What do you think it means if your therapist says he's not

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equipped to help you?

It means you better seek out another therapist.

That's what I thought. But I don't want to.

Do you feel like he/she is helping you, despite what he/she said?

I think many people who don't struggle with communicating may say things in a moment of emotion that they do not intend to be taken literally.

I think it is worth bringing up whether your therapist thinks he or she is helping you rather than asking what was meant by the statement which might remind him or her of negative emotion. It might mean your therapist was discouraged, but I am not sure.

I agree with Kraftie, what you think about this issue is most important.

There's a slight chance that the therapist is using that line as a motivation tool.

I agree. Your therapist certainly wouldn't have intended to confuse you. Too much wondering about motivation isn't going to help. I feel badly for you he said this, from what you've written recently this must be very difficult for you right now!!

Do you feel he or she helps you? I think Kraftie's question is very important. Or, is there a way he or she could help you more?

I think he is helping me a lot. I don't think he understands how much he is helping me. He said something about giving me over to an expert. But he does not understand that what he thinks is help is not what I think is help. But what he is giving me is very helpful even if he does not think it's help. I don't want someone new. I don't want an "expert." What helps me is consistency, not strategies and methods. What helps me is a change from a pattern of abandonment in my life. The strategies and methods are not important. I have been figuring those out my entire life and have been doing a good enough job of it myself, so much so that no one in my family even knew I was Autistic. But what kills me is constantly being abandoned. And this feels like just another one of those experiences to add to the list.

As long as I keep my Autistic traits hidden, people will stick with me. Once they see them, they abandon me. If I keep my relationships superficial and in the boxes people want them in, people will stick with me. Once my traits start to really show, once I relax and open up to people and they see the real me, they run.

Strategies and methods are fine because they help a little. But they are only surface skills. What helps me is for someone to see me as me completely, with all my Aspie issues and quirks and not run in fear. I don't need my therapist to help me with surface stuff, I need my therapist to be able to stick around when he sees what's being hidden. I can teach him the strategies and we can refine them together. But I can't have someone who just wants to work on surface skills.

And Waterfalls, you are right. This is a huge blow which is so big considering all the other things going on. It's so huge. I spent the whole day today in bed not able to move.

And it could be a motivation factor too but motivation for what? Nothing has been defined as anything I need to be motivated to do or not do.

I think he feels overwhelmed. He says my mind is so profound and so deep and when I write it's a lot and very powerful stuff. I don't think he is used to dealing with someone this deep and this intelligent who expects people to rise to that same level but yet is so incredibly childlike and vulnerable. I don't know that he has ever met anyone like me.

I can understand that. So I am not concerned about whether he has the academic knowledge to "help" me. The greatest help one can give me is to not abandon me.

If you feel like he's a good partner (therapeutic) for you, then stick with him.

What I mean about motivation: sometimes, people say things they don't mean as a psychological tool. For example, a therapist exasperated with a client might say "I'm through with you!" when he/she didn't mean that at all. In this case, the therapist is trying to prod the client into making progress. I'm not sure if this would work with most people--but I do know that people do this sometimes.

Be honest: do you believe he is helping you with your sensory issues?

In what way do you believe he is helping you? Is he helping you relate to people better? Is he helping you not have so many meltdowns where you're out of circulation for a long time? Is he helping you with your confidence as a person?

What I have noticed is that people become afraid if they see the youngest parts of me. It really freaks them out. As long as they don't see that they just deal with me on a superficial level and everything is fine. It's fine for them. They give me strategies, like, "Maybe say this to this person in this situation or that to that person in that situation..." Ok, those are good pieces of advice.

