I’ve been in and out of therapy a lot.
In 2010 during college, I went to the guidance office because I’d started to hit myself in the face more out of some unknown compulsion. This time it left a yellow bruise.
The counsellor handed me a tissue, which I hated, as I started to cry. Consolation makes me extremely uncomfortable. I find it empty. Any display, in fact, of compassion or empathy in therapeutic settings make me wince. I am paying for objectivity. Just be direct. Displays of feeling don’t mean to me what they may to another person. I feel heard when practical advice is provided, when tangible steps are provided to help me find a way out. After being encouraged to start a diary, my face hitting went unsolved.
In 2016, I ended the closest thing to a relationship I was capable of having. Mostly because I, again, saw I was being used. It was not reciprocal-a term my first therapist ever, taught me. There had been enough boyfriends to see a pattern: I didn’t get relationships. People told me I hadn’t found the right one but it seemed I was the common denominator here. Logically, it stood to reason, I am part of the problem.
It was here I started my 7 year on and off relationship with my past therapist. They did help me but it was contained to a specific time, with little pockets of problems ending up being symptoms rather than a core. It was a band-aid solution in which both clinician and client remained in the dark to real progress. Just a life on loop.
This isn’t to say they weren’t insightful about me, but it was limited. For a number of years they tried to help me understand my “Operating System”, so that I could mindfully curb these anxieties, compulsions, terrorizing fits of despair with each relationship fallout, romantic or platonic. The harder I tried, the further from peace I felt. There were no breakthroughs, just more questions and not in an exploratory way. More like a downward spiral. I wasn’t coming together, I was falling apart.
The best thing my past therapist ever said to me was “Autism is not my expertise”. It signalled to me that my search in getting to the bottom of my life was expanding. I had hope, for the first time ever, that maybe healing was possible if I sought help elsewhere.
Here are 5 examples of how I presented in Therapy, as an undiagnosed autistic person:
Lack of Eye Contact
Around 2019 I had been talking about another friendship on its last legs. During a pause, my past therapist interjected:
What was there to say? I just remember the jolt of that observation. Should…should I change it? It that what I’m supposed to be doing? I mean, therapy is particularly intense so it makes me uncomfortable to look at someone, especially so directly. How does eye contact matter in regards to my speaking?
This triggered an internal scan to figure out the point of the message. Rolling it over and over again in my head, wondering if anyone else had noticed this. No one ever made this complaint before, because that’s what it felt like: a complaint. I was confused. Should I be making eye contact? Blech.
I spent the next few times ‘practicing’ making eye contact in therapy. Although they did not explicitly tell me to do this, the observation seemed so glaring. Session after session my guts churned as I made conscious efforts to not be myself, looking in their eyes even though it made me sick. After I realized I couldn’t both concentrate on my train of thought and consciously maneuver my eyes to behave, I thought Fuck it and stopped trying.
It’s only now I know this is a classic example of Masking and is really the only time I can recollect I ever did that. I have a lot of sympathy for Autistic people whose life was run on Masking. It seems like a horrible thing.
Observing Perseverance
I would talk about “loops” in my thinking, trying to get out of the broken record or rut, probably even in therapy itself. “Do you know what Perseverance is?” was the question posed when I asked how I can stop my gerbil wheel thinking.
This was late in the game. I had already introduced the hypothesis I was Autistic and had listened to this podcast so yeah, I was getting an idea of Perseverance. It was the first time my past therapist had postulated something about me. Their methodology was not pathologizing. While some people may have been thankful for that, it was truly the worst thing that never happened to me, blocking any chance of me finding a path forward. If I couldn’t name it, how the fuck was I going to address it. THIS IS WHY the context of Labels can actually be important. They can save peoples lives. It saved mine because engaging in abstract Mindfulness practice when I could not retain a job or brush my teeth was destined to fail. Which of course I absorbed as yet another thing I could not do, despite how hard I tried.
Stopping Speaking
The safest thing for me sometimes is to stop talking. If I am really overwhelmed and pushed to my limit, especially in human interaction, I can stop speaking. For me, it’s like I have so much rage that if I don’t keep it in, relationships will just snap like a twig or in private I will destroy objects or lash out physically in some way just to release that reaction.
This happened once when my past therapist kept pushing me. Doing some abstract mental gymnastics like it was going to do me a favour when I repeatedly told them I didn’t get it. They refused to listen or even understand that I didn’t understand what they were asking-insisting I was being cynical and stubborn. So I stopped engaging but also, like, if I get mad, I can’t speak. The words just *poof*. After a few minutes of silence they pointedly asked if I was just going to stay silent.
