One of my biggest struggles

Post Reply New Topic

I have been having a particularly difficult time lately and one of my biggest and most frequent struggles is when I tell people that I have a need and they argue with me that it is not a real or valid need. I was reminded of how frustrating this is tonight.

I called a crisis hotline because I needed to calm myself down from massive frustrations that I had had this week. I know myself very well. I am older than most of the people who work at these crisis hotlines. I know exactly what I need and what will help me. What I absolutely did not need was to talk about what was making me struggle. Having to explain a lot of this stuff to an nt is hard enough but having him try to offer help and suggestions for something he can't even conceptualize is pure torture and if I were any less skilled in dealing with suicidal triggers, I would actually commit suicide just from having to talk to him. I asked him if he would just tell me a story like you would tell a little kid. That is what I needed. That is what would have helped me the most. He said he was not allowed to do that but that he had to talk to me about the specifics of what was making me struggle. Eventually after going back and forth about how insane that was and how unhelpful and destructive he was being by forcing me to follow his agenda rather than just talking about what I wanted to talk about, he basically hung up. Good thing I have been through this enough to be able to handle it. I then just called a different hotline and had a great conversation with that girl, basically telling her about the guy I had just spoken to.

But it really infuriates me when I ask people to do very simple things that would really help my emotional self which caps at four years old like telling "her" stories or just relating to her as a four year old, and they just flat refuse because they don't believe that I should have that need. It is so unbelievable arrogant and wrong for people to judge me like that. I am constantly being told that I should rise up to everyone's expectations and be able to do every adult responsibility that every nt of my age can do. But I am not an nt and much of my functioning capacity happens at a preteen age level. But no one will accept that. I am not capable of sustaining these adult responsibilities at this pace. And when I am collapsing from exhaustion and from the efforts of trying to do things that I am not capable of doing and I try to find respite and help so that I can recover, I am told that I am too high functioning to qualify for that kind of help.

It really is very difficult and very frustrating. I wish people could just understand that the needs we have as high functioning Autistics are just as real and valid as the needs that people on other parts of the Spectrum have. Our needs need to be met as much as other people's needs need to be met even if our needs are not as obvious or as well understood.

it seems to me that many folk lack a theory of mind when it comes to the struggles of other people.

Yes. It is astounding how nts always accuse us of not having any when they also have none themselves.

it makes me think that there are two different kinds of TOM- social/intellectual, and emotional/compassionate, and the two generally don't often mix, one tends to have one or the other, if one has TOM at all.

What do you mean?

By the way, it's really early in the morning. What are you doing up at this wee hour? I have to go to work. I have to leave here for work in about an hour. I am going to get ready now so I might not be back on the site until later today.

be safe

This could be besides the point but if you want to hear a story , get books on tape from the library

skibum

last year, a suicide hotline hired me as an unpaid intern.

during the job interview, he explicitly told me that interns had to go through the risk assessment questions with every caller.

granted, the hotline you dialed was not (necessarily) the one that hired me. (fine).

however, some jobs have anal retentive protocol that works have to follow. lest they get made redundant.

you do not know what the worker's job description says.

in that way, the worker hides behind an entire company.

it sounds like you have to give the worker the benefit of a doubt. you are the one that dialed the phone number. the worker could have been a volunteer. (many suicide hotline operators are).



"beggars can't be choosers".

I was going to agree with shortfat&c, but I want to reassure skibum that I am not doing that to invalidate.

I would wager the majority of crisis line operators are volunteers, with widely varying degrees of fitness for the job and experience dealing with human beings in crisis.

That doesn't justify someone disagreeing with what you tell them about your needs, but it maybe does explain it.

As I say about therapists, if you don't like the first one you get, move on to another. (Which is what you did, I'm happy to say).

Many thousands of years ago, people sat around a fire and some told stories in the dark. I am still a 4 year old at heart and I enjoy listening to stories. As time evolved the method of storytelling changed. From plays, to books and to movies. So generally I satisfy this need by watching movies or television programs, tens of thousands of them.

I imagine calling a crisis hotline is rather impersonal. The caller is in crisis mode. That puts the responder in crisis mode. Many times people have been taught in crisis mode to follow a certain script. Responding to a caller who requests that the responder read them a story is probably not part of the script. But I can see your need for a personal touch at a time of need.

