Advice for people currently in therapy

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Bring a folder of paper to your sessions and whenever something particularly useful comes up, write it down. Later you can compile these things into your own personal self help booklet.

I started doing this while I was seeing my therapist, and over three years later it's still a useful resource, and I find myself continuing to add to it as I learn more things on my own.

I printed out the pages and I keep them in a binder, organized based on the type of difficulty they address. For example, I have a section labeled "feeling anxious" with a bunch of pages of tools and reminders that help me when I'm anxious, and a section labeled "struggling with a project" with pages of exercises that help me brainstorm and get things done. This way I can just open the book and flip to the area that addresses my current problem.

That's clever.

I switched over to doing my trauma therapy and OT on Zoom. I used Google Docs and took notes during the session. My therapists were also able to share links or show me articles they were looking at. Between sessions I could organise or review my notes but I also kept a running list of questions for the next meetings. I was never quite as organised as you though. I didn't keep notes by topic. It was more of a diary style. Sometimes I also voice recorded our sessions so I could write my notes after we'd finished, instead of while talking.

Your therapist has said things that have helped you? That has never happened to me. This is not a joke.

Over the years I have seen maybe ten therapists. None have ever helped me, except by being someone I can cry to when I am trying not to burden the few people who are close to me more than I already do.

Their advice has been so damaging at times, especially in the beginning when I wasn't aware of how therapy works, and I was young, that I now have to consciously set it aside so that it doesn't hurt me, because it's very seductive to be told that things can get better, and very appealing-seeming, but damaging, to be encouraged to try to do things I can't do and to want things I can't have.

I would have thought this was a common problem with autistic folks, since therapists are taught to make assumptions about how people tick, and if you don't fit those assumptions or actually tell them that they are wrong, they just don't believe you.

Therapies also never really helped me.
My last therapist was quite good though and the only one I could really work with, but actually he never said much. Maybe that’s why it worked.

Most of the others were more damaging than it helped. I had no clue how therapy works, what am I supposed to do or say, what’s going on and so on. It just didn’t fit in any way.

I'm sorry you guys had bad experiences with therapy. I've had a few therapists since I was a teenager, and all of them were at least a little bit helpful for me.

I wonder what the differences are? Maybe therapy is different in Canada, or my problems are more responsive to therapy than others

I rarely got anything actionable out of one on one therapy. I did get better, but it was mostly through the process of figuring out how to express what I wanted to say. On the rare day where they did say something that important, it was usually obvious enough that I still remember it many years later.

Group therapy with a bunch of non-autistic people with various diagnoses was far more useful though. Mostly in getting to see how NTs work through what's going on with themselves. I don't think I ever did any of the homework because it was always more confusing and involved than I could really handle though. It was a lot of David Burn's 5 column strategy for analyzing ones emotions. Not particularly helpful for perseverating autistic people.

The fact that I didn't have a diagnosis for ADHD, SPD or the likely ASD that I've got is probably part of it. The fact that the insurance provider mostly just did CBT with few alternatives is probably another. If I had it all to do over again, I probably would have skipped the therapy and spent the time and money with an occupational therapist to figure out how to address my sensory overload.


The system in the US is kind of a mess. It can be hard to find therapists to begin with and you kind of have to know what your needs are in order to know which ones might work. And in some cases, the insurance company wouldn't cover anybody that wasn't in network at all. I had a generally decent insurer, but they only authorized their own doctors for coverage and they were completely bought into evidence based medicine. In theory, that doesn't sound so bad, but with autism research being where it was a couple decades back, I wouldn't have had any treatment available other than some limitation options that weren't validated for use with ASD anyways. I didn't bother getting reevaluated until a few weeks ago because even with an ASD diagnosis there wouldn't have been any treatment available because they didn't have any doctors to do it. Even with the ADHD diagnosis, getting competent treatment was pretty much impossible with them as nobody really knew how to treat ADDers.

Last edited by MatchboxVagabond on 03 Jul 2023, 9:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

thats a really good idea.

I never had a decent therapist since I turned 15. My insurance only covers ones that are fresh out of online school and don't know jack about autism. All the "specialists" are either frauds or only see children. All the ones that claim they see autistic adults either aren't taking new clients or don't accept my insurance. I think I only had two decent ones as a child.