Why therapy won't work

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I do make eye contact with people though (even though I don't like it), and it's never helped my problems with people.

I have struggled with therapy numerous times in the past...usually with therapists who insist that if I just relax socialising will come to me naturally.

Firstly my way of thinking is often vastly different to those around me. People may say that I live in a world of my own but to me they live in the freaking twilight zone! It is a rather strange dimension dominated by all sorts of bizarre logic and fake/false social rituals. I cannot change this as my tendency to think differently seems to be part of my hard wiring and I have problems agreeing with lines of thought that appear illogical to me, especially as they get even more illogical with further research and reflection upon the matter!

For example when I was growing up I had sensitivities and could not wear wool or certain materials made from wool that were itchy and scratchy against my skin. On insisting that my parent take me shopping for my own clothing so that they did not keep buying items that were quite frankly torture to wear, I was seen as being difficult and fussy and was told not to be so silly. Either that or I was told that the clothes could not be that uncomfortable to wear and that I was just overreacting.

Ummmm I'd like to refer to basic biology at this point and point that we are biologically unique or different even if we have similarities. Basically we all have our own unique genome and the sensitivity of a persons nervous system can vary. What extremely painful or uncomfortable to one is not to another. Whilst extreme ends of the scale (such as not being able to feel any pain) are considered to be a disorder I do also feel that there is a lot of natural variation between members of a species in many different ways. Therefore there is no reason as to why such materials could not be genuinely that uncomfortable for me to wear and I was not overreacting at all!! !! ! Neither was I being difficult.

Oh dear!

Of course if I point out that they may be incorrect in their assumptions I am just being an arrogant know it all so I apparently I am supposed to sit there and suffer in silence am I? In this instance their lack of understanding is causing the problem, not my insistence that I would prefer to wear something else please.

How about I dress them in wire wool all day every day and when they complain about it making their skin sore just reply with "oh don't be so difficult and silly, you are just overreacting" and then make them carry on wearing it. It would be akin to torturing them via my own ignorance, whether it was intended or not. And people say I can lack empathy...Excuse me?

Secondly I am often accused of having intentions I did not have. People will often attach meaning to my words that are just not there when I speak them. How exactly am I responsible for other peoples paranoia? This is not a factor I have any control over and it does not matter how many times I try to reword it or explain people will still insist I meant what they assumed I meant even when i did not. Again what exactly am I supposed to do about this?

How would they feel if I twisted everything they said and then refused to listen to reason when they tried to explain that they did not mean it the way I have interpreted it? This would be unreasonable and rude of me but if they do, oh that is ok I am still the one in the wrong not them. They are always the completely innocent party and everything is always my fault. They played no role in the misunderstanding at all....

What's more is they would rather continue on believing their own rubbish than even stop to consider the actual truth. At least I am willing to listen if I have misunderstood someone, most of the time anyway, unless the evidence clearly suggests something different and I don't feel the person is being honest with me or is trying to play/manipulate me. However the latter only seems to occur with bullies who seem to want to intentionally hurt another by twisting whatever they can even when the real meaning is incredibly clear, most individuals just seem to suffer from an extreme case of ignorance instead. It can still be frustrating for me though.

Then of course there are the malicious people (ie the bullies mentioned above) who just don't like you and want to stir up trouble. There is no way on earth you can reason with them so what the hell am I supposed to do about that too?

and so on...there are many more reasons but in order to explain I'd have to write an entire book...

In regards to dragging up old memories, I really don't mind. Yes I can remember said events and I can remember how I felt at the time, however how I feel now and how I felt then can be quite different. I also don't relive the feelings I had back them...I just remember them so I don't have a problem talking about events that were distressing to me in the past but which emotionally I have since moved on from. I explore them only as a means to explaining who I was then, why I was the way I was then and whether or not they have affected my perceptions and belief systems of the hear and now. The event itself is long gone and can no longer hurt me...However what is happening right now can! This is what I am concerned with.

