Transitioning from User Experience Leadership to Neurodivergent Affirming Therapy with Dr. Alison Greco

Welcome back to Autistic Techie.

I am thrilled today to be joined by Alison Greco, Psy.D, the founder and owner of ParaThera a unique therapy platform designed to fill the gap between I'm Fine therapy and

full-on therapy, acting as more of a sliding scale to adjust and accommodate people's needs if they don't need full-on, regular, consistent therapy needs, but still need some

sort of support, need some sort of accountability, and need to talk to a professional.

Alison Greco has been doing this for quite a long time.

ParaThera is new as of this year, but I'm really excited to dive into this application and program with her, learn more about this applies to the neurodivergent people, and help us

all figure out how we can hold ourselves a little more accountable, but also be kinder to ourselves.

Alison, welcome.

Thank you, I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, thanks for the intro, that was helpful.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Yeah, absolutely.

let's see, psychologist by training, which means that I have a doctorate in clinical psychology.

My focus was on anxiety disorders.

And then I worked with a wide variety of populations through my training.

So I worked in the prison system, I worked in college counseling, and then I worked out in community mental health, largely helping people manage their

symptoms of anxiety.

So anything that would show up that was at a level where they felt like it was interfering with their lives.

So they weren't able to do as well in their relationships or at work.

And so that was really my focus.

And then when I left graduate school, I had the choice of either going into private practice or going into a different kind of, know, applying the psychology in a different

way.

So I actually went into software and was in user experience, design and research.

for a long time.

And then while that was going on, I am a mother to a son who's now almost 21.

He'll be 21 in like three weeks.

And he is on the autism spectrum.

He's doing really well.

He's in college.

But I spent a good deal of my life trying to make sure that he had what he needed to be successful in the world.

So that is where I have put majority of my background.

in psychology and now I'm focused on Parathera, which as you so well said is really focused on helping people get to a place where they're more stable.

So whatever the life transition that they're managing, it doesn't have to be something that's clinical or in need of kind of the top level of my degree.

This is really more of the, need a lot of support.

Maybe you don't have the community that you're looking for.

Life transitions happen, especially.

as we go through a long life.

And so being able to offer that kind of solid skill of support, but not necessarily to a level of therapy.

It's interesting to talk about your background and user experience.

I'm curious how you transitioned from PsyD, which looks a little bit more deeply at the human psyche, than user experience often does.

How did you find that your doctoral background in your research and your studies there prepared you or didn't prepare you to be in the full-time user experience role?

It's funny, I think I probably used my clinical degree more in managing the organizations and working with colleagues and leadership and trying to help people understand and have

empathy for our end user than I did in the actual work of having to do the user research.

The user research itself, interviewing people, understanding their needs.

and then figuring out how we would apply that directly into the design.

You're right, was relatively straightforward, especially after you've been doing therapy for a while.

But figuring out sort of the framework that would motivate leadership to make decisions based on what users actually wanted was a much more challenging process where I ended up

using more of my understanding of needs and motivations.

to align that so that I could get decisions made.

So I think it was probably more subtle than overt.

Sometimes I feel like user research interviews and those types of sessions are, for lack of better word, therapy for the end user where they feel validated and they feel heard.

It's interesting that I've experienced that myself.

I actually did a user research study for Riverside when I used for my podcasting and I felt validated by them because I had mentioned a couple things like, like, yes, this makes

sense.

We're working on it.

that's really interesting.

I actually had a call with them.

I talked about like when I do my social media reels.

I like having captions, but it always puts the caption in the middle of the screen.

And I know a lot of neurodivergent people who read lips.

So I say, I want to be able to like set it up so when it puts captions on the screen, it's automatically like a little bit down because otherwise it blocks my mouth and people read

my lips, which is a really interesting insight that they never heard of.

No, I'm sure they hadn't.

it is those sorts of nuggets of really diving into somebody's experience and then being able to bring that back and advocate for them that I felt was the most important part of

being in user experience.

That I couldn't have predicted that.

And my designers certainly couldn't because our perspective is our own.

I was probably making sure that if you were doing any kind of on-screen overlay that it wasn't in...

over any controls, right?

That would be the most logical problem to solve.

So where then is appropriate real estate?

And then when you talk to an engineer, they're going to be like, well, it's easiest to center it on the screen because that way I know it's equidistant from the edges and I know

how to program that.

So then having an insight to say, I actually need it to move off to the side in an irregular manner.

would be those sort of argument that I wouldn't be able to make to an engineer.

