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.