I recently came across a blog post from The High Conflict Institute titled Autism Spectrum Disorder and High Conflict Personalities: Working with Cultural Differences. It is presented as practical guidance for conflict professionals working with autistic parties. It is well-intentioned. It is also, in significant ways, harmful, and the harm is not incidental to the framing. It is embedded in it.
This response is a challenge to the field to interrogate what we reproduce when we adopt frameworks uncritically, especially when those frameworks concern people who are already routinely misread, pathologised, and excluded from the processes that purport to serve them.
Building on a Shaky Foundation
Before addressing the specific claims in the HCI piece, it is worth naming a prior problem: the High Conflict Personality framework itself.
I have written previously about the significant risks embedded in the HCP concept, including the way in which behaviours routinely labelled as “high conflict” are often better explained by neurodivergence, trauma history, or cultural difference. As Tammy Lenski puts it, we should be very cautious about equating someone who disagrees strongly, emotionally, and frequently with having a personality disorder. The HCP label creates a diagnostic shortcut that bypasses the harder, more important question of why a person is presenting the way they are. That question matters enormously for how a mediator responds.
The HCI piece argues that autistic people “tend to display behavioral patterns with some similarities to Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial HCP described in DSM-5,” and that because of these apparent similarities, techniques developed for high-conflict personalities are likely to be useful with autistic people. What the HCI piece is doing here is taking a framework already prone to misreading neurodivergence, trauma, and cultural difference as pathology, and attempting to stretch it further by treating surface behavioural similarities as evidence of shared underlying mechanism.
They are not. Autism is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by differences in sensory processing, social cognition, communication, and pattern recognition. These differences have their own internal logic. They are not expressions of personality organisation, not responses to relational history, and not interpersonal tactics. Treating them as functionally equivalent to the presentations the HCP framework purports to describe does not reveal a connection. It erases a distinction that practitioners genuinely need to understand.
The consequences of that erasure are concrete. An autistic person who has difficulty modulating emotional expression in an unfamiliar, high-stakes environment is not displaying borderline traits. A person who struggles with conventional markers of remorse because their experience of guilt and distress manifests differently is not displaying antisocial traits. When a practitioner imports those associations, they do not arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the person in front of them. They arrive at a distorted one, dressed up in clinical language that gives the distortion an appearance of authority.
The HCI piece presents this conflation as a practical bridge: the similarities are close enough that the same toolkit applies. But a toolkit built on a misreading of what is happening does not become useful because it is confidently applied. It becomes a more efficient vehicle for the original misreading.
The Absence of the Double Empathy Problem
Perhaps the most significant omission in the HCI piece is any engagement with what is now well-established in the autism research literature: the double empathy problem.
Developed by autistic scholar Damian Milton, the double empathy framework challenges the long-held assumption that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are a product of autistic deficit. Milton’s research demonstrates that these breakdowns are bidirectional. Non-autistic people frequently misread autistic communication, struggle to infer autistic mental states, and apply neurotypical interpretive frameworks to behaviour that operates according to different (not deficient) social logic. The problem, in other words, is one of mutual misattunement, not unilateral impairment.
This framework has significant implications for conflict resolution practice. If communication breakdown between autistic and non-autistic parties is partly a function of neurotypical misreading, then the professional most likely to be misreading the autistic party is the mediator. The HCI piece does not address this possibility once. The entire analysis proceeds from the assumption that the challenge is located in the autistic person, and that the practitioner’s task is to adapt their technique in order to manage that person more effectively.
This is not a neutral position. It is a position that places the practitioner firmly on one side of the double empathy dynamic without appearing to notice it. A mediator who has internalised the idea that an autistic party’s emotional intensity is “similar to BPD” is already working with a distorted map. Adding EAR statements to that map does not make it more accurate.
The double empathy problem asks practitioners to interrogate their own interpretive frameworks, not just their communication techniques. That interrogation is entirely absent from the HCI guidance, and its absence shapes everything that follows.
The Management Frame and What It Costs
Read closely, the HCI piece is not really about working with autistic parties. It is about managing autistic parties. The distinction is not semantic.
