Has anyone here ever benefitted from seeing a counsellor?

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I was just going to say that. Otherwise, forget it.

Sounds like a tough situation. It's hard to know what to do with someone who obviously needs some sort of counseling and doesn't need it. If he were self-harming or self-destructive you'd probably be justified in making him go anyway, but from what you said about him that wouldn't be a good idea.

You said he has PTSD, doesn't like to leave the house, and is very socially anxious. Even if he wants to get outside help, he may feel unable to for these reasons. The counselor-patient relationship is very intimate and revealing private details and confronting emotional problems can be scary even for someone who is not particularly socially anxious. Then there's the problem of leaving home to meet this person and getting to know, and being potentially judged by, a stranger. If this is what's bothering your son, are there any adults he already knows (relatives, friends of the family, clergy) who could visit with him and help him talk out his problems and build up his courage? At least in the short term?

As other people have mentioned, the personality and attitude of the counselor makes a difference. Not everyone will "click". Also, if he does eventually find a counselor, it may help to find one who is familiar with AS.
Good luck. I hope your son gets the help he needs.

Seeing a counsellor was a waste of freaking time. We ended up just talking in circles because the counsellor had no expertise in handling people with autism or Asperger's Syndrome (though to be fair it had not even been heard of back when I was a kid). Completely pointless discussions about being nice (WTF was I doing wrong? I WAS being nice!) and of course the ever-popular but infathomably useless "Just be Yourself™"

Oh God I just don't know what to do.

The counsellor we saw 2 years ago who specialised in AS, I mean he was a lovely guy but just didnt understand my son at all. Because my son wasnt beaten up at school he kept telling him over and over he wasnt bullied and just wanted him to go back to school. That just was NOT going to happen! and just made everything worse.

The only person my son even likes anymore is another 36 year old AS friend of mine who unfortunately lives a long way away from us.

If it was bad enough for him being bullied at school after he left there he then got bullied online aswell so now he just hates people in general.

He also says he hates having AS and just wants it to go away and he keeps saying he wishes he was normal and he worries obsessively what people think of him.

On top of all this his other main problem is that he is soooo negative about everything. and yes I have tried to get him to come and read here but he says he doesnt want to that it will make him more depressed.

The guy may have been a nice guy but he was a terrible counsellor. Telling someone that he wasn't bullied just because it wasn't physical. A good counsellor doesn't tell a person what happened didn't happen. Your child didn't get ptsd from his imagination. A good counsellor helps a person to explore the past situation from a safe place.

Example 1: A girl in my primary school decided to grab my finger playing and twist, it broke but I forgave the girl in about two weeks.

Example 2: Another girl in the same school decided to turn the entire class against me, I stopped talking to anyone my age for about three years (approx age 6 to nine) and at age 27 I'm still annoyed about it. Also I still have anxiety of large groups as well.

Now, I don't let my fear of groups hold me back. I will go out dancing (if I want), I will go to pubs (if I want) and I do social things when I want to (if I want to) but I still get afraid. Too many people (no matter how nice they are) and I have to resist the urge to run.

I've had people tell me that I wasn't hurting, it made me hurt worse. Denial of feelings by others can have many effects on a person.

I don't think counseling would have helped much when I was comfortable with my life, even if there were difficulties, but after some really bad social situations that worsened my PTSD and ended up with me being anorexic, counseling did start helping and I began relying on it as something to look forward to and something to help me get out of the mental hell I was stuck in. It wasn't perfect at all and I'm on medication, but it did eventually help. I don't know if it would have done any good when I was in high school and privately tutored, kind of succeeding at living in my own head.

I LOVE my current therapist. But she's out of network and it took a lot of searching to find someone I thought was going to be good. She is the one who told me about AS, and it has opened a lot of eyes and helped me to understand myself.

The therapists I saw as a teen were completely clueless, though. They didn't diagnose me even though it was SO STINKING OBVIOUS! Your son won't have that problem, though.

Does your son know about wrong planet? He might find some help by posting here. Also, maybe he would enjoy reading some books about the subject, if he likes to read. Or if you would like him to see a counselor, maybe let him pick out who he sees or involve him in the process in some way.

I am 46 years old, so in a much better position than a 16 year old to gauge the usefulness of being in therapy, and yet I have only had unhelpful and even frustrating experiences with therapists.

The problem I found is that therapists didn't recognize the difficulties that AS brings on, so when I told them I was anxious or found social interactions difficult, they thought they needed to reassure me and encourage me to go out and get my feet wet. That works fine for people who are anxious but don't have AS, because once they get over their fears then their natural ability to socialize kicks in, and with practice they can get comfortable, but for those of us who lack that ability, it's sort of like being encouraged to go into a lion's den with no training as a lion tamer.

