What Types of Therapy have you done?

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What types of therapy have you done for Aspie/HFA and did you find it helpful?

Not therapy as such, but I attended a self-compassion workshop a few years back which helped greatly.

Smoke weed.

You see, when I was growing up for the most part there was no diagnosis for Asperger's Syndrome. There was an Autism diagnosis but that was reserved for low functioning autistics. I was pretty much on my own to figure out my place in this world.

So for those that received official diagnosis, what did the diagnosis buy you. It wasn't linked to follow-on therapy?

I heard that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was one form of therapy used. But no one so far claims this form of therapy. It must not have been very effective!

I heard of Somatic Experiencing. Anyone on the board use this form?

What other tools are out there?

The diagnosis didn't buy me anything.
In fact, therapy stopped when I was diagnosed.

I am undergoing EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy for PTSD. It seems to be effective. I think most people on the spectrum have had some kind of trauma. I'm sure, like anything else, it probably has its detractors, but I'm slowly making progress. Easier for you to Google it than for me to explain.

Some kinda talk therapy with a social worker I've been seeing since I was ten, has been very helpful.
OT and will be starting up again soon, good for learning to balance sensory issues and for motor development, not to mention fun.
Hippotherapy, I feel like the long term benefits are weaker but good for motor development, balance development, and sensory wise is great cuz horses.

Cognitive behavior therapy for ocd, anxiety and my mind-reading habits. It helped a lot. (Since anxiety and ocd are often comorbid with asd i wanted to share.)

By OT I think you are referring to Occupational Therapy.

According to the Internet:
Occupational therapy is the only profession that helps people across the lifespan to do the things they want and need to do through the therapeutic use of daily activities (occupations). Occupational therapy practitioners enable people of all ages to live life to its fullest by helping them promote health, and prevent—or live better with—injury, illness, or disability.

Occupational therapy practitioners have a holistic perspective, in which the focus is on adapting the environment and/or task to fit the person, and the person is an integral part of the therapy team. It is an evidence-based practice deeply rooted in science.

Well that therapy makes a lot of sense. My wife and I fashioned a coat of invisible armor for each of my daughters from the time they were wee little lassies who just began to learn how to walk and talk, to protect them always.

Consider this, most children start with the same box [Asperger and neurotypical]. But every time an Asperger’s child is ridiculed, they are told they have no common sense, every time they are told they are stupid or worthless, an idiot, their box gets a little bit smaller. If the box gets compressed too small, the box breaks and explodes. The goal is to help your child expand their box, to be everything possible that they can be. One approach to expand their box is to give them skills, your skills, hands on skills, life skills.

Every time an individual learns a new life task successfully, the individual becomes more confident, feels greater self worth and value, is better able to withstand non-constructive criticism and psychological abuse. Essentially, the individual is expanding their box.

Life tasks are normal tasks that individuals (such as parents) use in their normal life. Life skills can be almost anything. They can be making a scrambled egg, or making a sunny side up egg, or driving a nail into a board, changing a flat tire, washing the dishes, balancing a checkbook, using a cookbook, making cherry jubilee, ironing their clothes, fixing a broken dishwasher, answering the phone, unclogging a toilet, changing a light bulb, making a cup of coffee or grinding coffee beans by hand, coloring Easter eggs the old fashion way or finding Easter eggs buried inside or at the end of a movie, grinding grains of wheat to make flour and then using the flour to make a loaf of bread, creating a spreadsheet or sweeping a floor. These life skills can be a mundane or very intricate task. There are millions of life skills that can be learned. They can be outdoor survival skills taught in boy scouts or girl scouts. Every skill makes their armor a little bit stronger against psychological abuse. When my daughters stepped into the classroom for the first time; they had a thousand real life skills under their belt.

No therapies, just a change in lifestyle over the past five years:

Finally learning to drive
Toastmasters
Playing tennis, becoming more physically active
Church activities and the social contacts they provide
And, as always, my pets

I'm a member of an Autism Charity in my area. They employ a counsellor which any member can book once every month. She was really helpful when I saw her a couple of times. She also runs a workshop for adults with autism / Aspergers.
I think her counselling training was in "Integrated Counselling" which uses a varety of techniques, from Person Centred Therapy (e.g. Carl Rogers type stuff) to Psychodynamic Therapy (which is mainly Jungian ideas) to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. With me she was mainly using CBT and Person Centred.

The most important thing though wasn't any of that - it was that she had lots of experience with autistic people. That made her help tremendously valuable in my opinion.

It wasn't prescribed for autism, but I did benefit for PT/OT/speech therapy as an adult who had moved away from home.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with this too. My dog, whom I lost last year to a brain tumor, was with me for many years. She made all the difference in the world to me. Also as a child I grew up with four dogs and it was the same with them. I'm actually more comfortable with dogs than people. I'm waiting until I have everything in place but then I'm going to get another dog.

I lost my last indoor cat last year. It will be some time before I can think of getting another. Meanwhile, I am feeding feral cats.

I think it's more for my depression and, to a lesser extent, anxiety than for my autism, but I've had CBT, DBT, some sort of talk therapy that didn't seem to really fit into either of those categories, and ECT. None of it's really seemed to do a whole lot of good for me

Just finished two years of Cognitive behavior therapy



The counselor was so full of it