are you in treatment for AS?

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hey all.

i am in treatment (individual and group therapy, along with psychiatric). i have shared my aspie test results with my treatment team, but it has not gone further than that.

i am beginning to wonder how effective my treatment will be without any focus on AS. i have tried some interventions on my own that have worked quite well and wish i had professional guidance as i move forward.

are any of you in treatment? how is that going? does it have an AS component? if youve had it both ways, what are some of the treatment differences?

thank you for your responses.

I'm in cognitive behavioral therapy with an AS specialist right now, and it's going pretty well. I just started, so I don't have a lot to say about it yet, but we have done some role playing, and now we're moving on to cognitive distortions. The thing that I like about seeing a specialist is that I don't have to sit there and explain AS to him, he already get's it, so it's more or less right to the point. I also like that this guy is totally NT so he's able to explain things that confuse me about NT's, which just helps the world make a little more sense.

I was in treatment before, with varying results. The most beneficial thing was working on eye contact, we'd basically practice and she would give signals to me for when i should look in her eyes and when i should look away. It helped me improve dramatically on that front.

this is the type of skill building that i am afraid i am missing out on.

instead of working on how to show someone i am attracted to that i am attracted to them, we may be working on the 'attachment issues' that i have learned from my childhood that hinders me in relationships. it just seems off...or not as practical.

if AS is listed as a developmental disorder and attachment is an anxiety, which is a mood disorder, those two designations just seem to be different views of the same problem. i want to make sure i am looking at my 'problems' the right way, if that makes sense.

No.

There's nothing to treat.

i am not sure if you are saying that AS is nothing to treat in general or is you do not personally need treatment.

i connected with this because cbt is designed to get white middle-class NTs to feeling better. i see that a responder has found it helpful and i certainly recognize the important role that cognitive distortions can play, especially when you begin to consider the created reality possible in quantum psychology. i mean this to say that cbt attempts to get folks to accept certain truths about the world and others. heres one:

'the world is safe.'
believing this will lead to emotional well-being. however, anyone who grows up in one of the choice neighborhoods in my city knows intimately that the world is a horribly unsafe place. heres another:

'other people can be trusted.'
well, hell, can they be? i will use the poor black population as the same frame of reference. it does not support their survival in these neighborhoods to believe this as a truth.

back to folks on the spectrum. instead of working on the anxiety that you feel in a job, or the stress it seems to cause on your physical system, instead of working on the thoughts behind the panic, exposure therapy, flooding, mindfulness, why not just stamp the damn place as 'not AS friendly' and move on with your life?

i am just not sure that the focus of someone on the spectrum should be to live a happy NT life and this is what normative treatment seems to strive for.

I'm not. I prefer to let my mind flow freely.

No. I don't have the time or the need.

There's nothing to treat as there's nothing there to fix.

It's a certain way of life that's put/forced on you (life itself is forced though, after all), which you adapt to however your personality does. It limits you greatly in the social world (and nothing you can do will help that), but hey, those are the breaks.

I need help, but none is available to me due to a lack of money and insurance. However, I would not see AS as the thing I need help with as much as the depression and anxiety issues I suffer from.

i dont want to be misunderstood. i am referring to treatment that would be related to how to assist someone on the spectrum in existing in the world. i understand the viewpoint that the world can just go to hell, i am who i am kind of thing.

i do think you seem kind of defeatist though. an example of a skill that i picked up along the way is smiling with my face when i am on the phone with someone and they are sharing good news in their life. before, i did not sound happy or excited or what have you (as i have been told) so if i know i should be happy and if i know i care about the persons happiness, then i make this small adjustment so i dont agree with your point of view that 'nothing you can do will help.'

and again, i sought treatment for my anxiety and depression as well as psychosomatic pain. i just cant help but wonder if these and other issues might be more appropriately treated by professionals who treated those on the spectrum if in fact i am on the spectrum.

edit: i am learning that the name of the topic of my post is not helping with the confusion :/

Yes, I am going through reeducation. Freedom is slavery, afterall.

I've been going through court ordered therapy since I was in middle school, starting initially with being threatened to go to a residential/juvie for truancy, and later getting more involved in the legal system. At first I had to go to treatment for "depression" and later "anxiety." Then later I got an eval done with a Weschler I believe, and it revealed NVLD, they said I was "almost but not quite" for Aspergers, and instead said I was NVLD+Schizoid and Schizoaffective or Schizotypal. They said I was so impaired they wanted me to go to an assisted living facility place. The assisted living facility place said they were wrong to diagnose someone at 17 with schizoid or schizotypal/schizoaffective (I know I got diagnosed schizoid, but forget which of the other schizzes I got diagnosed with.) Then I got referred for more treatment, and they said I had HFA/Aspergers. During this time of treatment, due to my utterly useless depression and anxiety diagnosis I didn't even understand (due to being what I found out is alexithymic, of course I'm not gonna "feel" depressed) and the wrong schizo diagnoses, I didn't trust psychiatric diagnoses legitimacy at all. So I was like "lol whatever" to the Aspergers and NVLD diagnoses. But, at least the people doing the second round of treatment after the NVLD/Schizoid eval were at least reasonably nice. What made me realize I have NVLD/Aspergers was meeting someone else diagnosed NVLD and seeing parallels between me and him, and then rerunning VIQ/PIQ tests online and having the results come out the same.

Anyway, I've had almost nonstop "therapy" in my life since about 5th grade. One year break in 7th grade. It's not been useful really at all, except to make me trust people and the government less. A small few of the therapists were good people, though out of the dozens I've worked with in one fashion or another, most were apathetic, some were straight out of malevolent. Of course, all were doing it for my "best interest." Lastly, I've also learned if anyone says "your best interest" to you it means you can rest assured they don't have it in mind.

Does reading count as treatment? I have some books I'm working through.

Parallel Play by Tim Page
A Field Guide to Earthlings by Ian Ford

It's good to hear another perspective - I think we can always learn and improve.

cheers,

Nope I am not but I have in the past. I saw my shrink in high school for "adjustment disorder" and for anger and anxiety. I also did group therapy in 6th grade and it was also how to deal with my anger and how to handle it and it was about learning passive assertive and aggressive. It was basically to work on my social skills. I saw a shrink in my pre teens and it was for depression I think because I was having problems in school with peers and I couldn't move on anymore. I was in speech therapy and it was for communication so I learned turn taking, staying on topic and I learned some good hygiene and social skills. I also did gymnastics and pottery and that was therapy for me. It was to work on my coordination and motor skills. I was also in occupational therapy and it was for my sensory issues and processing disorder.


I think things were pretty good before the aspie label came along. I think I would have done fine without it in my family but school, probably be harder because then I be getting punished for my meltdowns and outbursts and inappropriate behavior. I dunno if I would have dropped out.

No. When I was diagnosed I was put on antidepressants and put into "talk" and art therapy for a while, but it didn't help me much. The best medicine has been life experience and with lots of knocking about and stumbling along the way.