I have been trying to write about the necessity of an intersectional perspective to autistic self-actualization-

And then I saw this:

What's postmodern about Autistic culture? A feeling that can exist only in these times

At the Society for Disability Studies last weekend, I had a very important conversation in one of my sessions that was centered primarily on what is intersectional about autistic culture.

http://thatautisticthatnewtownforgot.blogspot.com/2013/07/whats-postmodern-about-autistic-culture.html

This is completely different from where I was going, which is the impossibility of understanding social behavior rationally without understanding the system of imbalanced power networks that underlie it. Maybe I can excuse that by saying that I'm coming from a clinical perspective: how to convince Johnny's  parents that they have to understand intersectionality in order to understand their son. But this is much sweeter: an inquiry into why we produce intersectional postmodernism by the conditions of our being. A feast of pride, for those of us carping about being on the right side of history. 

What I Wrote After I Dumped My Last MFT

After I Got Home That Night:

The weirdness is that he really kept at me, challenging me, but also seemed to realize that I had valid responses to all of his (very politely acknowledged and addressed) defensive reactions.

I now know I want a survivor; someone who is removed from sentiment, and can teach me it.

When I critiqued his behavior, he challenged me, and I was able to come up with a narrative, I was okay. Once I could not, and remember looking around feeling lost. I do not remember how I escaped that, which upsets me.

He said, “When in the past have I exhibited signs of x?”

That I did not respond with fear or withdrawal was came perhaps from a pervasive sense of wrongness. When I knew his argument was wrong- not incorrect, or mistaken, but repulsive- I relaxed into that knowledge, and said, “You are asking me to survey our previous interactions, and that is a difficult process for me.”

I think he was challenging me to particularize my assertion that he was trying to separate my spectrum from my self. I gave him the “you are trying to parse…” paragraph from my previous post. More important than the argument I gave him was giving myself time to try, and fail, to answer the question on his terms, and then decide that the problem was not me at all but his question.

I explained things to him in biological terms- that being on the spectrum is a systemic brain condition, that there is no part of me that could not be affected by it. You’d think this would be covered by its being classified as a pervasive developmental disorder, given he is a specialist.

Did I make him understand that minimizing my autism made me feel like less of a human being? No. Did I make him understand that praising parts of me as “not autism” or as having “gotten past autism” only made me hate the part of myself- which would be myself, that is autistic and cannot get past it? No. He even started arguing altruism, and that’s the whole fucking point. It would only take me an hour to explain the altruism bit to him, but where would that leave me?

I explained that when he asked questions that were obviously fishing for key requirements to a DSMV diagnosis, it was insulting to me, as I’ve read the thing. This was an instance of standard practice for NT’s backfiring: apparently, NT’s hate being “labeled” with “a diagnosis” which I think means that they are reluctant to identify as suffering from a known mental illness. He therefore asked those questions “subtly” to preserve my delicate sensibilities- after I has self-identified as on the spectrum, and suffering from bipolar 2. I think the blatant senselessness of his efforts here is the best possible commentary on the end of our therapeutic relationship.

Yet at a similar juncture he said something that shocked me. When I explained the idea of NT practice contrasting with and requiring different or modified techniques from Spectrum practice, that you need different therapeutic models for different types of people, he really seemed to get it, becoming almost worried. He explained that his strategy has been to take tools that he uses on NTs and translate them over into spectrum work, and said that he felt he could do so effectively with me. I agreed that he could, and that we had been doing so, by engaging in multi-week dialogues where we tried to increase his understanding of the spectrum enough to make the tools fit. Shockingly, he immediately said: “Oh no, that wouldn’t be fair for you.” He really is not a bad sort.

What I Wrote To Dump My Last MFT

What I wrote before I walked into my therapists’ office and told him it would be out last session.[i]

I still can’t find a shrink. I can blame the failure of our society to meet the established need for individual therapy. Another part of the problem that I can do something about is my attitude; I have certainly regarded myself a supplicant to therapists- instead of a consumer of their services- for most of my life.

This second perspective helped me discontinue a nice, moderately (priced) productive therapeutic relationship I had with an MFT. It took some rehearsing of my thoughts to do this, as well as some difficulty. My mother was shocked that I had successfully ended the therapy in the same session that I walked in intending to. But I think some of the best moments of my life have been speaking a few true words, and life changing.

The point is that each therapist is a artisan providing a service that is necessarily tailored to each client. In order for a therapeutic relationship to work, their has to be an empathic match on some level. The Jungian “wounded healer” archetype is especially relevant here, the motivating zeitgeist behind the power of a phrase: “I feel your pain.”

If you’re an Autist, you will not find an Autistic shrink, (please prove me wrong and send me a number!). What you can, and deserve to find is a clinician who talks to you in language you understand and who you feel helps you actualize. That is the fundamental service that any clinician should provide you in therapy, and if you are not getting this service, you must terminate the relationship, (a world in which therapeutically unprofitable therapy would be terminated by the clinician is sadly inconceivable[ii]).

In the hope of emboldening my peers, here are the words that remain from my termination of therapy with a perfectly nice MFT, who just didn’t get it.