The dirty little secret about psychiatry/ clinical psychology is that there is a considerable amount of patient heterogeneity, even within diagnostic categories. Finding the right combination of therapy and medication for a particular patient can be very difficult. In addition, there is a subgroup of people for whom medications and/or psychotherapy techniques do not work. (I do not know to what extent this is related to autism spectrum disorders.)

There is also a considerable amount of therapist heterogeneity. That is to say, there are different schools of thought as to the causes and treatment of psychological disorders ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychother ... approaches ), and therapists differ in their therapeutic abilities.

Anyway, the following old articles may be of some interest.

"When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next "
By Richard A. Friedman, M.D
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/health/21mind.html

"The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?"
by Marcia Angell (23 June, 2011)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... lness-why/
"The Illusions of Psychiatry"
by Marcia Angell (14 July, 2011)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... sychiatry/

I can look at such books but I tend to have issues with the method of positive thinking in certain ways.

Firstly I prefer realistic thinking even if that includes something that most people consider to be negative. This is because positive thinking is no more accurate or reliable than negative thinking. I like to work with facts and truth not some fluff that is being fed to me or that I am forced to think just to feel the warm fuzzies and which may ultimately lead me up some garden path that ends up being nothing more than a nettle patch with a few sharp stones thrown in once I get there.

Realistic thinking is far more useful as it helps you to find practical solutions instead of feeding you feel good cliches!

Granted, like anyone else I can be prone to over generalisations, especially in the midst of being upset about something but I am aware that I can do this and tend to question how realistic my thoughts are at such times. It still won't stop me from feeling frustrated though or feeling as though no one understands when statistically speaking there is probably someone somewhere who will. For example I would like to meet an understanding life companion...I have not found them yet though. Just believing that there may be someone out there does not solve my problem or ease my frustration as there is no guarantee in life that I will ever meet them. What I need to do is find a way to meet that someone or learn to accept my frustration.

Therapists do not want you to accept your situation, they want to fill your head with nonsense like false optimism by telling you such things as you will meet that person you just have to believe it and be positive. Well I tried that and all I ended up doing was deluding myself...I am still single and still have not found them. So much for the power of positive thought....in some ways it really does not work.

Yes in others it can...ie if you believe you can't do something you will probably end up taking a course of action that means you won't be able to do it. Positive belief only works in situations you have sole control over, it does not work when other people are involved or in situations where you have no control.

No therapist has a crystal ball and cannot be sure that I will meet a compatible life companion. How can they possibly know this? Instead I would rather prepare for the possibility that I will not but leave the possibility that I will open without becoming convinced that my optimism is fact and that it will definitely happen in the future. To me this is more realistic than someone turning around and saying "you will meet someone, just think positively". Ummmmm. Yes, if you want to be pedantic about it, I might meet someone but that does not mean the person I meet will be compatible with me or that they will be the life companion I seek.

Anything so you feel the warm fuzzies whether it is accurate or realistic or not. Not only is socialising false but now we have to lie to ourselves with positive thinking as well. Gee is there any honesty left in the world.

Also I do not believe in philosophies that include things like worthlessness...to me all life has value and worth be it animal or human. What is a worthwhile skill in one context might be useless in another, this does not mean the person is worthless or useless, it merely means that their particular skill set is not suited to that particular task or situation. In another situation their skill set might be invaluable. So I have to go therapy to listen to all this rubbish about worthy and unworthy and all that kind of stuff. Quite frankly it does my head in.

Neither do I believe that being an introvert or not being a social butterfly makes a person defective, it just makes them an individual with their own unique skill set...it is just that socialising is not one of them. However they may have many other wonderful skills that to my mind balances things out.

This however, does not always stop me from wanting to tear my hair out when it comes to the general lack of understanding of the human race. It's sheer arrogance when it comes to labeling anything that is different, outside of the norm or which just does not live up to its exacting standards as being defective, worthless, worthy only of being treated like s**t, or deserving of stigma and rejection as a result. Not to mention its over reliance on materialism, its desire for power to the point of being corrupt, its greed and various other things.

