Why did my therapist act like Captain Obvious, and not help?

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When I was in early high school, I was seeing a therapist. For a point of reference, she's the same person who grilled me about feelings. At multiple points, I shared my family difficulties with her. Those consisted of my parents yelling at me, my parents expecting nothing but perfect grades, my parents putting me down, my grandparents and older sister never siding with me, and my little niece upstaging and overriding my wishes. Needless to say, it was a very miserable time I was having, and would have loved to have some moral support and guidance.

But every time I shared something with my therapist---and hoped to get that moral support and guidance---she came back with what I call "Captain Obvious responses". For example:
* "You feel put down because your father called you a little baby."
* "You feel ignored when your mother refused to play a board game with you."
* "You feel lonely when nobody in your family takes your side."
* "You feel unloved and abandoned when your parents take your niece's side."
* Etc.

WHY!! !! !!? Why would my therapist talk like Captain Obvious, and not offer an iota of helpful tips? I get it, it's not her job to teach me verbal self-defense. (Or is it?) But I don't know, maybe a suggestion on keeping my dignity in the family would've helped. At least something! These responses pretty much made me lose all trust in her, and I haven't shared any personal/family difficulties with her pretty much ever since. Instead, I ended up fabricating non-existent issues, like anxiety over tests, and asking for help with those. That, and talk about the science stuff I learned in school, since I liked science at the time. It was nice, since nobody else really wanted to listen to me.

I'm wondering at this point if it's a male/female dichotomy, rather than an aspie/NT dichotomy. Which was also an untended benefit for me. I remember trying the "Captain Obvious" tactic with my past girlfriend a few years ago (who emotionally abused me frequently), and she loved it. Ditto for the 22-year-old female friend I like, but choose not to pursue a relationship with her, since I'm terrified of LTR's and don't want to hurt her. But maybe it's because I'm an aspie, and my therapist was NT.

Thoughts? Anyone else had unnerving experiences in therapy like mine?

I've heard that therapists act like Captain Obvious because it's considered professional to not offer their own viewpoints, feelings, opinions, ... or possibly even suggestions. The thinking behind this type of therapy being that it's nonjudgmental and lets you talk with the immediate feedback that what you said has allegedly been heard ... so that You can better realize what you just said. The therapist is remaining clinical, and is not supposed to become a friend.

Maybe it works for some people, but it sure feels cold and lacking to me. (And I'm female.)

Anyways, Aspie1, I'm sorry to hear about your family troubles. You're not alone ... there's a lot of that going around nowadays, among NTs as well ... but we Aspies could certainly use some moral support, guidance, and suggestions given the extra hurdles and challenges we often face dealing with social situations.

Long story short, from the sound of it, no, your therapist (or the therapy style) was not biased against you because she's NT and you're Aspie. She's merely acting as the professional she was trained to be, and am sure she thinks of herself as proceeding with you in an ethical manner. She would use the same therapeutic approach with an NT as she does with you. And the NT might think of it as cold and unhelpful too.

That said, I hope things can improve or have improved for you. You're a little bit older now, right?

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Never expect anyone to give you any kind of helpful answer; in fact, expect them to go out of their way to make sure they’re not accidentally being helpful—especially if they can behave this way and get paid for it

Oh yeah, that was when I was 12 or 13, and I'm 33 now. I have access to three things that boost my mood the way therapy could never match up to: alcohol, cigarettes, and escorts.

Speaking of alcohol, when I realized I'd have no help in feeling better, I started sneaking alcohol from my parents' liquor cabinet. Specifically, by relying on the old "replace it with water" trick. And later, by buying cooking wine (in the Italian aisle) on the way home from high school, hiding it in my backpack, and drinking it alone in my room. Which they sold to me, because it's classified as a cooking ingredient, and not actual alcohol. It was the same strength as regular wine, even.

Another problem I had with my therapist is that she was overly focused on making me feel better "in the long run", with zero focus on immediate results. But she forgot that she was dealing with a 13-year-old---with an even lower emotional age---for whom "long run" is almost the same as "never". So something to elevate my mood now would have done wonders. Otherwise, it's like expecting the Space Shuttle to soar into space without giving it the booster rockets to push it through the atmosphere layers. In which case, it'll exhaust its fuel supply and get stranded in the low-Earth orbit.

