NT Therapy Doesn't Work?

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I've heard in a few places that therapy often doesn't work all that well on aspies, both from aspies themselves and from experts such as Tony Attwood (e.g. in this video where Tony comments that NT psychotherapists struggle to understand aspies and he encourages aspies to train as psychotherapists themselves, specialising in people with ASDs).

So I wondered, for those of you that have tried therapy and hit dead ends, what are they and why don't conventional therapeutic methods work for you?

I have only been in therapy a few times (sessions).

The first one (two or three times) was before I new about AS and was due to PTS. She was very much into how my childhood had been. How I had developed various things: Useless!

The second one (five sessions) was after I found out about AS. She was much more interested in mitigating things. We never really spoke much about details in lifeevents but more about what could be done to various thoughts etc. Some of it was quite good (I did not have enough money to continue, so I had to terminate the sessions). She had some mindfullness techniques that she tried on me, that did not really work. Some of them did not work and some of it I had figured out years ago (some of it as a small child).

There were various exercises where one is suppose to look at details in the environment (the raisin http://www.mindfulnessinfo.com/exercise-2-the-raisin/) Useless! I probably see more details in my environment as a daily routine than a NT on a mindfulness exercise will.

Then there were something like this body scan/savasana (http://www.mindfulnessinfo.com/exercise ... -savasana/) I have been doing that since almost as long as I can remember. When I was little i used to do this when my feet were cold or something like this when I was trying to sleep.

This one Mindfulness Meditation/Vipassana or something like it (http://www.mindfulnessinfo.com/exercise ... vipassana/) I use for dealing with pain and have been doing it for years and years (no, don´t have any training whatsoever or interest in meditation, I just did it). The unfocus of eyes thing, I used to do that when little because I found it funny to watch how the bathroom tiles would float around my vision (I probably have spend long hours in the bathroom just to watch the tiles).

Visualization do not work on me, as I can not form pictures in my head (contrary to what most people belive to know about AS!).

Funny really. I just googled that site with the mindfulness things, seems I have been doing most of it for a large part of my life

I think that things that would work on me would have to be very goal oriented, not digging to much in the past but focusing on the future.

I've tired it, and it didn't do anything good. I just got sad every session because I had to talk about my problems.
Experts have said that's it no good for me as well.

O*hhhh.. I forgot the
How do you feel about that?

That obviously do not work

I've had a few sessions over the years. None has proved effective.

NT therapy takes the assumption that the patient has issues with particular events/experiences in their lives. People on the autistic spectrum have issues with events/experiences in general, and not in particular.

For example. An NT patient may have an issue with social situations because of a negative experience he/she had at one a few years before.

But for people with AS they will have an issue with social situations because of what a social situation demands of them, and may or may not have links with a particular negative experience.

The problem with my therapy sessions is that they failed to take this into account.

YES! I've been to two sessions now and I've had a lot of the "and how does that make you feel?" thrown at me. I've got no idea what this question is supposed to deduce about the subject in hand, but I know what the question itself makes me feel and that's "on the spot and unable to think of a satisfactory answer, consequently squirmy as hell and horribly scrutinised".

I don't know how far onto the spectrum I am so I don't know if my response is indicative of spectrum-like traits or if it's more to do with being shy and hating being the centre of attention.

Why is it that questions like this don't work for you or for people on the spectrum generally?

Well, how shold I know how I feel?
My second therapist was better at telling me how I did feel than I was myself (she was one of the "feeling other peoples feelings" people)

I've seen various therapists and psychologists, all were as useful as a chocolate teapot and solved or helped nothing.

I've tried CBT before, but I found it didn't help. The information was useful when I read it, but as soon as it finished and I was back in my ordinary rut again, it just all went out of my head and I was back to being the same, anxious person I always was.

That's the thing about having AS - your brain doesn't seem to want to change. It's as though my brain has turned into a solid bit of concrete and it cannot be altered. I'm just stuck like this forever.