Society is too arrogant and ridiculously egocentric, even therapists are obsessed with padding out the human ego at the expense of the human soul. Instead of persecuting someone for being a witch and hanging them we now just stigmatise them with one of the psychiatric professions self made disorders instead because oh dear, they don't fit the mold that society says they should fit into.

Yes they have functioning problems but how many of those problems are due to the way society is set up? Society is not nature, it is man made.

As a child I was tested as having advance moral development (among other areas of advanced development) but was also said to be emotionally immature, over sensitive and idealistic. Maybe I still am I don't know I have not been tested recently, but from my perspective world is going slowly insane and its getting madder. It may be my idealistic nature and over sensitivity that makes me think this (either that or I have gone quite made myself and don't realise it), however:

Yes there are probably very real disorders and mental illnesses but the psych profession has gone over the top when it comes to diagnosis and handing out medications.

The world is more concerned with its own god damned ego than another persons welfare.

Materialism and power has become more important than the human soul

People are enslaved by society and if they don't conform are basically hung, drawn and quartered but in a less gory and more modern way (see above).

The economy, which is controlled by the greedy, is fed by the slavery of the rest of the population whilst they are forced and bullied into submission. Don't have the material things that keep the greedy people rich? you must be a loser right who is worthless? Don't have two cars, three houses and other crap you don't really need...oh you are just a loser who must be defective. Don't have 3 gazillion friends kissing your arse? Oh dear then you must be sad and not worth loving.

This psychological and emotional blackmail is pulled on people every day of their lives by society and they believe it. They believe it when society tells them they are no good because they do not live up to the expectations it has...expectations that keep the poor poor, the rich rich and the sick sick (that is if they are even sick in the first place).

And If I want a more natural way of life pursuing my passions, without all the fancy stuff I don't really need (a few useful mod cons are fine), and which I would love to share with a life companion, because I don't like the way society is going, well I must be a mentally ill loser too who needs instant therapy not to mention weak for valuing things like love and wanting to find someone special to be with!

I don't think so.

I want to love the human race I do, but some days it is really hard!

In my experience, the effect of eye-contact depends entirely on the situation and on the participants. In my case, it helps sometimes because people who only know me a little think I am either shy/afraid of them (or intellectually disabled when I happen to not speak fluently in that situation) though I am not. Sometimes however, people get confused about some of my non-verbal cues that they seem to misread for something like anxiety, uncertainty or confusion while at the same time, I try to have more eye-contact with them than they can or want to have with me which might be read as a signal for dominance, certainty and arrogance.

You had friends go with you on dates to observe you, or did you videotape it (creepy! lol)?

In any case, you must have been mild to begin with to have friends who were that close. Not everyone likely has that luxury. I have fixed many social mistakes just on my own by observing people's reactions and facial expressions when I make a mistake (so like trial and error), but don't know how to develop relationships. My ASD is pretty mild considering that I can get women to go out with me and stuff (occasionally at least) and I don't normally have trouble with interviews, and I still have never had any close friends. So you must have been really really mild. Thus, giving advice like that to a board full of more typical aspies is likely to just cause them to be depressed. In the majority of cases, professional help probably is in order, but it's probably better to find someone who specializes in ASD.

It actually takes a certain level of social competence initially in order to be able to make friends good enough to be comfortable giving useful feedback. For those who need help with that initial step, saying to rely on close friends is pretty useless advice.

Indeed, I have no real life friends and live the life of a hermit!

I occasionally meet a man for dating but the relationships are short lived and I usually have to wait for them to pursue me as I cannot read when they are flirting with me. I have had one date in 3 years lol.

I mostly find people to chat to online but they come and go. Either I don't know what to say to them or I talk too much and they flee apparently. Either that or they get fed up with my bobbing on and offline, getting distracted during conversations and disappearing or not being about to chat for weeks on end because I got into one of my hobbies. Also sometimes I can get migraines which also means I can be hard to get hold of at times.