She got paid and/or kept her job because your parents brought you there. Encouraging you to be able to defend yourself from what you went through would not help her get paid/keep her job.

Sounds like she's doing the "empathy" style of therapy, where the client talks and the counsellor feeds back what they pick up about the client's feelings, so that the client can say "yes, I feel that," or "no that's not it." It's supposed to be enough just to do that, the client is supposed to become emotionally strengthened by knowing that somebody understands their feelings. Whether or not it would work on an Aspie, I'm not entirely sure. Clearly in your case you find it lacking. Possibly some Aspies wouldn't derive any good from it, or maybe in some cases it would do good but they wouldn't directly feel the benefit.

It always seems odd to me when somebody goes into therapy without being given any explanation of what the "contract" is, i.e. what the style of therapy will be. I would have thought it ought to be the first part of the process, so that the client can choose the style they want, or move on to another therapist if the techniques on offer aren't acceptable to them. If I were you I'd probably raise this with her, asking what the arrangement is, and / or perhaps I'd ask direct questions such as "do you have any advice about the problem I've just told you about?" It might also be worthwhile to explain that as an Aspie you don't think the therapy is going to get very far with mere emotional feedback.

Last time I looked (a few decades ago), opinion was divided among therapists as to whether or not it was good to offer the client a solution, and psychiatrists tended to think that a lot of clients wanted guidance rather than just an "echo box" feeding back their feelings to them. The counsellors who favoured the "emotional feedback" method were more into "client centred therapy," where the client, having heightened their awareness of the feelings surrounding their problems, would spontaneously work out their own solutions. I guess a lot of Aspies would find this rather difficult, as we tend to think logically rather than emotionally.

… which means the therapy is a good chance to shame us for not thinking emotionally. This pressures us to give up any hope of solving our problems, since we know we need to do something about them, rather than just be coaxed into feeling good while leaving them unsolved. Needless to say, they’ll never admit this fact, and may instead use it to make us look paranoid, thus further invalidating our experiences, feelings and reasoning by default. Most people have a dreadful skill to make you look like the demented one for putting two and two together and getting four, rather than five, no matter how you look at it—psychologists are of course even better at this.

I assume it works up to a point. I don't know, you'd have to be pretty oblivious not to notice the pattern. I'd go along with if for a while until I started feeling manipulated. I remember having this exchange with a doctor once where he kept mirroring everything back at me - at the end I told him "if I knew that I wouldn't be asking you", which he thought was funny. And he didn't treat me like an idiot after that.

Why do so many professional Americans talk like robots? Like they have a script they can't deviate from?

Although I think there is some pretty solid evidence that cognitive methods produce significantly better results.

Seriously, you'd have to have some pretty mild problems if it were enough that a professional stranger sympathised. I mean, please....

LOL. This post is awsome!

Yes. She was doing it on purpose. Its called reflecting. The idea is that she simply verbally reflects back to you what she's said. The benefit is supposed to be two-fold. First off, you are supposed to feel heard - like she was really listening and paying attention to you. For many people, feeling heard is very important. Getting that alone can make them less depressed and anxious.

Secondly, by reflecting back your words, she was hoping to stimulate your own thinking about what you are saying and what you are feeling. So, if you hear something you've said coming out of someone else's mouth, you might think "Gee... That sounds really overly pessimistic. I wonder if I sound that way. I probably do." Then the idea is that the patient gets to direct the therapy. Having heard what she/he sounds like, the patient can then decide to what needs to change.

Why this is funny is that this shrink clearly had no idea what she was dealing with. Many autistic people don't have this same drive to be seen and noticed. Also, you are... how shall I say this... rather intent on staying unhappy. Soothing you or trying to be nice and friendly with you just doesn't get too far. You mostly want us on wrongplanet to just agree with you, no matter what you say. (Come to think of it, that trait is probably why she choose reflective therapy. Maybe she was just trying to get along with that tendency to look for confirmation.)

What you're describing is called "gaslighting". Bullies did that to me, by trying convince me that Saturn's rings are made of solid plastic, or that a burned-out "Exit" sign is actually lit up. When a regular person does it, it's emotional abuse. But when a therapist does it, it's "therapy".