I would need the voice of a user and explaining the particular need that we were accommodating in order to have something to inform the engineer about why they would need

to do something more than they were maybe expecting that they would need to do in their programming.

That would happen a fair bit.

Yeah.

with survey data, backing it up with interaction data, or customer calls.

I've started doing lot of customer calls on my current team at work.

And we're learning a lot just from the raw information, the video, audio people are telling us.

And it's like, wow, this is really interesting.

And either justifying a lot of our decisions or kind of contradicting what we had thought we'd known and telling us more about what they actually need.

You can't assume that you know what your user needs because you don't know the ways in which they're going to use your product.

You have like your main user stories, right?

But you can't predict at all the range of human experience and the specific needs.

so figuring out, you know, what drives your business, what's going to make you the money so that you can focus on that makes sense to me.

And I can't accommodate every use case because they're not all equally important.

But you have to know, you have to have enough data to be able to figure out if you are ignoring something that could actually be important to running your business or your

reputation or a differentiator.

And that I think was always the challenge of working with product owners who were really driven by specific metrics and making sure we didn't do anything that was gonna mess up

their metrics.

And then they would not necessarily want us to accommodate

an end user need if it wasn't directly visible in the metrics that were moving in the direction that the PM was being rewarded for.

So I was always cognizant of what it was that the inside system was rewarding because it wasn't always rewarding the end user's good experience.

It was often rewarding whatever the PM was getting.

rated on in any specific quarter.

Exactly, their KPIs are going to drive their decisions, sometimes unrelated to what user experience is.

It's a matter of pushing a needle.

And I'm learning a lot about that myself, trying to figure out like, how can we actually meaningfully solve for people?

I read on LinkedIn recently that a lot of people are pushing back unnecessarily against accessibility.

Like product managers and product owners are not always thoroughly convinced that the idea of accessibility, whether that's cognitive or physical accessibility, is a good business

goal.

past week at the Disability in Conference, which is a huge way for people to understand accessibility is a business goal.

And I'm curious to know how much accessibility, physical or cognitive, has played into your work, either in your experience or as part of ParaThera.

Absolutely.

So in user experience, I was almost always responsible for the accessibility.

I was the almost only champion in the organization.

When I first started in software, we didn't yet have some of the same sort of rules about working with sort of government websites and making sure that they met all of the

accessibility rules through our...

What is the legislation?

It is the ADA.

um And so just having that as.

the EAA just came out in Europe that just launched a few weeks ago.

good.

Okay.

I'm so I love that we are that they are holding the champion on it.

Because for a really long time, it was expensive to sort of retro your website and make it more accessible for variety of specific needs.

And so I was almost always my job to advocate bringing in the reason why it was important.

And it was much easier actually, when I worked in healthcare for

in software for most of my career, that really our clients would require that we meet very specific rules that came in basically if you were going to work with any Medicaid,

Medicare, and your tool was something that a hospital or a government entity or an entity that took money from the government, you had to prove that you were meeting basic

accessibility rules.

So having that legislation in place and having those requirements

made my job of advocating much easier.

And without it though, I wouldn't have had much of a business case to make because what usually came up was, well, it's a small portion of our population that needs a lot of

money spent.

And the ethics of that weren't going to play against the financial, especially if you were a startup.

And I find that, I find it difficult in a culture that is so focused on capitalism and so focused on money being the driver and that human needs are often second or third tier.

And that does inform how I want to move forward with Parathera.

I do want us, and right now it's basically a website in Zoom and so I'm kind of relying on.

the tools that I'm using to be as accessible as possible.

But in the things that I have control over outside of the technology, the training of paratherapists, the audience, the way in which we build it into our ethics, the way we

talk about and how we do finding of our correct audience.

All of that means that I get to change what is important in terms of our company culture and what we are measuring.

And if what you measure drives

people's behavior within the company, then it's important that we have end user experience and focusing on accessibility as one of those things we're measuring against.

Something that I've observed with a lot of the engineering AI tools is that they're really good and really robust, but not all of them have the same level of support for engineering

or architecting for its ability.

Like if I was going to have it put in an image somewhere, it might not remember to do alt text or prompt me for what the alt text is on a more literal sense.

But because a lot of these AI agents kind of design code in chunks, doesn't, it isn't yet able to think

about things at the 20,000 foot view for cognitive accessibility.

But there are tools out there that are designing entire websites where that is more possible and more doable.

But at like the editor level where you're doing little chunks that isn't always there yet.

But it's getting there.

And I'd love to see more from that, from all these AI tools that are out there, because there's like a million of them.

