An autistic therapist’s guide to better empathy for everyone

Empathy, we're told, is what makes us human: our innate ability to connect. But the classic stereotype of autistic people is that they can’t empathise. However intellectually brilliant they might be, their brains are not ‘wired’ for connection.

As an autistic psychotherapist, who empathises for a living, Aimee Cliff knew that this wasn’t true. Empathy isn’t an individual personality trait, a marker of virtue or vice; it is an act between two people, one that we choose to practice every day.

How to Read Minds playfully offers a new idea of empathy, one with a more exciting and expansive definition. For real empathy fights against the constrictive straitjackets of stereotypes, and dares to imagine something new. It's liberatory, radical and accessible to everyone.

Drawing on her clinical experience, alongside interviews with a wide range of neurodivergent people, Cliff interrogates the science of empathy in the brain and body, and lays out the five key pillars of true empathy. This wise, humane and quietly life-changing book considers how to understand each other, how to care for and love each other, in a timeless examination of questions that affect us all.