Throughout the article, autistic people are positioned as objects of professional intervention. They require visual aids. They require longer processing time. They require EAR statements when emotions escalate. They require breaks. The practitioner is positioned as the competent, adaptive professional who deploys the right tools at the right moment to keep the process functional.
What is missing from this account is the autistic party as a subject: a person with their own understanding of the conflict, their own interests, their own experience of the process, and their own capacity for self-determination. The piece gestures toward communication adaptations, but it does not ask what the autistic party needs from the process in terms of fairness, intelligibility, or genuine participation. It asks how the practitioner can maintain productivity.
This is the deficit model applied to conflict resolution, and it carries the same costs here that it carries everywhere else it operates. It positions disability as a problem to be worked around rather than a difference to be genuinely accommodated. It relocates expertise away from the person with lived experience and deposits it entirely with the practitioner. And it quietly imports an assumption of diminished capacity that sits in uncomfortable tension with party-centred values.
Party-centred practice holds that the parties are the experts on their own conflict, their own interests, and their own lives. That commitment does not become conditional when a party processes the world differently from the practitioner. If anything, it becomes more important, because the power differential is larger, the risk of misreading is higher, and the consequences of getting it wrong fall on the party, not the mediator.
The HCI piece does not ask mediators to examine that power differential. It asks them to learn more techniques. Technique without reflexivity is not neutral. In this context, it risks reinforcing the very dynamics that make conflict processes inaccessible to autistic people in the first place.
On Functioning Labels and Who Gets Left Out
The piece organises autistic experience into three tiers: high-functioning, medium-functioning, and low-functioning. These labels are not clinically neutral. They are contested within autistic communities, widely critiqued in the autism research literature, and associated with significant misapplication in practice. “High-functioning” frequently means “presents in ways that neurotypical professionals find easier to read,” not “has high support needs met” or “experiences low distress.” The labels flatten enormous heterogeneity and routinely lead to under-support of people labelled high-functioning and dismissal of the capacities of people labelled low-functioning.
The HCI piece deploys these labels to organise its guidance, then notes in passing that “most individuals with ASD who seek legal help are high-functioning ASD.” This observation does real work. It effectively narrows the lens of the whole piece to one presentation of autism, while implying that lower-support-needs people are someone else’s problem. It does not ask who has already been filtered out of legal and dispute resolution processes before they arrive, or what structural features of those processes do the filtering.
This is a question the field should be asking. Accessibility in conflict resolution is not simply a matter of practitioner technique. It is a question of how processes are designed, what assumptions are built into standard procedure, and whose communication norms are treated as the default against which everyone else is measured.
What the Profession Owes This Conversation
Critiquing this piece is the easy part. The harder work is acknowledging that its approach reflects assumptions the broader field has not yet seriously interrogated.
In my earlier writing on the HCP concept, I argued that the field needs to develop the knowledge and skills to engage with people in respectful and flexible ways, rather than reaching for labels that substitute for that understanding. The HCI’s ASD piece illustrates precisely what happens when that development does not occur. Rather than building genuine understanding of autistic experience, it borrows a pre-existing management framework and extends it, producing guidance that is confident in its techniques and largely incurious about the person those techniques are being applied to.
Conflict resolution processes are designed by and for neurotypical communicators. The expectation that parties will speak when spoken to, maintain eye contact, express emotion within a regulated range, follow the implicit social choreography of a joint session, and signal credibility through neurotypical affect: these are not neutral requirements. They are accessibility barriers for many autistic people, and they are rarely named as such.
When a practitioner intervenes to “manage” behaviour that is actually a legitimate response to a process that was never designed for the person in front of them, the problem has been misidentified. The autistic party has not disrupted the process. The process has failed the autistic party.
The HCI piece is a symptom of a field that has reached for clinical knowledge about neurodivergence without doing the foundational work of examining its own neurotypical assumptions. That examination is not optional if conflict resolution intends to make a genuine claim to inclusivity. It requires engagement with autistic voices, with the double empathy literature, with disability scholarship, and with a willingness to treat the design of our processes as a variable, not a fixed backdrop against which individual difference must be accommodated.
The question is not how to manage autistic parties better. It is whether our processes deserve their trust at all, and what would need to change before the answer could honestly be yes.
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Brilliant piece Sam!