It can feel a little bit overwhelming sometimes.

It can, especially as I'm trying to figure out the right ways that I'm bootstrapping this business and I'm trying to find the right tools to support us and think growth.

It is a challenge to play around with what's available and think about what you need now and how that's going to scale and keep the human in the center.

I'm really glad that I had as much usability and

user experience training as I've had in order to be able to be more thoughtful.

think if I just payment it from the psychology, the software would just feel like a means to an end.

And I wouldn't be thinking about it as part of the overall experience.

I'd really just be thinking about the session.

Speaking of this transition period, what led to your decision to move away from UX leadership and into running a business full-time?

How much of your UX background are you taking with you and how much are you learning brand new and having to build upon new skills?

Yeah, that's an excellent question.

I found, think,

clinical work has always been really important to me, or better said, being able to do direct service work and connect with people and help them in a direct way has always been

important to me.

And so I wanted to find ways to kind of incorporate more direct service into my life as I got older.

So when I got to do a lot more of the direct user interviews and I was doing more connecting with people and then

helping that inform the design, that felt like it sort of scratched that itch.

And then as I moved up in leadership, I kind of got that by being a good manager to my team and being able to have sort of support them and offer ways for them to grow in their

careers.

But I was paying close attention to the mental health market as it's grown since COVID.

And when I worked at Sondermind, that's a therapy platform, and I was their director of user experience, I saw how important it was that there'd be more options besides just

therapy paid for by insurance.

Because the number of people who could not access therapists, either because of wait lists or because they didn't have insurance, meant that they just didn't have anything.

They either had good social networks,

and that's more rare than we'd like to admit, or they are going and trying to get clinical help.

And it was just this obvious gap.

So when I had the opportunity, I actually left my most recent job to take care of my ailing father.

And when he passed, I had this sort of decision point and I could either go back into UX or I could start a business.

And I decided that that was the right time to add a new

service offering to what I think of as a gap where we can really help a lot more people in an accessible, affordable way.

And that was really my mission.

And so I feel like I'm not leaving UX so much as starting this business by recognizing a hole in the market and trying to meet user needs, people's needs.

But boy, I'll tell you, there's a lot more to being

starting a business than there is to being an employee in an established business.

So I am learning a lot.

surprised you the most?

Let's see.

I think it's not that I haven't had any impact or any experience with sales because in user experience, right, I worked a fair bit with the sales environment to try to help them

understand how we were caring for user needs.

They would bring feedback from customers to us and then we would try to respond to that.

But I wasn't out there like trying to sell my product.

I would work with

product marketing, we would try to make sure that the feature set was met the market need and our ability to speak to that.

But I've really been focused on product and the heart of product for a long time.

And so what I found in starting this business was that I was really capable of doing the product.

But when we had to then figure out how to do marketing.

how to run campaigns, how to do Google AdWords, how to understand SEO, I am out of my depth.

That's where I'm finding lots of advisors.

It's not that I don't have some elements of it, but I've never, I mean, it's a profession for real and not one that I've really done, right?

There's a whole industry, there's sub industries.

People get really crazy and in depth and skilled and talented at it if it's something that HubSpot does.

Marketing is its own behemoth, for lack of better word.

Exactly.

So even for an org as small as mine, it's a whole set of work that I have to educate myself on, understand the tools, spend time on.

it's just I don't have the muscle memory.

I don't have the confidence in that as I do on the product side.

And so that's really been I'm actually partnering with a

local college to me and they have a summer program for digital marketing class and so I'm I'm there like case study so that I have this group of people who are studying this.

Profession to kind of advise me give me their their thoughts on how I should move forward.

So that was one of the strategies that I've tried to employ to bring in expertise.

until I'm able to actually hire people to do it for me.

But yeah, that's been really surprising.

The like, no, I know how to deliver this service.

no, no, no, I have to go tell people about it.

I have to like, gin up interest.

I have to be on the socials all the time in a way that has not been how I've lived my life up to this point.

Being on social is a tough thing for me too.

I have to be accountable, I have to make sure I have stuff scheduled.

That's the whole thing.

And what I'd really love to know is how you have...

altered either your user experience design for the product or your marketing to be more mindful for the type of people that you're working with.

How have you approached the way that Parafera looks and feels and how you advertise it knowing whether it's people who are in the red advergent or not, how they go about

actually using the product and knowing that they actually need to use it in the first place.

the first one.

So you hit on something.

I've been working with Parathera for just about seven months, not even fully seven months, six months.

So I've had time to try some things and get some feedback.

