Mindfullness and ASD

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It did neither.

My first therapist told me to lie down on a couch and focus on whatever I was feeling... it was an epic fail. I had totally no idea how to realize what I was feeling. He could just as well had told me to levitate

Or there's "picture yourself floating along a river like a leaf in the wind".

LMAO.

If I could picture things, feel things, or imagine peaceful scenarios at will, I wouldn't be paying you.

Yep.....Freud knew he had to work hard with patients in order for them to achieve catharsis.

When a psychotherapist tells you to imagine floating in air or something, the doctor isn't working very hard.

I had to start from dreams and childhood memories, areas where my emotions weren't that heavily censored.
I think Freud dealt with many patients with deeply supressed emotions.

Yep.....At around the turn of the 20th century, Europeans (and many others) tended to keep their emotions in check in a rather extreme way. Certainly much more than what is occurring now.

Freud's orthodoxy is why he broke with Jung. Jung proposed a less "western-oriented" approach, and an approach which encouraged wide-ranging intellectual inquiry. If both were able to "stay together," who knows what progress psychology would have made.

I find Jung's psychological models much more relatable to my experience than Freud's - but I believe we're hijacking the thread

I guess we went off on a slight tangent....but we did keep to the subject at hand: the science and art of the Mind.

Seems like for many people there's a [perhaps mistakenly?] overlap between mindfulness and meditation.

(Sorry for the long post. Tips on how I make mindfulness work for me in the second half, with the numbered sections)

The version of mindfulness that I've found effective is really just focusing on and immersing myself in some sensory experience(s). To my mind, it's a form of distraction training which also cues the body to enter a calmer state. And the distraction part is key. It means that unlike with meditation, your mind is too occupied to allow your mind to wander. Or at least, it is if you're doing it the way I do....which ironically also makes it a mindlessness exercise.

The reason I'm adamant about THAT being proper mindfulness is because otherwise it's just meditation. I think that's rather important, the distinction between meditation and 'mindfulness' exercises.

But yeah, I would grade mindfulness as more of a mild therapy for less severe events. There are a ton of different mental coping/self-management techniques, but like most things, they all have their limits.

Personally I think it's a grave disservice for mental health therapy to be so casually and informally taught/administered. Failing to do so just ends up causing more distress and additional mental barriers in the way of seeking and receiving help.

That being said, I can understand the struggle. Humanity's grasp of the mental landscape is barely, if not still, fledgling. Not to mention our poor management of information (especially misinformation). I can empathize with the authority's political difficulty of handling it, whereby in their limited choices available they choose to help as many as possible and just accept the losses. Just another sad fact of reality, though, so best just note it and move on.

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As for helpful advice, I'd say that to make the most of mindfulness exercises, here's some tips based on my personal perspective and experience:

1) Try to employ your sensory sensitivity and fixation traits to fill your focus with a non-negative sensory experience. The more depth or complexity your target, the better.

For me, something like polished wood grain is great because the level of detail only increases the more you focus on it, and depending on how it's made it can provide a visual, tactile, olfactory and even taste experience, and even provides a focus for harmless thoughts like how it was manufactured and how trees work. A live plant can also be good, or plants blowing in the wind or other big weather effects. Heck, I've even found looking at interesting looking dirt (earth) effective at times (yes lol, I've found some dirt to be more interesting then others). Some activities can be good, too, like writing with a pencil or fountain pen. Experiment. Everyone has a different makeup to work with. As many of you have mentioned, slowly eating raisins can be just a stupid as it sounds lol.

2) Keep in mind that it isn't a cure-all. The less distressed I am, the more effective it seems to be, and visa versa. During moments of great distress, at best it's a soothing aid, best employed when I don't have a better solution at hand and only helps to 'take the edge off' and focus my thoughts a little, pretty much just functioning as a basic stim.

It's not completely useless, though. Similarly to how an overwhelming sensory environment can make it difficult to focus on anything else, I've found that having a lot of non-negative sensory stimulation can help pull my mind away from harmful thoughts. For example, I would stand right up against a glass window or even outside during the snowy winter and let my senses pull my at mind. A bonus with that particular method is that the extreme cold would also trigger some self-preservation instincts that tends to override everything else. (Obviously, be careful with such methods, don't get yourself sick. Best if you only allow your extremities to experience the extreme cold so that your core temp remains safe)

3) Don't use foci that may relate to bad thoughts or memories, and in the same vein, don't allow your effective mindfulness foci to form attachments to bad thoughts or memories. If they do, just keep a mental distance from that particular focus for awhile. Eventually memory extinctioning (the process of a memory weakening, especially in its connections to other thoughts/memories) may do its thing and become less of a trigger. Just protect it from being poked at it for awhile.

4) Don't try to force it. Don't expect it to always start working at 100%. Have patience in letting your mind settle into the focus, but also have patience with yourself when it doesn't work completely or at all. Different states of mind and distress change how you react to things even within your own mind. If it's not working, or not working very well, just make a mental note that X doesn't work when Y, and move on to a different coping method.

5) Remember that you do eventually get bored and/or distracted. Again, don't try to force or expect it to go beyond what it has demonstrated. With training it may get better, or just fluctuate in effectiveness based on mood, mental state or even just what you ate recently.

