Finding a better doctor/therapist for teenage daughter

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I think we have run into a wall as far as any treatment or support where we live. Her therapist recently cut her loose, feeling there wasn't really much more they could work on. They were mostly working on anxiety and depression issues rather than Aspergers issues.

Her behavioral health nurse has been mainly dealing with anti-depressant doses but is really limited in knowledge and doesn't seem to have a clue about Aspergers.

So I am not sure if there is some other behavioral health help that might be useful or some sort of support group or something like that to help her address challenges or how to work around things that become problems. She will be looking at colleges soon but is still dealing with issues like keeping a normal schedule, dealing with noise and outside chaos and self management.

The problem is that there just isn't anything in the city we live in. If there is something useful as far as a consultation or second opinion we can travel for things like that.

Your local autism society might be able to suggest something. What general area are you from? Someone may be able to suggest something.

On that note, make sure you find a therapist who doesn't keep dropping F-bombs in every sentence. That too, but I'm talking about the word "feelings". Most, if not all, aspies won't know how to correctly answer questions about feelings. I had a therapist like that. She used to grill me about my feelings all the time. Pretty normal for an NT therapist, right? But she'd also go as far as not believing me when I tried to give an answer. Something like: "That's not how you really felt. Try again." Then, out of desperation, I'd tell her a emotionally gushing, bold-faced lie, and she'd thank me for my, wait for it..., honesty. I ended up fabricating test anxiety in school, and letting her "help" me with that.

You daughter is old enough to know how to lie her way out of difficult situations, like I did, but not everyone is so lucky.

My daughter has a number of challenges, AS/ASD being just one. At first we thought we simply assumed that when a therapist lists the areas they can help with, that those were areas of competence. We quickly learned that most have one or two narrow areas they excel at, a handful they learned about in a 1-hr seminar at a conference, and five handfuls that they list because they have had a client with that challenge and consider their handling of it a success b/c the client didn't end the relationship in a fury or something more tragic.

So next we thought we'd try multiple therapists, as that seems to magically work for some people. One that specialized in anxiety and stress, on that specializes in another issue (at the time there were none that specialized in AS/ASD spectrum people). That didn't end good. Each was fighting the other, as they either blamed things on the "other" issue or it didn't fit their school of therapy good enough to be helped by it (read: they didn't believe it was real).

All of this mirrored what I went through when I'd tried to find therapists for myself, for the same issues.

I'm not sure what the answer is at this point, but I do share your concern. The closest we've found to a solution is a partial one: finding therapists or courses that teach a skill, like meditation or time management or mindfulness. This solution doesn't depend on schools of therapy, and intersectionality of issues don't really come into play. It does provide very practical workarounds and the ability to recognize real life problems before they get too big.

Asking about feelings is not something you should avoid - in fact, it's a sign of a competent therapist. The problem with your therapist was the not believing you. Even if a therapists suspects a patient is holding back, challenging them like that is grossly inappropriate. If a therapist accuses you of lying when you report an internal experience they weren't expecting, they are incompetent.

I'm a good doctor :p

I think you're right. But I wonder what's more incompetent: not believing me in the in the first place, or thanking me for being honest when I tell a bold-faced lie.

We have no local autism society. Rather odd since there are support groups elsewhere in the state in much smaller towns.