In the real world I am also notorious for not answering my telephone so people give up calling after a while. I do keep forgetting to plug it in but even when it rings and I do have it connected, if I am in the middle of doing my hobbies, I won't answer it.

Unfortunately when I do feel social and chatty there is rarely anyone around to chat to, so I usually have to post to forum boards instead.

Ergo I have no close friends to ask and I'd like to see a therapist work with that one (especially as therapists often use the 'but you have some friends' angle to prove that you can indeed make friends if you want to)! I have not had a real life friend as such in 20 years and the last time I made one of those it was accidental (they befriended me). Yes I have sporadically had short lived romantic relationships but that is about it.

It is not through lack of trying, I try, I just um, don't succeed very often for various reasons (not all of which are listed here). *ahem*

The worth it is to you is whatever you want it to be.

I had sex for the first time and it went like this........

Sperg:Sooo.
Her:Yea there is the couch I'm going to bed.
Sperg:Oh ok yea, see you when you wake up.
..........................
Her:Well goddamn am I going to lay naked on this bed all goddamn night, get in here.

You do sound depressed bumble. I know many of us have reason to be cynical and jaded and to avoid socialising, but there seems to be more with you. The fact that you unplug your phone and seem to have given up.

If you don't like medication, have you tried something like St John's Wort or 5HTP?

Don't let everything break you. I totally get how you feel, just try to hold onto that inner survival spark. No-one can say what is round the corner for you, but you can see what there is out there that might change the type of people you meet. Are there any Aspie/HFA groups that you can join?

If you are round like-minded people there is far more chance that you will find someone that is compatible.

I found CBT therapy useful as it helps train your brain to not focus on negative thoughts as it will affect your mood and make you feel bad

I think that this ability to switch off from negative thought patterns can often only be achieved by changing your brain chemistry with anti-depressants etc ie it's not possible from willpower alone for many people

So in this way therapy and medication together work best

I also liked psychotherapy as it was an opportunity to just talk about my problems and have someone's full attention, which I liked.

The advice the therapist would give me often wasn't to my liking though as it seemed to indicate they didn't really understand my issues properly

Seeing therapy as a means of overcoming specifically Asperger-type difficulties isn't that realistic in my opinion, as 99% of therapists won't know what Aspergers is, let alone how it manifests itself

When I spoke to the psychotherapist I saw a few years ago (at a cost of £70 for each half hour session! which my parents were paying for luckily!), I said I didn't like going out among people as they often acted in a judegmental, rejecting, unpleasant manner towards me so I preferred to avoid them. He said well you'll have to make more effort or you'll end up as a recluse. I didn't see this as a very good answer at all as there was no recognition of the role other people were playing in the problem - the onus was being put totally on me to just deal with it, which, as I have Aspergers was by default even harder than for the average person.

So most therapists have a one-size-fits-all method of advising people. When I said people stared at me he said 'Well people have to look somewhere and if you are in the space in line with their eyesight they may well look at you' and when I told him about people being insulting about me in passing he said 'Well it's nice to be noticed' or something like that. So I didn't think his advice was that good really. It seemed to be along the lines of 'We all have our cross to bear but most of us don't overreact to it in the way you do' lol

He told me about one of the clients he saw who had a big scar on his face and said 'How do you think people react towards him?' I said 'They might stare' and he said 'They stare and people challenge him to fights', as if this was a hundred times worse that what I experienced, which I would dispute unless I had a chance to monitor exactly how often these things were happening to him. I bet he had more friends than I've ever had and more respect off the average person than me!

I dislike the way a lot of these therapists seem to make an unfavourable judgement of me and seem to not take my issues seriously.

Another time I said to the psycho-dynamic therapist I saw for about a year that this person in the waiting room had stared at me in a very unpleasant manner, as if I was an alien from another planet and she said 'There are some very ill people in the waiting room', as if that excused it! I then started to think 'Exactly HOW ill are they then? Dangerously ill?' as the one who stared had headphones on with his music on so loud that I could hear it and it was a nice, calm peace-loving song that totally contradicted the threatening vibe he was giving me! I felt like saying 'How dare you listen to a good song like that! you are sullying the very nature of that song with your awful attitude!'