And I didn't, I think, fully appreciate how important it is to communicate very quickly and in multiple ways that

people are able to trust the people they're going to talk to in my service.

I know what my training includes, but because we're not in a regulated space, you're in sort of that middle ground where we have some examples, peer support is a thing that

exists in some domains, some coaching, but we're in kind of a middle ground.

What I realized was how important it is for people to know that they can trust whoever they're talking with.

Even if it isn't as deep as therapy, even if it isn't these deep stories, you just want to be able to vent.

You just need to be able to talk about something that's bothering you and know that what you're going to get back is validation and reflection and that you're going to be held no

matter who you are.

and I needed to do a much better job of communicating trust and safety, and really addressing that as a, as a core need that people have.

Cause I was really focusing on the feelings and situations that would drive somebody to need support.

And so my communication was a lot about maybe you're a person who's going through this time in your life to help them identify why they want to come to our service.

What I hadn't really counted on.

or evolved to was what I needed to do to help them understand why I'm the best service when you're going through those kinds of life transitions.

So over the last, I say last month or so, I've really been focusing on making the training that I'm doing professionalized.

So I'm creating a certification in structured emotional support.

It's about 30 hours of skills-based

training and it's focused on sort of the theoretical underpinnings as well as the specific behaviors that everybody who works for Parathera has to go through.

And so then I'm able to talk about the fact that people are certified, the number of hours, what they know, what we train as a way of very quickly giving people evidence that

when they come talk to us that they're in good hands.

And then they can ask questions about what it is that the training looks like.

can, you know, take a look at some of our mock sessions, any of that kind of shorthand.

And then I'm able to talk about sort of cultural sensitivity and the ways in which we're building in how to give safety and security to anybody who comes to talk to us, right?

So how will you be able to talk to us about

the appropriate pronouns that you want us to use, the way in which you would like to not have your video on or the other accommodations that are necessary.

I need to do a better job of putting that out front because it's in the training and I kind of just have it as an of course, but it isn't enough for me to know it's there.

I have to be able to broadcast it.

And so that's where I'm...

coming on your website or on your social media.

I think a lot of companies are doing a lot more skits with reels or TikTok and stuff where this maybe is an idea for you.

Have a reel where you're doing a therapy session and the video is off.

I just did an episode on this show about not making eye contact when you're on meetings.

That's something that helps me.

My eyes like to wander.

I'm not always looking at the camera.

And that is a huge thing for neurodivergent

people to not feel like they have to staple their eyes to the camera.

we, it's part of my training, actually.

I have a whole thing on how to both communicate warmth and allow the other person to not feel that you are either like staring into their soul or that they don't have to meet you

where you are.

You are meeting where they are.

And so it's a big thing about looking over the shoulder or giving them something else to focus on.

and having that be something that's overt and acceptable.

And that, think if, to get back to your original question, like I'm learning what it means to communicate trust and then finding ways to do that in sort of multiple layers.

So starting with the training and then what parts of the training will really resonate with people so that they feel like whatever objections or concerns

vulnerabilities are something that we have taken into account and really care about.

I think that was, it's kind of where I am now in evolving.

And so I've got to update, I've adapted my whole website around like changing the angle of communication.

I try to not have it be very image heavy.

There are images, but it's not a big

part of it.

And then I haven't done any video.

I've done video for my social media, but I didn't want to be the personal face of my business.

I didn't want you to feel like I'm the only person you're going to talk to because there'll be people I'm training and I want them to be more of the face of it.

So I hadn't done any video yet to try to give people a sense of what it's like.

But I know that's a miss.

I have to do that.

So that's part of my evolution.

My wife and I always talk about the things that we find, whether that's businesses or places, which are increasingly for social media, and less through emails or walking

around.

We've both found a lot of those places, whether they have compelling social media presences or insightful conversations, or they just have what we're looking for.

Once you get people in place, I think if you did a skit where you tell people that you don't have to do eye contact, or you mock out a session,

without eye contact, I think that it resonate with you.

I did a reel recently where I'm working on my hooks for my reels and one of my first two seconds reels was about like, I don't make eye contact, da da da da, and it got a lot of

hits and I was happy with that because I feel that that resonates with autistic people and resonates with a lot of people really strongly, but especially neurodivergent folks.

And I want any kind of identity to feel welcome and accepted.

So figuring out the ways in which we appropriately signal that, either overtly through that kind of language or whether it's this sort of the people who are, we call them

paratherapists, so I'm just going to use that, the paratherapists being able to talk about themselves, right?

Because I want to be able to employ.

neurodiversion folk.