You are bad at your job:

To say you think I will eventually run into Bergman, and it will be fine, is not to help me: what makes going to school so hard is that I am terrified of this run-in, and you are supposed to helping me manage the anxiety, or take steps to reduce it, but pointing out that the situation I am terrified of, (to the point that I have stopped going to school in the past), is just going to happen, and I’ll see how silly my fear was, was not helpful, (with people on the spectrum, having them type such emails while you are in the room is helpful).[iii]

You are always trying to parse “normal me” from “spectrum”(should be in double quotes because you don’t believe in it)[iv] me. You crow with delight when my problems are the same as people who are not on the spectrum. I am what is different. Society, culture, modernity present a wall of problems that many nerotypicals struggle to navigate. THE FACT THAT I STRUGGLE IN SIMILAR WAYS DOES NOT MAKE ME NEUROTYPICAL. The fact that I struggle in completely identical ways does not make me neurotypical- imagine telling a gay person that part of his life was ‘normal’ and you didn’t have to ‘treat him as gay’ for that part of the therapy.

I came into this room looking to mollify and stating terms that were less about establishing boundaries and more about groveling in the hope of finding someone willing, however grudgingly, to take me as I am. If you are not comfortable treating me for aspersers, because you are not comfortable diagnosing me with it, then our relationship is not only fruitless but stressful and invalidating for me.

I know you don’t try to make me feel this way- but this is my life: being different, being punished for it, and having the difference attributed to defects of my character.

When you weigh your belief in my disability, you are repeating the trauma of everyone who has attacked me for the laziness, disobedience, or other sin that I now know is the result of my disability. My progress has come from accepting (radically) my limitations and focusing on my strengths- and when you question my disability, you accuse me of all those sins, making it much harder for me to focus on the work I have to do.

(Sadly, this paragraph was left unsaid) When you have the impulse to share, do you stop, and ask yourself if you are doing it to help your client work on transference or if the impulse comes from the needs of your ego? The one real note I can give you is that you are over sharing. This may be technique, but there are several instances when you talked about your feelings in session that have been detrimental to my therapeutic experience or perception of you.[v] This I really should have told him, but didn’t.

---

[i] Not that I said this to him, really, or at least so bluntly. I mean, it was an exercise in railing against- and I would not have realized this without his help- the standard practice with spectrum disorders. I explained to him the difference from other mental disorders, (I want to manage/eliminate my bipolar cycles, but I am asbergian, in that no aspect of my life experience can be separated from it. I think he got it- he thought so, and thought that he was “the best you’re goanna do.” Which may well be true. But he said the words to me, “thank you for coming in today, this has been very helpful, and it is helpful for me trying to understand other adults on the spectrum who I think are not able to articulate themselves as well as you.” And I do want to be an advocate). But I did read a lot of this to him, verbatim, so take what joy in that you will. I do.

[ii] I am not trying to call therapists chintzy, here- they have invested in you as much, (possibly more) emotionally than you have invested in them, and the idea that someone else could help you better or that there is a flaw in their methodology is not so much threatening to them as an attack on their fundamental self-conception as a healer.

[iii] This is the first time he challenged (gaslighted- denying the experiential reality of someone to exert control over them) me, pointing out that we had written a script for Bergman. I pointed out that it hadn’t worked and then we’d let it go, instead of finding a solution.

[iv] His first non-challenging response is that he had always seen me as having Asperger’s and would be willing to diagnosis it. I am skeptical of this, because we had talked about diagnosis and its importance to me before in session, and he seemed to be hanging it above my head.

[v] When I explained how happy I was to learn that the Prisoners Dilemma is finally being challenged, I had to explain it to him- and he went on to talk twice in that session about how good he felt for remembering the name of the thing in the first place and understanding my explanation. He also said something to the effect that most therapists would just be intimidated by my intelligence, so he understood if I’d had problems finding one in the past. I don’t even know what this is trying to do. 

Berkeleyan Goes to Washington: Listen to an Autistic Person for Autism Awareness ...

Listen to an Autistic Person for Autism Awareness ...: It’s Autism Awareness Month, and you may have noticed inexplicable blue lights popping up on the skyline, your Facebook feed, maybe even th.... (This is a cross-post from where I post things written more formally).

The Caffeinated Autistic is awesome, you should follow her, and here's one reason why: an incredibly nuanced an experiential look at why it can be so hard for autists to say no. I recommend practicing in the mirror, and practicing the all important mental pause before ever responding to a request. If you've got strategies you prefer, then let me know: I'm still working on this one.
(Also, how do I get a proper post of this on here, even though the original post is on wordpress?)


What They Didn't Tell Me

I do not know how to post things yet:

So let me say that the post I reposted below is awesome not just in its general blog, which is very awesome, but also its particulars. As an autist who worked at a Peets' Coffee & Tea for eight years, (Starbucks stole it from us), I've done a lot of thinking about the nature of the work, its relation to economic exploitation, and the skills it helped me learn. Been meaning to write something about it, hope I can do it half as well as below. So now you know what that's about.

We Are Like Your Child: Autismbucks-Guest Post from Grimalkin

We Are Like Your Child: Autismbucks-Guest Post from Grimalkin: Grimalkin is a mentally ill genderqueer person who lives somewhere in Texas. Alternately Dallas. He eats bipolar II or depressio...