Mindfulness is BS, to me. It probably works for some people, but it doesn't work for everyone. Typical meditation doesn't work for me. Walking around in the woods while yelling about ships, however, helps me feel better. I have tried so hard to meditate, but it never does anything for me. I find actually doing something that relaxes me, or focusing on something I can actually see or feel that is relaxing, helps. It's ridiculous that everyone that "cares about mental health" yells at me for not meditating hard enough or whatever. It just doesn't work for some people. Don't force it on us.

Growing up meditation actually made no sense to me. Nothing anyone told me or that I read clarified it for me. I even went around looking for english books on Buddhism, and even that didn't help. I thought for awhile that it was just BS, either snake-oil scams or religious hoodoo.

In the end I actually stumbled on it because of paintball.

In high-school I played sports-style competitive paintball and invested a lot of money, time and effort into getting better at it. Eventually I started using the period of time between when I get into bed and fall asleep as a time to reflect on how I played that week (I played once a week), and simulated those sessions in my mind to figure out where I made mistakes and all the different possibilities to figure how I could improve my game.

Eventually I started doing that during other periods throughout the day like when I was walking to school, taking public transit or just waiting for appointments, and started doing more with it.

Eventually it just turned into a thing I did when I didn't have anything better to do or wanted to accomplish something specific, and rather than just using it to simulate past events and future possibilities, I would use it as a platform free of sensory stimulus to guide my train of thoughts to a certain area and let my mind go wild.

With proper training (as in exercising a muscle, not attending a class) and environment, it's possible to completely recede all your senses into your mind within less than a minute, so you're left with just your thoughts and memories. It's a similar experience to when you're 100% immersed in a book and you just kind of forget about the world around you. The only difference is there is no story to serve as focus and to guide your thoughts. To me, meditation is like reading, except I'm in control.

To be clear, I'm not telling you that you or your personal experience is wrong or anything like that. I'm just saying that people are usually s**t at explaining stuff like meditation, and you're just as likely to stumble on it randomly as you are to be properly instructed on it.

A lot of people say a lot of s**t, but at the same time, if a lot of people are clamoring about the same thing it's usually a pretty decent indication that something real might be there. Maybe it's not the same as those people are talking about, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there.

Keep doubting dubious claims you can't personally verify to a degree you're satisfied with; that's a good thing. Just keep that last paragraph in mind, too .

I certainly don't want to insult anyone; that is not my intention for making this post.

I have been practicing meditation and mindfulness for many years. I teach and lead a meditation group and have taught mindfulness as well. The most salient observation I've had over the years is that both meditation and mindfulness are an awful lot like sex in that most people think they're experts on the matter from their second attempt. By the time they get to me they've filled their head with so much crap from so many sources, many of which were just guessing themselves, that the practice has become almost damaging to them.

There are other comparisons that come to mind. For instance, eighty percent of all people with a driver's license think they're above average drivers. Golfers regularly take lessons to improve their golf game but you'd be hard-pressed to find a poker player who, having watched a couple episodes of high stakes poker on television and bought a really cool pair of sunglasses, thinks they lost for any other reason than they're just unlucky.

Aphantasia sounds interesting. For me personally, seeing clear imagages in my head/mind is extremely difficult most of the time. I sometimes get something but it is not like seeing the thing or environment with my eyes.
I hate it when people talk about how easy it is to visualize.

This is actually very good! Seriously, I think mindfullness can be bad as difficult things can come up without you getting help dealing with it or that you are forcing yourself to feel comfortable and calm.
I think many people today disslike Freud but go to another extreme of talking about how CBT will save the world.

I like what you wrote but...focusing on my breathing doesn't do much for me. It is good to focus on breathing in order to find a good technique for breathing but I doubt that I will get help from just breathing and focusing on it. Some people seem to like it. We are all different. I just want silence. Mindfullness is obviously a lot more than just focusing on the breath but it is an example.
I find that mindfullness asks you to do stuff. Sometimes I just need to do nothing.
I do like exercices in which you are asked to feel your body. I think those are good but they are not mindfullness. It is more about other stuff, eg doing physical exercices and being aware of your body or just feel without trying to do anything.

Eating like this seems like a good idea:

Breath, or breathing meditation (also know as anapanasati) is just one form of meditation. The idea that we're supposed to focus, or concentrate on our breath seems to be all pervasive. It is also wrong. Breathing meditation isn't about concentrating or focusing on the breath; in fact, it would be more correct to define it as 'anti-concentration'.



This is not my experience of mindfulness, either. Again, I know that there are a lot of the 'blind leading the blind' situations out there, but one of the reasons that I love practicing mindfulness so much is because it has helped me to 'do nothing' more effectively when I absolutely need to do nothing.



Agreed.



It's a good start, I think. I eat one meal a day in a way that I define as 'mindful eating'. It's a bit more like a Japanese tea ceremony than the description in the video, but as I said, I think it's a good start.

edit:
P.S. Let us say that I am in an office and I'm finding the ceiling light much too bright and obnoxious. Focusing on the light is just going to make it worse. Meditation is more like closing my eyes. I'm still aware of the bright, obnoxious light even through my eyelids - but it isn't nearly as bright or obnoxious now.