Therapists thinking strangely

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Is it me who thinks strangely or is it therapists. Whenever I try to talk about my social anxiety they keep on about rejection and acceptance. My brain is not sure it is ultimately about that. I feel it is more to do with finding people you share a mutual connection and compatibility with...acceptance usually goes hand in hand with that.

Her exact words were "Well no one likes to be rejected". This was an assumption on her part as I never said anything about rejection at all at that stage. Personally there are times I do want to be rejected (if I must think of it in those terms) as I either do not feel there is enough compatibility with the person who is trying to befriend me and/or I don't think I could cope with being friends with the entire population of the planet so I don't want *everyone* to accept me! It would exhaust me and I am exhausted enough lately. Therefore at times...rejection can be most desirable!

That is just one example of how therapists think strangely (or I do). Also I do not like them assuming that my brain works the same as other peoples...I usually find that if anyone has the odd opinion in a room full of strangers it is me. Ie I don't seem to think like other people and that is why I can have trouble socialising...I just cannot identify with them and so therefore can struggle to connect with them.

Really their thinking is most strange and for this reason I find that therapy always fails me. Basically its next to useless for me. Anyone else have the same issue?

I find that I think differently from just about everyone else too. It's sometimes excruciatingly hard for me to get my point across.

Therapists are trained to look for certain things in people. It takes a special person to be a therapist who "thinks outside the box."

Have you found a therapist that specializes in ASD and/or aspergers?
I have been through several therapists to treat my generalized anxiety disorder (this was all before I found out about aspergers). Most of the time a therapist would say something to me and I would feel like she was totally missing the point of what I was trying to say OR I had no clue as to what she was trying to say. I've only had one therapist that I think helped at all and basically she just let me talk and then pointed out what other people might be thinking. Now I know why that therapy was most helpful. At any rate I am going to try to talk to a child therapist who specializes in ASD and Aspergers who I am hoping will help me understand people better. . .

Is this therapist's specialization in anxiety? Or does she specialize in AS/autism? I used to see a counselor for generalized anxiety and found I had a similar problem, she didn't understand the underlying cause of my anxiety and made assumptions about my thought processes. If she has not been trained to work with people with AS she is probably assuming that your social anxiety is coming from the same pattern of thinking that SA comes from in neurotypical people (fear of what people are thinking about you and fear of social rejection) because that is what she was trained for and what she is familiar with. If that's the case I'd look for a therapist who specializes in AS, it made a big difference for me.

I was kind of the same, though my experience was more of seeking the purpose. I knew what was wrong with me, I knew how to fix it. I only went to therapy because I was told to, and thought it might help me figure things out. Said I was depressed and had suffered a traumatizing childhood/psychological abuse - which I found out actually can have the same effects on a person as Aspergers. If it was not for everything else Aspie related, it would have been convincing.

I had a traumatising childhood as I come from an abusive home (physical and emotional abuse not sexual) and was bullied badly at school. So I got it everywhere I went basically and there was no safe place to run growing up. However I also have problems fitting in due to other reasons...one of them being my unusual way of thinking. I was tested by a child psychologist at 13 years old back in the 80s and all they concluded was that my intellectual and moral development were very advanced for my age (explains my A grade average academically and my tendency to not need to revise for exams etc to get those grades and my differences in thinking when it comes to morals) but that I was emotionally immature, over sensitive and too idealistic (is it possible to be too idealistic? I am still an idealist now lol).

Therefore I do wonder if those differences are what makes it so difficult for me to fit in. I may have been the same age as my peers growing up etc but I was not at the same stage of development and that made me feel weird and different.

I do wonder if my traumatic past also contributed to my social difficulties, but my therapists don't really discuss my past much so it gets ignored.

Actually my idealism can cause me issues in some ways as I can often have difficulty accepting the fact that people can be so uncaring and hurtful towards each other. I really don't understand why there is a need to be nasty to others, especially if that person has done nothing wrong or nothing to hurt you (I can understand how someone might be angry with someone who has hurt them but still don't agree with revenge etc).

I have experienced bullying both at school and in my adult life and to this day I still fail to understand what bullies get from inflicting pain on another living being.

The same goes for cruelty to animals, they have feelings too.

It hurts me to see another human being or animal being hurt, it's very emotionally painful for me so I tend to avoid society so I am not exposed to it quite so much.

Crime, discrimination, prejudice...all cause unnecessary pain...it's so very sad to see when people have the potential to be so much kinder and more understanding and tolerant of each other

Let me tell a small story. Years ago, I was volonteering in a charity organization. We had a couple of lectures about psychology. I remember one question the lecturer did 'What is the opposite of love?'. Everybody said 'Hate' and he she answered 'No, hate is another emotion. But the real opposite of love is indiference'.

For most of NTs out there, 'rejection' and 'indiference' are synonyms. However, for me they're completelly different: 'rejection' means that you specifically don't like one person and you don't want to have any relation with him/her. 'Indifference', on the contrary, means that you don't care, but without any personal dislike involved. Perhaps you don't have anything in common, or you need some space in that moment, or you have a full social agenda and no more spare time, or whatever. It's possible that the other person is a wonderful human being, but you can't befriend every person in the world! In my case, rejection hurts, but indifference doesn't: I don't take it personal. From my point of view, this is the logical way of thinking.

It took me years to understand that 'normal' people feel hurt either with 'rejection' and 'indifference'. Indeed, for them this is kind of similar, the same thing. Right now I 'socialize' a bit even when I'm not interested to avoid people to feel hurt and become conflictive (I have bad experiences with that). I think your psychologist doesn't understand very well the difference and mix 'rejection' and 'indifference'.



