Psychologist Emilio Amigo Discusses His Life and the Story Behind ‘How to Dance in Ohio’

Three decades ago, I founded Amigo Family Counseling in Columbus. Our focus is treating autistic people. If you saw the Broadway musical “How to Dance in Ohio” that opened last fall, the actors referred to Dr. Amigo many times. It’s been a stunning life journey: I am an active clinical psychologist whose work inspired a Broadway production. 

Before the play closed on Feb. 11 after nearly 100 performances, the actor Caesar Samayoa—who starred in “Come From Away” and the traveling version of “Evita”—portrayed me at the Belasco Theatre in New York. It was the strangest thing in the world to watch—all of my own quirks and nuances on display, played by an actor onstage. Granted, my name is lyrical, but there is so much more to my story than what was in the Broadway play. 

On Instagram, the musical was promoted as a coming-of-age show about human connection. Human connection. That’s a loaded term. All sorts of social connections have shaped my family. My father was a Cuban revolutionary with personal ties to Fidel Castro, and later was part of a brigade of Cuban dissidents funded by the CIA that tried to retake Castro’s Cuba. That didn’t work out. We moved to Cleveland, where he practiced medicine, served as chief of staff at several area hospitals and divorced my mom.  

Human connection is important. As a psychologist with a specialty in treating neurodivergent people, I understand that autistic people have trouble forming relationships. They can be very challenged with this human connection. 

Autistic people vary dramatically—many of their efforts for social interactions seem to be too much, or not enough. For example, some autistic people don’t like touching. Others hug everyone. Some are loud; others barely speak. Many autistic people have a lot of anxiety, and that anxiety causes people to shut down. 

The way we relate to people as children is the way we’ll relate to them later on, as adults. Autism presents itself early on, usually between 18 months and 3 years old. For example, if a child isn’t paying attention to what’s going on around them, that’s a clue. If they’re more interested in objects than in people, that’s another clue. If they don’t make eye contact and struggle with verbal and nonverbal interactions, those also are clues.  

As I treat my autistic clients, I try to meet them where they are. If I start working with a 3-year-old who doesn’t know how to connect and engage with people, then I act like I’m a 3-year-old to engage them.  

What I have really loved about working with autistic children, teens and adults is that everything is so apparent. They don’t have a lot of pretenses. They don’t hide things very well until they learn how to “mask,” a term we psychologists use related to how people learn to hide symptoms.  

Amigo Family Escapes Cuba 

My father, Isidro Jesus Amigo, was a medical student training at the University of Havana when he met Fidel Castro, a law student there. I was born May 5, 1959, during these revolutionary times. 

While my mother, Elisabeth Sierra Amigo, looked after me and my 5-year-old brother in Havana, my father assisted Castro’s regime from a naval base on the other side of the island in the city of Santiago de Cuba. As time passed, Dad became disenchanted with Castro. Eventually, my father escaped Cuba, swimming at night through shark-infested waters during a tropical storm to meet the boat that would take him to Florida. Per his instructions, my mother took my brother and me to the U.S. Embassy, which offered protection and covertly arranged for us to meet my father in America. At Duke University, Dad obtained another medical degree. 

Once we moved Cleveland , we socialized monthly with other Cuban dissidents in the area. Cohiba Cigar smoke filled the room, chairs were moved out of the way, and everyone danced to Cuban music. We feasted on an abundance of our food: garlic-infused pork roast, rice and black beans, plantains and more. Each time another immigrating relative arrived at our home, a party would break out. Those celebrations are ingrained in my DNA. Many nights, I listened to Dad on the phone until the late hours making calls to embassies, as he helped our remaining relatives, one at a time, flee their home country. 

I was 5 years old, thrust into kindergarten in suburban Cleveland, the only non-English-speaking kid in class. My parents had become U.S. citizens quickly, but they struggled with their new language.  

I’ve always been a social person. I quickly adapted to life in the United States and, later, adapted well at Independence High School in Northeast Ohio where I was the varsity football quarterback my senior year. My mother was a deeply religious person with a Southern Baptist background, so I attended Wheaton College in Illinois. I studied abroad for a semester and then went to California, where I received my master’s and doctorate degrees at the Rosemead School of Psychology at Biola University. 

Finding a Niche in Group Therapy 

One of my early experiences leading group counseling happened when I was a pre-doctoral intern at Ventura County’s Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which was known for serving the most desperate mental health patients in California at that time. Some of them never left. Every day I went there, my heart broke as I met with the patients in the autism unit. These individuals were not being treated as humans with hearts, minds, personalities, needs and rights. I knew in my gut it was wrong—these people were more than the behaviors they represented. When I went into the autism unit for children, I was overcome with sadness. I wanted to relate to these kids and to understand them. I knew for certain that they deserved better lives and better treatment. 