“I will sit here and watch the clock until time is up”, was the best I could respond. I left early, I think. I can’t remember. But this was not out of petulance. I really want to emphasize that. I can’t explain it, but words leave. That’s it. That’s what happens.
It was a terrible experience but I wasn’t sad. It was an amplified example of how this person I enlisted to help me, wanted me to do what they thought was right and refused to hear me when I said it wasn’t working. I think it’s a perfect example of the damage that can occur when you are working without the full story. It was old news to me though, people always saw me this way. Instead of trying to understand, they call me undesirable terms. However, I won’t leave out their redemption arc, apologizing to me the next time I saw them (months after) that they pushed so hard it drove me away.
In instances like that, I see the value of forgiveness.
Stimming
Mindfulness therapy meant observing me out of myself. My constant fist clenching, leg shaking, skin picking, lip biting, thumb sucking, hair pulling, face hitting, toe tapping, swaying, pacing, fooling with clothing, applying pressure, sucking on clothing—OBSERVE. For once you observe, ostensibly, you can “relax” i.e stop.
If you don’t know what Stimming is, it is an involuntary self-regulating process. Anyone can stim, just not in the way Autistics need to in response to many variables of joy or anxiety. I say need with the caveat that this “need” isn’t imposed by thought [repressing stimming is another deep topic] it comes from the body, an unconscious driving force because somethings going on we are reacting to. I won’t go into SIB (self injurious behaviour) or repressing stims on this post for now, but they require mention.
With all my non-SIB stimming, I was encouraged to stop “be mindful” in regular therapy. I never understood this premise of curbing it but I was lead to believe it was antagonistic to me rather than what it really was: regulating. It was proposed my fidgeting was a signal of my anxiety-which was a half right answer-but it doesn’t mean I should have shut it down. The irony that I was told to disengage from the very thing that helped me get me through is laughable in a very, bitter way.
I guess it was supposed to be me being so aware of myself that I could control my body and by extension the anxiety current that runs through it. Nice try. Deep breath and unclench your fist. Slowly but surely, you’re cured! I have run out of GAD at long last. How delightful.
Shoutout to my current therapist who, as I picked at their pillow threads methodically, commented “some stimming today, I see” I didn’t know I was doing it and it was the least of their concerns.
Clenching my left fist since ‘98. Once I learned what Stimming was (in 2022), I was shocked. Pure dis-belief. I had no idea the things I did all my life or how I hold my hands was a thing?
Events not Feelings
Recounting an event to my past therapist, I received an interesting response.
“Do you notice you talk about the events and not feelings?”
Like the eye contact, No, I do not notice. I thought therapy was about talking about things that happened? You mean to tell me people lead with describing feeling about the event? I cant do that, I don’t do that. I can tell you I feel worthless and angry in general but that’s about it. How I feel is not a simple question. Firstly, no one’s ever really asked me so I have no practice. But even if I did…I don’t…know? Couldn’t tell you. Maybe if you give me a list to pick from? Possibly a visual one with lots of expression, I can make an accurate assessment.
When I broke my nose in 2017, it was only until I was at the ENT and saw this chart that I realized my pain was level 10. The ER refused to X-Ray me because I described my pain as “really bad” with a Mild face. This has to do with Interoception which the medical community at large is just now getting in touch with. I learned that in the future I have to put on a performance in order to be believed—if I’m lucky enough.
It wasn’t until I was hooked up with Occupational Therapy that my clinician was asking me questions I could answer. Ones that were not centred on my feelings but my actions; how I metaphorically walk in the world, how much I struggle with that as I see counterparts just go on. This is not to say OT is devoid of feeling, quite the opposite. However, I am starting at the bottom of the mountain of executive function. No ladder, ropes, any of that shit to hoist me up to scale the peaks of smoother existence. I have to be taught how to hear and listen to my body more than the average person without Interoception issues. Not to mention how I basically process everything backwards, detail first. Of course I’m not going to volunteer my feelings if I don’t know what they are in the first place.
Autism was so present. I was so present. My current therapist, before my assessment, was baffled.
“What I don’t get is how this didn’t get picked up earlier-way earlier.”
Just hearing those words from them...it was like all those years of speaking through my art, my terrible experiences with people, “friends”, jobs…were cradled in this sentence. Still not through the diagnostic process, the clinician who knew Autism, knew.
I don’t know the word for it, but it was a feeling like I was on the precipice of being able to place this shit-fuck-garbage they called “life” into a new frame. One which finally made everything upright and on track to heal the most important relationship I have in my life: the one with myself.