When it gets to the stage where even the other people in the mental health service waiting room are judging me I tend to get really annoyed!

I feel some progress has been made over the years as before I'd have allowed people like this to make me feel lesser and bad about myself whereas these days I have more of an attitude of 'You can stop right f-king there with that attitude towards me - it's not going to work!' So while I can't stop the judgemental attitudes I can make it clear in no uncertain terms that I'm not just going to roll over and tolerate it.

If you go into therapy with a "there is NOTHING I can do for myself, there is no sense in trying" kind of attitude, of course you will not get any help from it. From my personal experience, that attitude is always self-destructive. Take my sister, for example. Won't listen to anyone's advice, won't put in the slightest effort to improve herself, refused to listen to anything therapists had to say, and now she's failing life miserably.

Of course, if you have an incompetent therapist, who spouts dumb analytical bullcrap that you yourself know isn't true, then you also will get no help from them.

I used to be in this mode too I called "the blame game" and after hitting my head against the ceiling of normal one time too many I had a revelation.

It didn't matter whose fault it was, I could sit there blaming normals for being like they are all goddamn day and it wouldn't change a thing. I might as well have blamed the waves in the ocean for washing away my sand castle. Or blame the scorpion for stinging the frog.

Once I realized the only one I could change was ME, and if I ever wanted more from life than being institutionalized or if I was lucky on SSI I would have to learn to how to cope with normals(or manipulate them) I then finally had the motivation to stop/watch/learn about social interaction.

A study by Bruce Wampold of the Uni of Wisconsin showed that psychotherapy does work. However, it only works if both the therapist and the subject believe it is going to work. Why this is the case is largely unclear.

I know psychotherapy has worked wonders for me.

I understand what you mean but in my opinion some people are always going to have more success than others in terms of adapting themselves. I categorically can't and won't do it. I can get by but as far as wanting to do the social group interaction thing I have made sufficient attempts at it to know it's not going to work.

I don't want to socially interact with most people. I've spent enough time around other people to realise I don't want to be like them. I am fully aware that I am the person responsible for what happens in my life and I choose my own way of dealing with it.
Different strategies work for different people.

I cope with 'normals' on my own terms and to the extent that my mental health allows me to at the time.

Obviously the recipient has to be receptive, but I do think there are so many rubbish therapists out there. This whole psychological approach of the same set of reasons being responsible for the same set of reactions or behaviours in every person is flawed. They don't seem to see you as a unique individual, their brains are ticking over trying to work out which set cause is responsible, and even if they do offer insights they are frequently incorrect ones.

I used to know this girl, she really had some weird behaviour, she was an aspiring thespian, but was rubbish and embarrassingly theatrical when out. She would break into song in the middle of pubs with arms open wide and people would be askance. OK people should be able to be themselves, but there are some behaviours that are going to always be socially odd and when the person is not mentally ill, they ought to reserve some things. As her friends, myself and another person tried to explain to her that she needed to tone her behaviour down (there is a time and a place). Her therapist told her that we were wrong, she should just be herself and we were the ones with the problem...in fact everyone else were the ones with the problem. This made her behave even more outlandishly in public, and people thought she was mentally ill/unstable. This therefore did her no favours. It also alienated her friends from her. So her therapist decided that her only option was to boost her ego, not to address why she felt the need to behave in socially odd ways. She herself, felt that her voice was great and people would admire her, and that members of the public would be her audience, she had a totally skewed view of reality. Surely the therapist should have been addressing this and not encouraging her to alienate herself from others. She had a food addiction because she was unhappy and would binge/gorge. So clearly she felt things weren't right in her life and she couldn't meet anyone. People were laughing at her. But her therapist just bolstered her up and got her to ignore what perceptions her behaviour was making people have of her. In the end her therapist made her in a worse state. The last time I saw her she was as big as a whale (so her health was affected too) and she was still living in denial. Sad.