"THE SECRET TO CHANGE IS TO
focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new."
–SOCRATES
ABOUT
You're looking for an approach that creates real connection — where the autistic individuals you support feel genuinely seen, and where the strategies you use actually make sense to them. That's exactly why this exists.
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Making Sense of Autism® was founded to bridge the gap between how non-autistics are trained to see autism — and how autistic individuals actually experience it. Through the Neuro-Strengths Based Support for Autism (NSBSA) Framework, we help professionals and parents shift from a deficit-focused lens to one grounded in strengths, genuine understanding, and relationship. Because when support makes sense to the person receiving it, everything changes.
The Team at Making Sense of Autism®
SUSAN GOLUBOCK
Founder
For most of her life, Susan Golubock did what so many autistic people learn to do early: she made herself fit. She was good at it. So good, in fact, that it took until her early 50s to receive an autism diagnosis. By then she had built a decades-long career as an occupational therapist, earned two graduate degrees, and developed an innovative classroom-based therapy model that moved Occupational Therapy services out of the pull-out medical model and into the real environments where students actually lived and learned. But masking has a cost. Susan succeeded at appearing neurotypical, and in doing so, never developed a full sense of self when she was young. The toll showed up as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It wasn't until her diagnosis in 1999 that she finally understood there were other ways to think, to be, and to move through the world. That realization, she says, radically changed her life. It also changed everything about how she understood her work. With her late diagnosis as both a lens and a liberation, Susan immersed herself in the autistic community. She became an organizer and presenter at Autreat, an educational conference created and run by autistic adults, and co-founded Making Sense of Autism, LLC with autism-rights activist Jim Sinclair. She contributed to the book Women From Another Planet: Our Lives in the Universe of Autism, spoke as a keynote at autism conferences in Phoenix and California, and co-presented a congress-mandated training for Vocational Rehabilitation counselors across Arizona. What she kept returning to was a gap she saw everywhere: support systems designed around what non-autistics thought autistic people needed, rather than around how autistic people actually experienced their own lives. That gap became the NSBSA Framework. Built from her dual vantage point as a clinician and an autistic person, it centers what the autistic individual wants to achieve, in the environments they actually inhabit, in ways that let them function more comfortably as themselves, not as a quieter version of someone else.
STACI NEUSTADT
CEO
For most of my career, I did what I was trained to do. I set goals, I measured progress, I followed the frameworks I was given, and I genuinely believed I was helping. But the longer I worked with autistic individuals, the more a quiet tension grew. I could see clients working incredibly hard in sessions. I could see families doing everything they were told. And yet something kept feeling off. Not wrong enough to name, but present enough that I couldn't ignore it. The support we were providing often made sense to us , the clinicians, the teachers, the parents, but I wasn't always sure it made sense to the individuals I was trying to support. That question sat with me for years. In 2019, I re-connected with Susan Golubock, a retired occupational therapist, autistic self-advocate, and the founder of Making Sense of Autism®. We had worked together in the early 2000s when I was able to learn little tips that made a huge difference in my sessions. In 2019, she had put together the framework she had spent decades developing. The Neuro-Strengths Based Support for Autism (NSBSA) Framework wasn't just a different set of strategies. It was a fundamentally different starting point: begin with how the autistic person experiences their world, and build everything from there. It reframed what I thought I knew about communication, behavior, and connection — not by dismissing my training, but by giving it a foundation it had always been missing. That shift changed how I work. It changed what I believe good support actually looks like. And it's the reason I now spend my time helping other professionals (SLPs, OTs, teachers) find their way to that same clarity. Not to make you feel bad about where you started. But to show you what becomes possible when support finally makes sense to the person receiving it.
BRADI LEE
Speech-Language Pathology Assistant
Brandi is a licensed Speech-Language Pathology Assistant. As a true student of her discipline, Brandi is constantly pursuing opportunities and education to further her knowledge and skills in her field. She earned an additional certificate specialized in the area of working with Autistic individuals. Brandi’s goal is to help individuals use their strengths to learn new skills to help them build meaningful relationships. Her greatest assets are her patience and calm demeanor. Brandi lives in Chandler with her husband, Travis, and their two young boys, Gavin and Grant. In her free time, she enjoys sharing a good meal with family or friends and watching her boys have silly dance parties in the living room.
TARA J. MARSHALL
Autistic Speech-Language Pathology Assistant
Tara J. Marshall is an Autistic Speech Language Pathology Assistant in Arizona, she also has a BA in Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of Miami. She has long experience in running a support group for Autistic adults in the Phoenix, Arizona area with a friend. Tara has been working with Autistic and other clients with language/communication differences for 22 years, with people with a wide variety of support needs. She is familiar with using AAC and was recently certified in Natural Language Acquisition to assist her clients who are Gestalt (echolalic) Language Processors as well as her typical instruction in Analytical Language Processing. Tara is fluent in English, is currently an intermediate speaker of Spanish, and has experience and courses in American Sign Language, French, and Arabic as well. Her special interests include learning languages, sharks, dinosaurs, and the various medical conditions associated with Autism, with a particular interest in Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Mast Cell Activation Disorders. She has experienced many successes and failures in her life, relationships, and education, and is willing to share lessons learned from her experiences as needed to help her clients.
"I feel like the client, that I have implemented goals with,
seems happier during sessions (more smiles)."
–COTA MENTORED BY AN OT
TRAINED IN NSBSA