If she made me feel anything at all, it's objectified and disrespected. Her "reflecting" method looked and felt like she was laughing at me. Kind of like: "You feel bad when your family mistreats you, and you can't do anything about it. Ha-ha-ha! I'm an adult, so I can do anything I want if I'm feeling down: drink whiskey, have sex with my husband, get a pet, hang out with my friends. But you can't. Because you're only 12. All you can do is keep feeling bad, like now." So yeah, I stopped trusting her.

Also, when you're living with your family that has a very low opinion of you, and you're too young to move out into your own home, staying miserable is pretty much your only option. After all, I was too young to buy alcohol, which could make me forget my troubles; I didn't smoke back then, so cigarettes are out; I didn't have friends, so I had no way of getting out of the house; I didn't have a girlfriend who admired me, which could raise my self-esteem; and obviously, I was way too young for escorts.

Perhaps I should say a few favorable statements about my therapist too. She put up with my science talk like a trooper. She listened to me ramble about families of mammals, types of volcanoes, mechanics of simple machines, and properties of noble gases. She listened to me ramble when no one else would. Although I admit, the science rambling was meant to drown out the feelings talks. But when it comes to therapeutic help, her feelings-oriented approached clashed with my aspie mind like a toreador with a bull. But she was an adult, and I was a lowly preteen.

Don’t forget, “I can enjoy making fun of a troubled kid who expects me to help him with his problems, wasting his time, treating him like an idiot, pressuring him to give up without acknowledging I’m doing anything but helping him, and, last but not least, getting paid for it ”.



That’s basically why depending on anyone for anything sucks—they get to gaslight you, make fun of you and screw you up for life as much as they want to. They don’t need a reason, after all. If you manage to become an independent—let alone successful—adult, it should be seen as a mistake on their part, and you’d better make sure you never need anything from them again, so they don’t get a second chance to destroy you once and for all.

I think you took it too far there. I'd describe my therapist as misguided and foolish, rather than malicious outright. There were times she gave me genuine sympathy and encouragement, although that was mostly for physical ailments. Like when she did a session by phone when I couldn't come due to food poisoning. (I leveraged that in my favor, by loudly asking for tips on improving my grades when I heard my parents walk past my room, because I knew they loved A's more than anything.) Or maybe it was a clash of minds: because she was NT, because she was a woman, because she was an adult. All of which were the opposite of me, creating a perfect storm of undesirable therapy tactics.

But long story short, I wanted some ideas on verbal self-defense against my family's put-downs. Instead, I got my misery thrown right back in my face.

I found it helpful when my therapist told me in high school I felt abandoned when I told him about the time when my dad brought home a puppy and he wouldn't quit peeing in the house. My family would get mad at me for my anxiety and my feelings stopped mattering and I was now the bad guy for my stress. I didn't know how to describe what I was feeling. I could only describe the situation but I wasn't sure how to describe the feeling so he told me "You felt abandoned." Yes that was it, abandoned. I didn't know you could still abandon someone without kicking them out of your house or leaving them somewhere behind. You can still abandon your child without getting rid of them.

One of the problems with talk therapy is that here a therapist has an extreme power differential with a patient, who isn't even the client. Moral and ethical dilemmas abound here, and yet I'm aware of therapists or paraprofessionals in their 20s being thrown into this, partially for cost reasons, partially because the good ones in the field can make more money elsewhere.

Agreed. Therapist in general are not prepared to deal with our kind.

I have terrific horror stories about psychotherapy. I was subjected to 4 years of psychoanalysis from the age of 8 -12, when I ran away from home in order to really get my point across that I wasn't going back to this guy. That was so much out of character for me that it shocked my parents into paying attention to me. The dude thought that my disability came because I was jealous of my brother! So we spend 4 years with him trying to get me to talk about how much I hate my brother. And the really sad thing is that I started to believe him. I really started to believe that I hated my brother and that this was my problem. Also, he used to sit behind me where I could sit in horror and not be able to see him. And he would not allow me to squirm or fidget. I had to sit still for the whole hour. Sometimes, he would just let me sit there, not saying anything, and only speak to me to tell me to stop fidgeting. Now that is a bad therapist. It was abuse. I'm just glad he never tried to wrap me in a cold wet blanket.