Teaching assistants in the system of primary and secondary education in Croatia have been deployed in the last 20 years, in parallel with the adoption of the philosophy of social inclusion and the social model of disability. The inclusive education approach enables students with disabilities to achieve school success in accordance with their abilities, skills, interests, preferences, and the level of individual approach required in the processing of school content. They were provided with continuous psychophysical support from teaching assistants within the framework of collaborative learning. The corpus of conducted research in Croatian educational practice still does not fully indicate all the problems, shortcomings, and proposals for improving the efficiency of teaching assistants. In this paper, the roles of teaching assistant, researcher and respondent are combined in the same person. The purpose of this paper is to enable a deeper insight and self-knowledge of one's own points of strengths and points of weaknesses that arose during the process of providing support in schooling to a first-grade elementary school student with intellectual disabilities. Qualitative methodology was applied. Methods of analytical autoethnography (self-perception, self-reflection, and self-analysis) are used to self-assess the development of personal emphatic communication skills, work efficiency and the degree of professional and personal development towards a competent teaching assistant. Inductive content analysis was used in the processing of collected data at the descriptive level. The obtained results have confirmed that researcher/respondent’s self-perception, high intrinsic motivation and adopted personal value system based on patience, altruism, empathy, and the ability to understand and comprehend the needs and desires of pupil are strong points of strength in professional growth towards a successful teaching assistant habitus. Excessive emotionality is recognized as a point of weakness, as a lower control of emotional reactions can disrupt the primary focus on the needs and interests of students with disabilities. The paper demonstrates the change in personal growth in a way that empathy and the immanent desire to help the pupil with intellectual disabilities overcame the great initial fear and insecurity regarding the start of assistance. Given the scarcity of research on the experiential perspective of teaching staff working with students with intellectual disabilities, the acquired deeper insight and self-knowledge contribute to the literature in this area and can serve as a quality basis for more complex research.