I feel very identified with it. I have said more than once, talking with friends, that the problem of having several issues (traumatising childhood and unusual way of thinking, by the way) is not that they are (obviously) more than one, but that they interact making it much more difficult to understand and handle.

Modern psychology is, right now, only a collection of books with recipes. I you had difficult parents and childhood, this is the recipe to solve it. If you have Asperger, here is the recipe. But if you have several of them, there's no recipe. It goes out of the book, and then the psychologist becomes lost. The problem, in my opinion, is that psychologists have usually a lot of proffesional self-esteem issues (Psychiatrists use to say that psychologists are people who wanted to be psychiatrist but were not clever enough to get a medical degree), and find extremelly difficult to say 'Sorry, I don't have an answer'. So, they focus in only one problem, for what they have a recipe, and forget absolutelly about the other one. Some psychologists focus in childhood (it's all about getting over the childhood issues), other ones focus in Asperger (yours, for example).

I pretty much have the exact opposite issue: therapists and other "We will help you, really!"-types are so eager to blame every issue I have on my past that they are unable, sometimes even unwilling to consider something else could be going on too. I've spent plenty of time dissecting the bad and ugly that was my past. What I'm currently dealing with is "how can I live my life without spending more energy than I have on 'the act' that is NT behavour". Obviously more "Oooooh you must be so sad over your crappy childhood!" is not going to do the trick in that area.



Indeed. Oh and if their method does not magically fix you then the problem must be your attitude, obviously

Given that this is how the system works and that it's rather rare to find someone able to 'transcend the book', I'm now hoping to get some practical tips taking the AS-route for a change. I know the factors an patterns related to 'circumstantial crap', now just give me the info on what might work for the AS part, I'll mix, match and come up with something that works for me. Good thing I have those mad thinking-outside-the-box skilz etc... ahem

It helps a lot. I have been dealing with the the standard psychological advices (basically it's always the same) and they were useless. Since I know I have AS I have discovered more about myself than I did in years. But thinking out of the book is needed! The problem with psychologists is that they don't have a serious theory to work with, just recipes. And they really don't understand how AS feels. So they're trying to solve a puzzle inside a black box that they can't see. But, of course, no way to accept that, because they're the proffesionals and they're supposed to know.

A friend of mine that studied psychology told me once, part serious part kidding: 'all the people I know in the faculty are interested in psychology because they actually need psychological help, me included, I don't know up to what point we are the most suitable people to give any kind of advice!'

Yup. The main thing I'm looking for is "what strategies do you guys find to be successful for others in vaguely similar (at least AS wise) situations". Surely their experience has brought some points to their attention that I'm not yet aware of, as I'm relatively new to this. I'm used to doing things 'as I ought to' (by NT standards), but the amount of energy it costs me makes that unsustainable.
Also they might know a bit more about support that is available here. I would like to know what I can optimize and how to go about it, basically.



Lol, indeed. I picked up a coursebook on psychology and while it's entertaining it amazes me how little 'new' (to me) stuff is in it. The main things I didn't already know come down to 'oh there was a dude with this name that wrote this particular concept down, good for him'. I suppose that's a side effect of 'learning to deal with things on your own' (plus perhaps a dose of hyper focus )

Yeap. I think that psychology is a 'special interest' for most of the people here



I'm relatively new on it too (months), but I'm afraid there's no so much clear recipes here. Otherwise they already would be in psychology books. Anyway, I think that the first thing is 'Which are the problems that you can't solve with the 'standard' psychology?'

Bad childhood experiences do not retroactively prevent ASD; ASD does not inoculate one against childhood trauma.

Recall what happens when you break the word "therapist" into two words.

All that is to say I agree with some points being made here.

Bumble, you sound a lot like me in these posts.

How do we deal with this? One thing at a time. I've posted my "save it for later processing" approach to taking compliments, hugs, and whatever else. That's one of my adaptations. I'm happy to post on these things, but there are too many questions and too many different answers that work for different people to put them all out at once. Perhaps someone will write a book one day, out of all the best Wrong Planet posted solutions to things. In the meantime, you'll have to get them piecemeal, I'm afraid. But I create my own recipes all the time, both for actual cooking and for life. That's just my way of doing things. Therapy cannot always help as much as one might like with that. At best, if you have someone familiar with all your concerns (good luck on that one), you may have someone you can bounce your ideas off of and who will listen without judgment and respond in a way that conveys that you've really been heard (without that stilted, stupid sounding paraphrasing, one hopes!) Then you might even get, at some point, some kind of feedback you can actually use. But you'll still have to put the ingredients of the recipe together yourself, stir, and let simmer. The result will be a lumpy concoction of answers, but it may still satisfy you in the end, as best any stew can.

It really is remarkable how some therapists are so clueless. They just assume that their clients lie to them and don't do enough listening.

"Love" and "Hate" really are opposites since they are both strong feelings of affection: one positive and one negative. Of course everyone understands this except the lecturer in psychology. If one has no feelings of affection (good or bad) than one is indifferent.
I really don't understand why a lot of psychologists are clueless about this stuff. "Rejection" and "indifference" are in no way synonyms. I could go on but why are psychologists so confused?

I'm no longer sure these days of why it even needs to be debated what the opposite of love is. I used to care, but now I only care if there's love or not. Even the best poets in the history of the world have only been able to talk about love, not definitively define it. So, why argue about what its opposite is?

Distinguishing one thing from another, however, as with rejection and indifference, makes sense for the sake of clarity.

As for therapists not believing their clients, I think they must be trained this way, in case their clients lie or delude themselves. It's their default assumption, and that lumps everyone together, just because some people can't be honest with themselves or others. It's different if you're simply trying to discover the truth about yourself and trying to clarify something your therapist doesn't understand.