During my training, I was given a treatment group of six schizophrenic men. They all thought that they were Jesus. For months, I used my Biblical training to help them identify the “real” Jesus in our group. One by one, they disqualified themselves, realizing they had no knowledge of certain points that Jesus would certainly recall about his life. In the end, after a lot of work, the group determined that only one of them really could be Jesus.  

I’ve always been good at and enjoyed solving unsolvable problems. Group therapy was a natural for me. After I finished my doctoral program, I accepted a position as assistant professor of psychology at John Brown University in Arkansas so that we could be closer to my wife’s family. We met during our undergraduate program but married while I was training in California. By the time we moved to Arkansas, we had two children with a third on the way. I loved the social interaction among the college students there, and I thrived creating dramatic and thought-provoking exercises for them. I regularly gathered students in our home, in front of the fireplace, for readings on the latest psychological studies.  

After a few years, I was satisfied that I’d done good work that I was passionate about. But the work of a professor is like being a missionary as far as the pay goes, when I knew there was clinical work I should be pursuing. We decided to move back to Ohio, where I eventually launched the Amigo Family Counseling center in Columbus. We chose Central Ohio because we already had friends in the area, and one of my brothers, Roger G. Amigo, lived here. I liked that Ohio State University, a thriving intellectual institute, was here, too.   

Amigo Grows His Practice Through Marketing 

From the beginning, I took a deep, personal interest in each of my clients. I had already decided to focus on autistic children and adults, inspired by my work with autistic children while training in California. Once we were in Ohio, if my clients were children in elementary school, I would show up at the meetings that affected their Individualized Education Programs. Because of my deep connection with clients and the schools they attended, my client base kept growing. I excelled in social settings, and my ability to connect and market my business was innate. Those are reasons I was so engaged in trying to figure out the minds of people who didn’t have the social abilities with which I seemed blessed. I even had a local radio program that addressed mental health issues.  

One way to help my autistic clients was to arrange social-based therapy for them. I put all of my energy into creating a social-skill therapy group program, engaging clients in groups according to their personal interests. 

My group therapy treatment model allowed me to use my creativity and passion for community, as well as create celebrations. I was determined to meet my clients where they were, learn from them and respect them. I would use whatever interested them to give me a medium for my work. As I started working with each client, it was imperative to discover what they would respond to. We use toys and games—I have hundreds of games in my office—as tools for intervention. People desire to connect if it’s fun, pleasurable and safe, and they can laugh and actively engage with others. 

My goals were for my clients to be more socially engaged, become more capable of expressing empathy and have a greater awareness of their own bodies. In my treatment approach, I help them modify their early format for socializing so they can have better relationships and deeper bonds. I still have a lot of fun doing that work. 

Teaching Clients to See Eye-to-Eye 

My office has a collection of more than 1,000 Pokémon holographic cards. Some of the therapy groups that I’ve created and led, which usually have six to 12 people in them, bring together Pokémon fans. I instruct them on the art of negotiation in doing card exchanges. One of the first things they learn is how to make eye contact with the person to whom they want to speak. Sometimes, it takes an entire hour for a client to visually engage, process and phrase a question about a trade. 

Once my clients understand the basics of what we psychologists call “social pragmatic language,” they do better. They then understand that eye contact is necessary before they learn how to ask for things they want or need. In another group, participants learn how to negotiate and trade the necessary Lego pieces so they can build the project they want to create.  

One of the funniest situations I recall was a group therapy session when youngsters were creating an elaborate cowboys-and-Indians scene with the small toy figurines. One girl in the group, though, refused to participate. Each week she walked around those playing on the floor and cited basketball statistics from the University of Connecticut women’s team. Finally, one week she curled into a fetal position on her knees next to the group and rolled right through the entire setup. 

Of course, this caused an uproar. When I questioned her, she said something like this: “I wanted to participate with the other kids, so I decided to be a tumbleweed.” Even though the other participants weren’t happy, I knew we’d made an advance in her treatment and could now begin improving her social skills. 

My work fills me with a sense of gratitude for being able to help people. I watch week by week as clients become more social within their groups. Each group meeting only lasts one hour. For autistic people, this type of environment is exhausting. We also host twice-monthly Friday Night Clubs, which are still popular and draw 30 to 45 people for each two-hour group experience. 

How the Documentary Happened

About a dozen years ago, two well-known documentarians from New York City, Alexandra Shiva and Bari Pearlman of Gidalya Pictures, searched far and wide for a psychologist in the country who did stand-out work with autistic people. Other psychologists kept referring them to me. Eventually, they traveled to my Columbus office. After much conversation, we agreed for them to come back to film a documentary. I’m still impressed with their understanding of my clients. They spent a week prior to filming carefully preparing my neurodiverse clients for their participation in the documentary, allowing them to examine their cameras and other equipment without actually filming. 

