Getting over emotional pain

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Is it an ASD thing to be stuck and unable to get over bad emotional pain? My therapist seems to think so, but that may be because she doesn't have another explanation, so she ascribes it to my inflexible thinking. It's been almost two years for me of despair and sobbing.

I don't know if it's an autistic thing or not, but I can relate.
I can't heal from any setbacks in my life.
I don't have the emotional intelligence or coping skills.
Maybe it's the "developmental delay" part of my ASD.
Maybe it's my PTSD.
Maybe it's because I have a lot of support needs.


Have you been assessed for trauma or tried a trauma therapist?
What kind of therapy are you receiving?

I'm thinking a PTSD OT might be helpful.
That's an Occupational Therapist who specialises in PTSD.

They can help you to use your time and emotional energy more productively.
It's hard though, I know.

I also feel a lot of emotional pain brought on my my life experiences. I have a very soft heart that is often broken. I'm a very sensitive person and I cry easily.

I found that it's very hard for me to process emotions. I'm naturally an act first, feel later kind. Sometimes it causes a lot of stress and affect my physical health. It's important to find ways to relax yourself and let the emotions out. For me music helps, also warm showers and meditation. During those times I can get incredibly moved or sad or angry but also feel empowered. It's like I could understand normal people's feelings temporarily. Apparently feeling bad can feel good. Anyway you need to figure out what works for you. I don't think you can get over emotional pain without processing it properly first.

My therapist seems to think that the normal and helpful thing to do is to reason through one's emotions to be able to put them in perspective, and make them feel more manageable by doing that, but I can't do that. To me they are how they are. Like if I'm thinking, and saying, "This is the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me and it will never get better," she considers that to be an unreasonable belief. So to her if I could think it through and look at it another way, it wouldn't seem that way anymore. Not that it would be all better, but it would be less overwhelming. But I can't do that. She ascribes it to my inflexible and black-and-white thinking, that has me stuck on one perspective and doesn't let me look at the situation from another perspective.

I don't think she's wrong, but I can't change how I see it. That's the part that I think (and she thinks) is ASD-related.

That sounds like CBT. ^
Personally, I find CBT feels like gaslighting.
It's someone telling me what I should and shouldn't be able to think.
If I could control my thoughts I wouldn't need a therapist.
Nor would I be autistic with trauma and ADHD.

I don't think it's CBT. I loathe CBT and would never accept a therapist who engaged in it, even if she was stealthy and didn't say that's what she was using.

This a paraphrase of something she wrote me:

I think that's dependent on how the other person reacts. My mother, for instance, would start crying and having her own trauma triggers activated if I told her some of the bad things that have happened to me. That would make me more upset because I'd worry about the impact it would have on her mental health. Other people I know might coddle or comfort me too much and make me feel even more sorry for myself. Plus I could develop an usual dependence on them for my own validation.

I think your therapist is making some big assumptions that we all have neutral third parties who want to hear our anguish, that they will be available as needed, and that they will respond in the ways we want. It also assumes those people won't have their own troubles for us to hear. That means we'd be depleting spoons or emotional energy to help them with their problem, when in reality we're hyperfocused on our own, and we're already depleted.

I don't know if she was referring to talking to friends and family, or talking to therapists. While her point might sound logical, I think it's quite ableist. We don't all have willing and able friends to burden, and we can't all afford the assistance of a therapist. Even when we find therapists, they don't always help. Some do, of course, but not all.

I tend to look for specific instructions on how to handle meltdown moments, and I don't want the instructions to involve anything cognitive.

Have you tried grief counselling?

I know he didn't die, but unfortunately the emotional impact of what you're experiencing is no different.
There are strategies for people whose lives have been destroyed, who have no hope of reconciliation.

I hope it doesn't upset you if I say that, but it seems to be the reality as horrible as that is.

I get disproportionately stuck on emotional pain, but one is not a representative sample.

Autism comorbid with clinical depression and obsessive compulsive disorder

Look up autistic perseveration, emotional rumination, and responses to trauma. Those things could explain a lot. I was trapped in re living emotional trauma and pain for most of my life time. Once I got diagnosed at age 68, I was able to see that my re living these experiences was frantic attempt at processing the event looking for a way to change the ending... trying to find something that I could have done to change it all. Once I learned I was processing the pain over and over trying to sort it all out and get a "handle" on it, trying to be ready for the next painful event and trying to figure out how to handle it, I was able to set up a mental file in my mind. I labeled it "finished business" . When a painful memory would present itself again, I let it play and looked closely at it from all the angles I could see, now understanding how my autism might have been working in there without anybody knowing. If there were things I could do such as apologize, make amends, reach out to another, etc. I determined to do that. For almost all of those painful events, there was no way to do those things. the event was over. It was "finished business" and I was able to file it away in that mental file. sometimes a memory would start to play again and as soon as I caught it, I told myself/the memory, that it was "finished business" and that I did not have to go back there again. Over time many painful feelings have been settled and given a safe place to rest. I don't need them, and I can safely leave them in the file. It has given me a lot of peace. Part of my constant replay was hypervigilance from trauma and the wanting to try to figure out how to be prepared to prevent the event from happening again. In truth, there was no way to do that. It has taken time, but it does seem to be helping. If we can't do anything about it, and it is in the past, it is safe to let go and stop working it around in the mind, causing fresh pain and sorrow each time. It is OK to have sad feelings , everybody has events like these in their lives. We are never prepared for them, but we can find new ways to deal with them as life goes on. I hope this mental filing system might work for you too.

Strangely, I seem to bounce back quite well, at least superficially, once the source of the pain has been removed. But I'm not so sure I get over things well at a deeper level. Recently a cat I loved died. I was heartbroken while he was dying and when he died, but seemed OK again after a day or so. But what I did notice was that I'd become very critical of everybody and everything that came to my attention, making harsh remarks. I suspect I was manifesting a certain hatred towards the world for my loss - very unfair of me, but emotions aren't reknowned for being fair. It took me a few days to get back to normal, though now and then I miss him terribly.

Some decades ago my (now ex-) wife betrayed me and then tried to severely reduce my access to our son. Then my landlord tried to evict me. I fought back and got most of what I wanted. I continued to function pretty normally, but I developed a strong sense of suspicion and cynicism about everybody except my son. It took a few years before it got much better.

I sometimes think I'm too stoical and "strong" for my own good. But I think I do escape a lot of conscious anguish, so there's an upside to it.