My Different is Different Than Your Different

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I just got home from a therapy appointment in which I was made very frustrated. We were talking about how even though I'm accepted in my group of friends, I'm still clearly different among the group and even sometimes treated as such.
She tried to compare my experience in the group - being viewed and sometimes treated as different - to being similar, if not equal to, her experience of being the vegetarian in her family. As the discussion progressed, she tried to use another comparison of it being like how my prescriber can't eat pork because she is Muslim.

I tried, seemingly to no avail, to explain that these things are not like the ways in which I am viewed as different and am often treated as such. Her abstaining from eating meat is a personal choice, as is the choice of my prescriber to abstain from pork.

When I told her that she could eat meat without her body responding based on some biological component, she said that she'd naturally suffer mental anguish. Still, in my eyes, and I'm sure in the eyes of everyone on here, this is clearly not the same as someone on the spectrum responding to sensory sensitivities. If she didn't believe that eating meat was wrong then she wouldn't naturally have the mental anguish and throwing up response that she claims she'd have. If my prescriber didn't have to follow dietary laws (by choice), she could eat pork without her body driving her to a meltdown.

These things aren't the same, right? No matter how I think about walking into a bright, loud, and crowded room, my brain is going to neurologically flip its s**t and I'm most often going to have a meltdown. He moral beliefs and my prescribers religious beliefs drive their view of what foods they partake in eating. It is because of those beliefs that her mind may trigger her gag reflex if she were to attempt to eat it. However, no matter how much I believe that worship with fellow Christians is important (I'm a Christian), I will still suffer a meltdown in a big crowd with loud worship music. Even at the smaller services at church, my sensory sensitivities win out. No matter what I convince myself of, no matter what my thoughts towards sensory input is, my brain, by virtue of the way it is "wired," will respond the same.

Does this make sense or am I being completely illogical?

My big question is whether anyone here can think of a different way to explain this to people.

Also, I think it is important to note that I like my therapist and am not looking to change. 90% of the time she is very helpful, however, just like every other human being I know, sometimes she says the dumbest things and gets on my nerves.

Sometimes people forget that using an illistration to make a point isn't always the best way to explain something to an aspie. Your natural response was to compare the situations side by side like a spot the difference puzzle, but she was only comparing a tiny part of the picutre.

I think that she was saying that her family treat her like an outcast and a weirdo because she won't eat meat. I can relate to that because I'm from a farming family. We kept our own livestock and ate them. To be a vegetarian in my family would be considered to be very strange and incomprehensible to the rest of the family. In my family Vegetarian guests are told "there's the kitchen, make your own meal if you don't like what we're eating." Likewise to your friends your being autistic and the way you respond to certain stimuli is as strange to them as a vegetarian is to a farmer and they can't quiet understand it.

They go to church and enjoy being around other people and listening to the music, but for people like you and I even though we like the information at church or enjoy being a Christian, we find the going into a room full of people part overwhelming. To someone who has never experienced this it is incomprehensible in the same way a vegetarian is incomprihensible to a lamb farmer.

That's whay I got from her comparison anyway.

Well, I she is trying to find a way to find common ground with you, and to express that she knows how it feels to be different. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.

But if I am to be honest, people who do not have sensory issues will never be able to fully appreciate what it is like to have sensory issues. They aren't wired to understand it. It is outside of their possible realm of experience. The one difference is maybe a person with photosensitivity with a migraine. They might kind of get it.

There probably isn't an analogy that will properly describe the way in which you are different. Although you might be able to use a peanut allergy...a person with a strong religious or moral conviction could conceivably have a change of heart. Heck, I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian at one point, and I no longer have any qualms about eating meat. However, someone with a peanut allergy cannot have a "change of heart" about how they feel about peanuts. No amount of wanting to be able to eat peanuts or attempts at behavioral change or pressure from the outside will make the person be able to eat peanuts. Much the same as how sensory issues are for you. The main flaw in that analogy is the person with a peanut allergy may be facing a life-threatening reaction, whereas a sensory issue is not life threatening.

I've heard that people with autism were the original hunter species. Their senses were more attuned for hunting and survival than the modern human. I liken it to taking a tribesman who has never known civilisation and putting them in the middle of a big city. Of course it would be overwhelming and incomprehensible with the amount of stimulation compared with living as a tribesman. Their sharper senses would be a liability in that environment, so they would need to shut down to cope until they become accustomed to their new world. People with autism don't become accustomed to this kind of environment. There's nothing more peaceful and healing than the natural environment if you ask me.

Well, I sometimes get frustrated with things people say and it is difficult not to get obsessed with that thought for the rest of the day. This is the kind of thing I would lose sleep over, it would go round and round my head. I think that the best thing to do is to let it go. You'll only be stressing yourself out for no good reason if you keep dwelling on it. My advice is to find something enjoyable to do to take your mind off it.

I've never really tried explain my sensory issues to anyone, so at least you've got someone who is trying to understand, that's a bonus at least, even if she doesn't quite get it.