The problem is that all that stuff is only valid and useful when I am functioning in adult intellectual mode. Yesterday, for the first time he saw me in full blown child mode. He had seen glimpses before but yesterday when we met he saw something that no one else has ever seen. I think it freaked him out. The problem is that for me, and I know also for many of you, this is just a part of who we are. It's not something that can be counseled or medicated out of us. It's how our brain functions in certain situations because our brains are physiologically designed to do so. You are not going to change this about me no matter how many strategies you give me. All you will do is to teach me to hide if more effectively and all that will do is make me have Autistic Burnouts more often and more severely. And I am not convinced that some expert is going to be any different. And I have already told him that he can feel free to consult the expert about anything he wants with me if he feels he needs help. But the biggest issue that I have in my child character is abandonment. And just being passed on from expert to expert will not help with that at all.

I have also been living with this for half a century so I know how to live with it. What I need is for people to be able to see it without freaking out. That is what will help me. Those of us who have this character cannot be fixed of it. It's like trying to unretard a mentally ret*d person. It's not going to happen. We are taught to accept them for who they are, I just want the same compassion and consideration.

I see what you mean. I think that is a horrible motivational tool especially for Aspies who think literally. The damage a statement like that causes takes a whole lot to repair.

I don't think it's possible to be helped with sensory issues. I have read of people who have desensitized some of their issues and I have tried some of the techniques and none of them work for me. There may be people who have the ability to have them desensitized but I don't think it's possible for everyone. And he has never offered any solutions for sensory issues either. For me I just have to remove myself from the situation. I like to give the analogy of being beaten. If a girl is being beaten by her boyfriend she is told to remove herself from the situation or her boyfriend just needs to stop. She is not given strategies on how to endure the beatings better. There is no reason whatsoever for people to play their music so loudly that it kills me. They just need to stop. But they won't and they will never be held accountable so I just have to remove myself from the situation or deal with it. There is nothing anyone can do to make my sense of touch or texture less sensitive. I just live with it just like the rest of you do. If there was a way to make our sensory issues better, we would have found a way amongst ourselves as Autistic people and there would be all kinds of threads about the solutions we would have found. No NT who has never had sensory overload has ever been able to help me with sensory overload issues.

I don't think he is helping me with any of the things that you mentioned above. And I think the reason is because those are not the things that I seek help in. Those are just surface things and over the decades I have developed my own survival and coping mechanisms and strategies to be able to motivate myself and help myself in those areas. The things I need help in are much deeper than that and that way to help me in those things are much simpler than any academic strategies he has ever been taught. Yesterday, I asked him to do a very simple thing that would have helped me miles and taken my self esteem to great levels. It was too simple. He could not do it. Not because he could not but because it made no sense to him. He did not understand it. But he is the kind of person that once I teach him, he will learn and he will grow and having someone like that is extremely helpful to me and that is why I don't want to leave him.

that he can't help you with your issues and he can't help someone like your kind.

It's possible the therapist hasn't seen this particular manifestation in a person.

It's good that he is able to consult with others about something which he feels he's not "equipped" to handle alone.

You can't "unretard" an intellectually-challenged person--but you can help this person achieve his/her highest potential. Maybe even to the point where his/her intellectual functioning rises above two standard deviations below the 100 norm (i.e., above an IQ of 70).

People freak out when somebody goes into child mode--perhaps--for the same reason why people freak out when people start "speaking in tongues" in church. They fear that the person will remain in this state forever--this state which seems quite insane, and where the person seems like he/she is out of control, has no moral restraints, and is liable to do anything.

Yeah, people do freak out. That's the problem. The issue is not the person who is speaking in tongues, the issue is the person who is freaking out. In many churches speaking in tongues is perfectly acceptable. So if someone is going to go the that church and freak out than it's the one freaking out who has the problem.

I also understand how you can teach a mentally challenged person to rise in functioning level. And I agree with that. But I think that this is very different. You can't change how someone's brain processes information. You can only change their behavioral response to that. You can also help people understand how to make sense of emotional issues if they are seeing them from a younger perspective. I know all about that. I have been doing very well hiding this side of me and hiding it so well that very few people know I have it. That means that I am very capable of intellectually handling the child like traumas and getting through them with an intellectual support system which I have created within myself.

