucracy and work one to one with the diverse needs of these individuals and their families and the systems they were involved in. My title came from focusing on what each person I worked with needed: to discover the world around them.

Why choose that location? Why start a business in this town?
I have lived in various places and now Nanuet is my home. Nanuet as part of Rockland County has great needs in the adult population of autistics and is central to the Hudson Valley and Tri-State areas.

Briefly, what business are you in?
Mental Health/Coaching

What’s the most difficult moment or challenge you’ve faced as a business owner?
Most individual and private business owners can face a sense of isolation. But, because so few people even in related fields did not understand the dynamics and unique needs of autistic adults, at times it was more isolating. Even family members had a difficult time and steep curve in understand what autism meant to an adult in this world.

Were there any challenges that made you second guess your decision to be an entrepreneur?
Just the idea that I did not have a business background.

What’s been your favorite moment or proudest achievement since opening?
It is impossible to talk about individual clients, but, overall in the years I have been doing this work I feel I have affected positive change and growth in the individual cases I have worked with. I also think that I have had an impact in the professional communities that serve this population from academic, employment and service communities who serve these individuals. Right now I believe there is a rapidly growing movement that conceptually might change the employment world to embrace the gifts and skills of persons with autism (and other ‘intellectual differences’). This for all of us in the larger population often is the piece that opens doors and gives us long term value as a human being.

What’s the most innovative idea your employees or customers have had that you put into practice?
“Thinking Out of the Box” is something that is used often. But, they say when you meet a person with autism, you have met one person with autism. So, though the world is focused on ‘evidence based models’, I quite often have to be creative in establishing the relationship and trust first with autistics and then work with them on their individual approaches sometimes distortions to help these individuals understand the expectation of the social world including higher education and employment. At the same time, bridging the gap in helping the social world understand and embrace the autistics I work with.

How do you deal with difficult customers?
The foundation of working with adults with autism, is understanding that sometimes their worldview is tightly grounded. For some, the idea of changing that worldview or amending that world view is difficult. One aspect of some autistics is inflexibility. Patience and time is the key. I always say that change can take years or occur rapidly. Truly, if you understand autism in adults and enjoy the work autistics are not difficult. It is often the community and people they interact with that are difficult in terms of understanding them.

How does your business give back or get involved in the community?
I am the co-chair for the tennis fundraiser at Jawonio held in August. I serve on the editorial board of Autism Spectrum News and am currently involved in a fundraising activity for this publication. And, I am always willing to work on education via speaking to employers, educators, parent groups, and any civic organization willing to learn more about this population and their strengths as well as the challenges. At a recent employment conference held by the organization ICARE4AUTISM International, a presenter shared a statistic that 50,000 people with autism will graduate from high school and the 10% will find gainful employment.