I found it useful to be able to talk about my experiences to a councellor who did not give advice.
She listened and challenged my assumptions sometimes, but when she asked how I felt about stuff I had trouble putting it into words. It was non-judgemental and good for me to be accepted - whatever I said - because I didn't feel free to do this with anyone else.

However, when I switched to a different councellor who said "are you aware of any AS in your family?" and "I think it might be useful to look into it"
it all began to make sense.

Instead of "fixing it" from a NT perspective it became "understand and make the best of it" from an AS perspective.

I think I would find it beneficial now to have councelling with someone who is experienced with AS clients and their needs.

Talk therapy doesn't work for me, because my emotions are experienced more nonverbally. For example, if I say 'I feel like I'm worthless', I'm putting a verbal label on what is essentially a nonverbal experience. So dealing with that verbal statement is ineffective, because it's doesn't touch the nonverbal source of that emotion.

In contrast, things like art therapy work on me, but it's rare that I find a counselor who does that sort of thing. So mostly I try to sort out my own problems, with the support of my loving family.

I think AS can present significant complications in therapy, because we think and feel differently, and certain therapies depend on certain assumptions that aren't true for some AS people. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy depends on the assumption that thoughts cause feelings, and so you can modify feelings by modifying thoughts. For me, the link only goes in the opposite direction. (To clarify, for most people it's bidirectional, for me it's one-way feelings->thoughts. Since CBT works on a thoughts->feelings mechanism, it's ineffective for me.)

Cuz all they do is tell me that my problems are my own fault. All I gotta do it "have a positive attitude" and of course copious amounts of childhood abuse doesn't destroy ones psyche, you can just dust yourself off an go on.

That attitude alone has messed me up psychologically.

I had a doctor once fire lots of "how do you feel?" questions at me.

He asked how I felt in the morning, or what time of day I feel at my best. Then as I am thinking about the answer to that he suddenly asks: "How do you feel right now?" and I was stumped.

I think he used that as a way to uncover my AS. So it was useful to him but not to me because I was left thinking about how I might be feeling, and wondering what non AS people would say to those questions.

It made me laugh when I watched Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. When they swapped places the girl had to do the job of pshycologist for her mother, and her mother said "Its easy, just look seriously at them, and every now and then ask them how it made them feel."

I have had various types of talk therapy including CBT. The main reason they didn't work was because I didn't understand what I was trying to achieve. The main goal always seemed to be something like "get on a bus" or "go to the pub with friends". They assumed that I was anxious about situations but the truth is, I just don't want to do those things. I don't want any friends, I don't want to go to nightclubs, I don't want to join a club, so why would I put any effort into trying to "achieve" those things?

I also didn't know how to describe emotions. I don't really feel emotions much, so I ended up just describing every situation as flat. Sometimes I felt pressured into "getting better" so I'd make stuff up and pretend that I'd moved from 4/10 to 7/10 or something.

The whole time I felt like I was lying because I didn't want them to write on my notes that I was uncooperative or not trying hard enough.

i went to some social skill seminars myself; although they were mostly aimed at NTs.
it didn't help a lot for my own skills, but it allowed me to see things from a NT point of vieuw, which then allowed me to work out my own methods

I have found CBT helpful. I have found that by teaching myself to rephrase my inner monologue and changing it's tone, I am better able to deal with a wide variety of situations. I cannot control other people, nor their responses, but I can control my own thoughts. And because I can control my own thoughts, I can often re-direct my feelings and responses. I have found that CBT techniques help me stay calmer and less caught up in other people's negative energy.

But the crap where you just talk about your innermost feelings with the goal of uncovering some kind of deep-seated but repressed darkness is all just a bunch of crap. I also once went to a therapist who was kind of an "I am Woman. Hear me ROAR"-type and tried to impose that perspective on me...way too into DEMANDING that I be treated the way I wanted, and all that resulted was I became a self-centered b!tch. Not helpful.