Just because I can do that does not mean that the child part does not exist and does not go through things and does not suffer. But the problem is that I have to always keep this secret. This is not an area that can be fixed or changed. People have tried, it's not possible. It's like having brown skin, it just is what it is. The difference is that any strategy that helps the child side get through things is intellectually or behaviorally based. I am extremely good at these strategies since I have had to learn them from a very early age in order to survive.

What people want to do with my child side is say, "process this experience differently. Experience it as an adult, not as a child." Not respond to it differently but experience it differently. And they want me to do this because for me to experience it as a child is uncomfortable for them and they don't understand it. That is the only reason. In order for my to understand the experience and make sense of it and get through it, I have to experience it at the level at which I experience it. It's like telling someone smelling a rose that they have to experience the scent of that rose other than how they experience it because the way they experience it and interpret it makes others uncomfortable because it's not "normal."

This is how I process. I go through it in a child like capacity, then my overdeveloped intellectual adult capacity analyses the situation. Then the intellect comforts and and protects the child and "we" get through the event together in a very mature intellectual manner and growth happens. And as long as the child side stays hidden, no one sees that and they only see the brilliant strategies of the mature intellect after it has kicked in and saved the day. And nobody has a problem and nobody cares. I don't need more intellectual strategies. The problem is that The child side has to stay hidden.

This causes me damage. No one is going to get rid of the child side. People have tried. It's not going to work. And no one should have to. It's just part of who I am and it's a wonderful and fabulous side of me, the best side of me in fact, and for people to want to get rid of it just to make me more normal is cruel. And the same people who freak out when they see the child side in a difficult moment marvel at it when they see the great sides of it and beg that I never lose it and wish they had it themselves. Now I have learned to live with the good and the bad. Why can't anyone else?

At Special Olympics I don't see any other athletes who are being reconditioned if they are less mature than their age peers. People accept them at the maturity levels that they are. No one has a problem with them. I don't understand why people have a problem with me. Maybe they need my emotional capacity to match my intellectual capacity. Well, sorry, that's never going to happen. I don't have the luxury of being intellectually incapacitated as well. If I were I would not be having this problem.

What's interesting is the only bad part about the child side is other people's reactions to it. In and of itself there is nothing bad about it. I have developed a way to compensate for it with the intellectual more mature side. If people are patient, any issue can be successfully navigated no matter what they are. The problem is that people refuse to be patient and refuse to work with me. They insist that I process as they do and won't accept me otherwise. If they were patient and gentle they would see that there are many ways of viewing whatever is happening and many ways of experiencing it and that one way is just as perfect as another. The problem is that they can't tolerate it that I might have a different way of experiencing something because it is not "normal" for someone of my age and intellectual ability. So therefore they demand that I must change.

Last edited by skibum on 31 Dec 2015, 5:35 pm, edited 5 times in total.

The problem is that he does not know that he can because he has been trained and conditioned to think that there is only one kind of help. If he would just chill out and allow me to teach him he would see that he helps me tremendously.

Everything you are saying makes sense Skibum, but your mind works differently than his.

Sometimes finding inside myself the ability to be curious and ask...."how do you think and how would you see this siruation" helps because it clarifies that I think how I think and even if it's different, it still makes more sense to me....but I am interested in your way.....that can help (and I think I've been in similar situations).

As far as sensory problems I don't totally agree that's hopeless because for most people this is much worse under stress than when calm so even if they are always there, there usually are times they may bother you less, so helping you feel less stressed might help indirectly.

I also think most people aren't prepared for the intensely literal intensely emotional yet different way we communicate and when they finally see and feel our emotions and are used to us seeming aloof or different or however they see us it is frightening just because it's not what is typical. But Skibum: you aren't doing anything wrong or scary IMO different scares people but you must try not to believe that means you are scary. You are sweet and compassionate and loving and discreet and intelligent and I'm sure many many other good things.

Can you write him something?