Even before I knew or suspected that I had AS, I found myself saying, "But I don't know how!" and I was dismissed with a shrug and an encouraging smile. It was very painful.

I recently saw an AS specialist who said that going to therapy would be a waste of time for me. She said that what I need is actual information, not reassurance and platitudes. She recommended attending aspie groups, especially a local one that is led by a trained professional who teaches social skills to people with AS, but also aspie self-help groups with other people on the spectrum. I don't know if any such groups are available in your area or if your son would be willing to try them, but they could be worth a try.

I think a counselor could be helpful for emotional support, as long as he/she doesn't try to "fix" the wrong problem, by treating your aspie son as if he's an NT suffering from garden-variety anxiety. But that entails finding the right person, who is warm and supportive and willing to admit he or she doesn't know everything and who will be there to listen to your son, so he can have someone to talk to about his problems who understands him.

I saw a mental health one, for two years, in the late 90s. It didn't help. The b***h only wanted me to blend in with my female peers, and like what they liked.

This sounds familiar. I also say "I don't know" a lot to questions like this.

me too. When anyone ever asks me questions about how I feel about things my answer is always " I don't know" then they get angry with me and tell me that I should know. LOL

There's go to be a difference between a counselor and a psychotherapist, because the guy I've been going to only pisses me off. He wants me to write down how I feel during a week. I really don't have much to say about a week for me. I don't get angry, or sad, just frustrated by noise and interruptions. This comes with AS. He should know this, but I think he's just fishing for disorders. He even asked me if I knew that there are "tag-along" disorders. Well, AS has a lot of "symptoms" of various disorders. That doesn't mean I have Asperger's AND Anxiety Disorder. The anxiety comes with the package. It's not something you can burn off like a mole with some kind of psychotherapy.

I'm actually only seeing him because I was considering getting SSI, but I found a place that helps us "aspie" types find work. So, I'd rather try to get a job that I can keep and make a decent amount of money, instead of a lousy $635 a month.

I don't need treatment. None of us do. We need patience and understanding, cos there's no changing us. There's no curing us. We're not mentally ill. Just wired differently.

There is a difference between a counsellor and a psychologist.

counsellors are not psychologists they arent fully qualified to give strategies to help resolve problems but can only listen to what you say, which never did any good to me

and there are fully qualified psychologist who gives advice and strategies of how to deal with any difficult situations.

A good counselor can work wonders.

A bad one....

I'm 48, and I've been to over a dozen therapists, mostly at the request of my NT wife. None were helpful to me, and many were destructive. NT therapists do not really understand AS people, and normal methods of therapy are useless at best, but can be dangerous. Even several who were supposed to "specialize" in AS had a laughably simplistic working model of AS. Even worse, because I have a good job, a wife, and three kids they assume that I must not really have AS, despite my professional diagnosis. They even had me convinced of this for a long time (very bad).

I am not overly rigid and I don't systematize things. My greatest problem is called Alexithymia (a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions), which is true of 85% of people with AS. So, I often answer "I don't know" which is the only true answer, but it seems to upset NT people a lot.

Alexithymia Test:
http://oaq.blogspot.com/

I have ultimately learned that for as much as I have failed to understand how NT people process the world, the vast majority of them assume that either:

a) They DO understand how I process the world, which they don't.
b) The way they process the world is RIGHT, and any other way is WRONG.

However, I am willing to admit that NT is the majority, so I have bent over backward to do things the NT way. Amusingly enough, I am still thought of as stubborn, inflexible, and uncompromising.

I am beginning to wonder if it is even possible to have a meaningful discussion with an NT, much less a partnership or marriage. I've been seeing the same therapist for over two years, and though she thinks she understands me, she is absurdly off base, trying to shoehorn me into something that makes NT sense.

My two cents.

And that would be followed by "On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you feel?" I would rather have bamboo splinters under my fingernails.

I had so much counselling, and it was really a compulsory part of being in the mental health system - no attendance at counselling meant no support of any kind. I think that some of the counselling was positively harmful - the phrases that really grated were that I have "distorted thinking", "excessive negativity", I am "judgemental" (and non-judgemental counselling can take a flying something beginning with F) and, best of all, "sabotaging my own recovery".

It was only the most recent psychologist, part of a team that diagnosed AS, that was helpful. He was the first to say that this is how I am, and that the "recovery" other counsellors expected was pie in the sky.

I want to go on but my laptop battery is shrieking imminent shutdown...