New therapist questioning my diagnosis - can you help me?

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I think that video's too much, too.

Ask him to read up on the diagnosis and just not blurt out random words showing off his ignorance (just don't say it using my words).

That or change therapist.

If you're deaf and you get hearing aids or learn to lip read it doesen't stop you being deaf.

If you have a stomach ulcer and you take some painkillers it might stop hurting but it doesn't make it go away.

If you have autism or Aspergers and you develop strategies that help you deal with your challenges, it shouldn't wipe out your diagnosis, it just means you cope better.

I don't think he gave me reasons to change therapist, he's been helping me a lot.

This said, "the piece of paper says it" leaves both me and him unsatisfied. You know, pieces of paper can say anything, someone with AS could be diagnosed as schizoid or whatever and they'd still be aspies. Also it's not some kind of royal blood I'm claiming I have, I don't want get defensive and give the impression I want to be autistic, because I just really want to understand.

Yes! I think this is the point. I just can't explain myself when I'm asked "ok but how is what you do any different from
what everybody else does in their heads".

But I'll try and say something similar to what you said.

That's a technique he's been taught, to draw patients out and get them talking, without upsetting them. He's blowing smoke up your @$$.

While he never tells YOU he's certain about anything, you can bet what he's writing about you in his reports is concrete certainty, and will have lasting effect on you and your well-being. Anyone else ever asked to treat or evaluate you will be relying from the outset on his notes, and whose opinions do you think will carry more weight in their minds, the licensed professional, or the patient with the mental illness?

Remember naivete is an autistic weakness. Question everything, trust no one.

The paradoxical nature of someone who tells me "trust no one, trust me" is perplexing.

Your therapist is clueless about autism especially in adults. Being straightforward is often one presentation of autism. But autistics after repeated admonishments and consequences for being straightforward can and do learn not to be straightforward.

Autism is a spectrum meaning it encompasses a wide variety of traits.
Symptoms of autism spectrum disorder

If most of those traits listed above describe you or it exhausts you not to show those traits to the world there is a good chance the specialists that diagnosed you are correct and the generalist is wrong.

I want to know how you know what is going on in other people's heads.

That he's clueless, is probably true. Thank you for the list, even if I don't remember much of my childhood. I feel bouts of shame when reading some of these points. I must be repressing memories.

I don't know. This is why I can't address this problem.

An example: I feel an acquaintance is angry with me.
I have a string of people in my memory claiming/being described by others as "angry". And then I have my own anger, how I feel it inside.
I notice there are contact points between how I usually show anger outwards and how these people behave.
Then a "leap of faith" happens: I've never felt anger, and I'll probably never feel anger, in the situation my acquaintance is living in this case. It makes no sense to me. I just can't put myself in their shoes. I just accept it as a truth of faith that they're feeling "anger", the same anger I feel in completely different occasions - reassured by hundreds of silent voices from the past telling me "yes, the clues coincide".

This is thanks to years and years of observation, and talking about feeling with other people, and growing a bigger and bigger "mental archive of people's behaviors". Also it's because I've slowly given up feeling their situation on my skin.

In a way, I really am a man of faith, and at the same time a real detective. Lol.

Of course it happens that someone is having an experience I lived, and I understand their emotions. I get your sense of abandonment if your SO has broken up with you. I don't really get why you should feel angry if I tell you it's a habit in your group of friends to talk behind people's back. I get it as an act of faith, I take act of it, but I don't understand it.

Sorry this got way longer than expected.

He's an idiot. Show him your diagnosis report.

You have been diagnosed. It's settled. I'm actually thinking how EFFING DARE he question it. Tell him to f**k off, seriously, just reading this has made me even madder than I was already feeling.

HOW can he be helpful AT ALL to you while not even BELIEVING your diagnosis!? Dump him.

I am no expert, but I did have aspergers for more than 50 years without realising that that was the problem.

It sounds to me that this therapist knows nothing about autism, and is very probably not qualified to diagnose it or undiagnose it (certainly not in Britain).

To the best of my knowledge the only one of these therapies that works on aspies is DBT.

I know, usually because of unskilled generic clowns trying to be experts in fields they know nothing about.

I've read several posts here on WP over the years about people being diagnosed by "wheel of fortune" therapists until they saw an expert and got the right diagnosis.

If you want to stay with him it's ultimately your call.

This. My counselor said she "didn't see Autistic traits" in me, but she should've asked my classmates-- they believed it.