My social problems and seeing my disability attorney

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So I had my appointment with my attorney for my SSI hearing. The hearing is in nine days, and my appointment was pushed back 35 days (was set for March 26, but said attorney had an injury, and then had something like 30 hearings in two weeks), which has already left me extremely anxious about the outcome.

The problem is that I was relying on this appointment to get a good idea of how I am supposed to describe my impairments for the hearing, but instead my attorney kept prompting me to explain them. I repeated a lot of things I've talked about on this forum, but he said they wouldn't count (apparently forgetting to take care of yourself is a trivial matter compared to the inability to work) or assumed I was trying to say one thing when I was trying to say something else.

So he'd ask me, "why can't you work?" and I didn't have the right language to explain why, and he spent nearly two hours coming back to this question over and over again, but I didn't understand what he wanted because no one has explained this at any point during the process.

And because I got stuck on some things, I forgot to be explicit about things like sensory overload and fibromyalgia (why can't I work as a janitor? Oh, because I will be in severe, distressing pain from doing primarily physical work - mopping the kitchen floor where I lived three houses back left me in severe pain).

Another problem I had is that I simply described my problems and expressed no emotion about those problems. He said I didn't seem distressed, but he cut me off when I tried to explain alexithymia. Anyway, he was paging through the report from the psychologist I saw a year and a half ago (and then again last October), and pointed out that my major depression and suicidal ideation are major factors that would be considered. Oops.

He also said that he felt my social impairments (based on that report) were much greater than my cognitive impairments (I am not sure I agree, but I came out of his having a better sense of how pervasive and severe they are). This is the second time I've seen him, and the first time I had even more trouble answering his questions. This time he explained all the points I was missing toward the end, so I have an idea of what I should say at the hearing, but I have to come up with it on my own.

However, his explanation made it clear that I was missing a lot of the conversation (apparently the nonverbal parts, plus all the taking what he said literally, not understanding how to explain myself, and so on). It doesn't typically cause me this many problems, but the stakes are usually not so high.

Once I got home, I sort of had a meltdown over the whole thing that slipped right into shutdown. Plus very loud screaming children at dinner time, so coming out of shutdown right into sensory overload to get food I actually couldn't eat because of my cognitive and sensory state. Also, lost speech.

I think I'm going to restart my therapy, as I've been putting that off, but it's clear I need something. Hopefully I can find a way to explain myself properly at the hearing. If I write it all down first, I will probably be okay - writing is much easier than speaking, and if I write it, I can usually recite it later.

Also, auditory processing issues: Several times during the conversation I stopped understanding what he was saying, but I only managed to bring it up once.

Why couldn't you see him with someone else that could explain things better? Actually, I think I know. Nobody could explain my issues like I could even if I can't talk as well as them.
I would think the fact that you had a problem explaining is an impairment.
The first thing I'd think of was the sensory issues. It's like my most severe symptom that minimal exposure to sounds can just shut me down from.
I can see he may have caused you to be in distress which made it harder for you to explain your most debilitating symptoms.

I can't believe you need an attorney. My attorney is my psychiatrist.

Or maybe he was testing you? He was being hard on you because that's how others would be. Either that or he's a b*****d.

He was trying to help me come up with something, but I think the way he did it was not very well suited to my brain.

When people ask me questions I tend to answer very specifically - I told him about sensory overload in previous workplaces, and at parties where I'd find a bathroom or other small dark room to hide out in and recover from the sensory bombardment, but I am not sure he interpreted it as a sensory thing and saw it more as a social thing. But very specifically: If you ask me if I have a problem with people, I'll say "no." Because people in general don't bother me just because. If you ask, "do you have a problem with specific people? Or with people in specific situations?" I could go on all day. Does that make sense? In face to face conversation, I am terrible at extrapolating beyond the literal meaning of a question, although I am also terrible at getting to the point (my therapist called it "circuitous speech"), which said attorney did notice.

I have an attorney because in the US going without one means representing myself, and I have no idea how to do that.

I agree that the problem explaining is itself an impairment, and really frustrating for me. I'm so used to being online where I can enumerate details fairly thoroughly and without interruption, and I wasn't able to do that there because the way he was asking was mixing up my responses - I couldn't just rearrange things on the fly and just repeated things that apparently weren't helpful. Plus, he kept cutting in when he assumed he understood what my answer was and I'd never get to the point because of the circuitous thing.

Also, he read something my mother wrote that I didn't even know existed - in it she said I never want to talk to her. This actually annoys me because I try to talk to her rather frequently and she doesn't really reciprocate. Or she makes phone calls, or takes phone calls, or when someone else wants to talk to her she cuts me right off. But I don't ever want to talk to her. I mean, I don't really like talking, but I am not totally against talking to her. I just find it nearly impossible to do so.

I don't know if this helps, my advisor helped me get care allowance for my daughter. I was a bit like you totally lost as to begin to explain it all. She talked me through it all. She said to start at the beginning of the day and think about every single thing that I do and the difficulties associated with that task. So basically breaking down your whole regular day. In your case, as you're doing this, you need to relate the difficulties to how it affects your ability to work. eg fixed rigid routine over getting dresses which means some days it takes all day. Then, if I were you, I'd do the same for an imaginary day assuming you're working eg catching the bus to work - what would it look like in your case, panic, confusion, meltdown?

Actually, I was expecting something like that. I already botched my function report and got told I could do simple, repetitive labor after I sent it in. But what we discussed was different.

Trying to imagine those scenarios may very well help, at least.

The whole mess was at least valuable for one reason - I very very rarely have people explain to me how I'm misunderstanding or making social mistakes, and it's really hard for me to understand I am socially impaired without explicit feedback like that.

I forgot to answer this bit earlier:

The idea of taking someone along to help explain my issues hadn't even crossed my mind. Right now the only person who could possibly do that is my therapist, but arranging for her to accompany me is not really possible. My mother doesn't understand and constantly translates what I say into something she can relate to (so much for theory of mind or empathy). Other people in the house have told me to my face that I have to learn how to match my expressions to my emotions so they don't mistakenly think I am angry when I am not, which is a pretty big misunderstanding.

Oh, and: I tried to say I wasn't communicating what I needed to say, but he said I was doing fine. I am not sure how he knows I am doing fine when I know what I want to communicate and his responses are completely inconsistent with my intentions. Just because I sound like I am speaking coherent sentences doesn't mean I am saying things that gets my intended point across, and just because I agree with the person I am speaking to does not mean I understand what they just said or even realize I didn't understand what they just said.