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.
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