The documentarians seemed especially interested in my plans to organize a “prom” for my adult clients of all ages. For various reasons, many neurodiverse people did not attend their high school proms and homecomings, and I thought this would be a fun and interactive event that could further help them with their social skills. As a personal favor to me, the owners of Encore, a nightclub near my office, agreed to host the Amigo Spring Formal in 2013. 

Our autistic clients openly expressed questions, thoughts and emotions, exposing their true selves during 240 hours of filming the documentary over five months. Upon beginning the editing process, the documentarians decided to focus on three of my clients, as well as myself and my oldest daughter, Ashley, who runs the Acting Workshop program that we offer.  

The documentary was unveiled at several film festivals around the country. I was invited to the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 to host a screening and lead a Q&A session. While I was there, I found out that “How to Dance in Ohio” was acquired by HBO. The professor in me was elated to have the world as my classroom. The documentary has had more than 65 million views on HBO. 

As the documentary became more and more popular, I started hearing that the legendary Broadway musical producer and director Hal Prince was interested. (Prince is known for his work with West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret,Phantom of the Opera and others.) The composer Jacob Yandura, lyricist and script writer Rebekah Greer Melocik and Shiva, the documentary maker, arrived in my office in 2018 to present their ideas for the musical as well as Prince’s vision for it.  

My clients had 50 questions waiting for them. I called it an exercise in “picking the brains” of the musical’s team. In weeks prior, we had created two heads out of Styrofoam and inserted 50 tall, plastic floral card holders into the heads. My autistic clients wrote questions on colored index cards. Once the musical’s team arrived, we picked one card at a time from the Styrofoam heads until my clients and I had asked all 50 questions. The visiting creative team answered all the questions with patience, care and respect. This exercise is now a scene in the musical. 

Prince began working on the musical, which is based on the documentary, prior to his death at age 91 in 2019. Then COVID-19 hit, and I was unsure it would ever be finished.  

Eventually, though, we continued to assist as producers from P3 Productions—Sammy Lopez, Fiona Howe Rudin and Ben Holtzman (a longtime associate of Prince)—and the musical’s director, Sammi Cannold, prepared for an off-Broadway run at Syracuse University. That show was received with a lot of success in fall 2022.  

I was elated last July, when I was notified that the musical would open on Broadway. As we got closer to opening day, there was so much good news, and my office buzzed with excitement. The musical cast was invited to appear in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; a writer from The New York Times interviewed me, several of my clients and my daughter, Ashley, in my Columbus office; the musical’s promotions team started scheduling me for appearances along with Samayoa, the actor who played me in the musical. 

“How to Dance in Ohio” Hits Broadway 

Most days, you’ll still find me in my office, working with my clients as I run 10 to 14 therapy groups a week. I’ve had a deep well of emotions after watching the Broadway musical several times this fall and early winter. I can control the work I do, but I can’t control my reputation. Samayoa played me so well in the story; I personally think he was believable. He is a really compassionate person.  

Even though the musical’s writers took creative license and incorporated several things that really aren’t true, I understand that it was all in an effort to create an engaging storyline. The HBO documentary incorporates actual footage from the Amigo Spring Formal. At first, I was a little taken aback with the fictionalized version in the musical, but there’s a greater purpose to this show than what my purpose might be. (The musical portrays the Amigo Spring Formal as a failure with only one client attending. We had more than 100 autistic adult clients who attended the real Amigo Spring Formal. The writers of the musical then added a fictionalized “Second Chance Dance.” As I mentioned to The New York Times writer: “A whole treatment team helped and supported these individuals through the years to get the nerve to do that.”)   

Treating autistic people is my life’s work. Autistic people sometimes limit themselves, and I am guilty of nudging them in terms of exploration and growth and personal development. I planted the seeds, and I’ve pulled out a few weeds. 

I guess it’s all so personal to me. I saw the musical 13 times, and I was thrilled to be included in the red carpet promenade prior to the opening night performance, as well as being introduced with Ashley onstage that evening. The after-party that night was awesome; among those attending were Steve Martin, Jude Law, autistic savant and advocate Temple Grandin, the musical’s producers, including Paula Abdul, and hundreds of others.    

Beyond the opening of the musical, my personal life has dramatically changed, too. I am now the father of three adult children and two grandchildren. After 23 years of marriage, my wife and I divorced. Four years after our separation, I decided to live my truth. I’m gay. My husband’s name is Doug, and our wedding was featured last year in Columbus Weddings.   

Being gay and openly living my life has allowed me a viewpoint that I didn’t have in the past. Being different, whether gay or autistic or something else, can sharpen our sensitivity and enhance our resiliency against cruelty and judgment.  

I have learned much while working with autistic people. I’m keenly interested in what happens to people who are socially isolated and how—as a psychologist—I think we can become more understanding of our fellow humans. In May, I’ll be 65 years old. I’ve had an eventful journey, but I have a feeling there is much more to come. 

This story is from the March 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.