And so I want there to be stories on both sides, where we talk about the ways in which we are supporting each other, the tools that we're giving people to be able to do that, and

then the environment that we're building, which means that you walk away feeling like you got what you needed.

And that's, that's ultimately, if I have a KPI, ultimately, that's what it is, I want people to be able to walk away and feel like they got specifically the kind of support

that they needed in that moment.

You were hurt.

Like-

goals to feel more complete, to have done something.

goals may be not the right word, it depends on what the individual wants.

But they feel more satisfied, whatever that shape takes.

Exactly.

You come with an expectation or you wouldn't come.

And the way that we structure the sessions at Parathera is that there are themes.

So you would pick the kind of support that you're looking for.

So do you want to vent?

In a venting session, we're not going to problem solve.

The entire point of it is for you to be heard and for you to feel and be reflected back and for that to be entirely acceptable.

Like whatever it is that you've had, like we are here on your side, you're the main character.

Because so often you have this, as soon as you start talking, we start moving into problem solving.

And problem solving's awesome, I've got a session for that.

But I wanted people to have an opportunity to just talk, just get it out.

And so setting that expectation upfront, not just that you've got 30 minutes with a paratherapist,

But you've got 30 minutes with a paratherapist and a specific kind of support.

And that way, you have all the agency.

You tell us what you need up front.

Not everybody has somebody who can listen.

So the first step might be to talk to a paratherapist who is a good listener, who is just digesting and just validating and reflecting.

And maybe next time they, maybe they work on fixing if it is the right thing to be worked on to fix.

Not everything that you go to a therapist about can be fixed or is fixable or is worth fixing, honestly.

I've dealt with a lot of that.

I deal with things that can't be fixed.

or I don't want to.

yeah, for sure.

And I think, you know, I was chatting with a woman about she wanted to be able to have this sort of space to talk about work before she went home because she felt like she

talked about work all the time and that that was sort of getting in the way of being able to be more present with her kids or, you know, even with her partner to be able to

listen to what they were needing or talk about something else because her work was just very stressful and she wasn't happy in it, but she wasn't in a space where she was ready

to leave or find something else.

And so having an opportunity to just get it out and not feel like you're overburdening the people who are in your social network was a way that she was hoping to be able to use the

service so that she was able to.

feel heard, get it out, and then move on with our life.

That's a great example of testimonial.

Another social thing you could do would be testimonials or referrals or letting potential customers or potential clients talk to past clients and talk about their experiences as

well.

Now I'm the one giving you some social media tips and tricks.

No, I can't wait for that.

That is, think, the most valuable is when we have a group of people who are ready to advocate for us.

I think at that point, we really are at an amazing place.

And so I'm still pretty early in building out that stable of folks.

But yeah, that's where I'm hoping to go for sure.

I get to drop back and my paratherapists and my clients get to move forward.

Speaking of where people can find you and what's next, if people are interested in ParaThera, they want to learn more about it, they want to do a session, where can people

find you?

Or if they want to directly, where can they do that?

got a website.

It's para-thera.com.

So, P-A-R-A.

The name is a little bit like a paramedic or a paralegal.

We are around therapy.

And so that's the idea of it is.

And so you can come to the website.

have

the ability to book a session.

can have a free session.

You can have an info session where you just learn and talk about us, what you think you might want to know, any questions that you have.

And those are generally with me.

So you're welcome to just ask a bunch of questions.

You can also find us on most of the social media.

So Parathera, think on Instagram, it's tryparathera.

And that's...

That's my main one.

I'm also on Facebook at Parathera.

But who's on Facebook?

I haven't made it to TikTok.

Your face, yeah.

Facebook just to make sure that my family knows that I'm still around.

I post every once in a while, so people are still on it loosely.

And I've...

there for my distant relatives.

And something that I feel like no social media has done really as well as groups.

Like I'm in like a group for my town.

I'm in a group for like special interests or social interests or memes or whatever it is.

Just like...

groups a lot more than I have.

You raise a very good point.

One of my favorite groups is like, we all pretend that we're like coworkers in the same office building and people are like, like the printer is out of paper or someone's doing

your food fight in a cafeteria.

It's all like improvising all very social chicanery, but it's the sort of thing that I live for and I enjoy looking at every once in a while.

As far as your socials and your information, I will make sure that all those are in the show notes on podcast platforms and on our website.

Allison, this is

was an awesome conversation and I'm so glad I got to learn about Parafair and share a bit of the world.

Thanks so much for coming on.

so much for inviting me.

I really appreciate it.