Perhaps a crisis hotline might be the wrong venue to meet your need. I remember visiting bookstores years ago and in the children section, they had a reader who would read a story to the young children that were gathered around them on the floor. I am sure they would not mind if you sat near while they read a story. But then again many bookstores are closing and this function may not be available nowadays.

Thank you for the great suggestions. I have access to hundreds of audio books through my phone apps and youtube and I listen to audio books all the time.

I think that we are kind of missing the point though. The point is that when someone is in crisis, if that person is reaching out it's because she needs something in order to get through the particular crisis moment. Sitting in a library during story time is great and wonderful but going to find a story time in a library at 2am when you are having a suicidal moment is not going to really be effective. And the point of being told a story during a crisis moment like that is not because I want to read a book or listen to a story. It's because I need an actual human being to connect to in order to get through the moment and it has to be someone who is not going to freak out because they are getting a call in the middle of the night while I am in the moment of crisis. A "story" could be as simple as what you had for dinner. And in those moments it is often more effective if you have the freedom to choose to remain anonymous and not have to explain to friends and family why you are going through what you are going through especially if you have family and friends that tend to not understand these things and be judgemental and invalidating.

When people are in crisis, if they reach out to a hotline, they are looking for a human connection. If you force them to talk about all of the events that led them to this point and they are not capable of doing that, or if they know from experience that that will not only not help them but in fact might make things worse, and you don't allow them to say anything that they need to say, or you don't talk to them about the things that will help them, you are causing them much more stress than they are in already. You are denying them the one thing that they need the most in the moment. And then if you tell that person, "Unless you tell me exactly and only exactly what I want to hear from you, I will refuse to talk to you and you can shop around and call somebody else," you have now just rejected that person completely in his or her most vulnerable and fragile moment. Anyone who is actually really suicidal will be much more likely to commit suicide immediately after this kind of rejection from a crisis hotline. This will most likely be the event that causes the actual suicide.

If a person is in crisis and he calls a crisis hotline, he feels like he has no one else to call. If the hotline rejects him, he might not have anything left to go shopping around for anther crisis hotline that will meet his need. I would love to do a study on how many people actually commit suicide right after talking to a crisis hotline.

I am sorry but I don't actually care if the people are just volunteers or what their training protocol is. I understand that this might be the case but I will draw a line and say that I am disgusted by this and I will not accept this as the way that things should be. I absolutely refuse to. I am pretty sure that I, alone, will not be able to change the system and I understand that and shame on the system, but I absolutely refuse to buy into the beggars can't be choosers mentality for crisis hotlines. You can't take that kind of luxury when you are dealing what could very often be life and death situations. If the people putting together crisis training protocols don't understand this, they need to find another profession. Nothing anyone can say will ever convince me that this is acceptable. Anyone who thinks that this is ok has probably never been in a crisis suicidal situation.

And I also agree that it is immensely funny that the conversation I had with the girl on the second call was about the crisis worker on the first call. It's funny and pathetic and sad that we had to talk about how potentially destructive and dangerous the first crisis center was.

Glad to see you're still posting and fighting the good fight, skibum, and that you are still able to see the funny side despite what you've been going through.

I think your general point about services trying to squish us into "one size fits all" interventions is spot on. In my experience, it doesn't just apply to crisis hotlines, but often also to medical staff, social services, counsellors, school educational interventions and many more. I was diagnosed well into middle age, and while my coping strategies aren't perfect and I still strive to improve them, I have learned an awful lot in those decades about the workings of my mind; through introspection, empirically by trial and error, and through communities like this one. I'm open-minded about suggestions, but they should be just that; suggestions, not rigidly enforced pathways designed originally for people with different psychology to mine or anyone else's.

To most of my doctors, I have been deemed an ungrateful and awkward patient when I suggest that anti-depressants don't work for me, or that I need mental rest or diversions to hyper-focus on, not emotionally intense counselling, when I am burned out. Likewise with counsellors who seemed determined to fit certain traits into models of psychological trauma when I knew them to be neurologically innate (alexithymia and sensory processing in particular.) The attitude of social services has been much like you said in the OP. My lack of intellectual impairment means that I'm allowed to access very little, and what I can access is always the same; push, push, push to restore the more neuro-typical behaviour which has previously been seen when my masking was working, at just the time when that is the very thing which made me crash and burn in the first place. As soon as my basic social functions seem to be working again (masking is back on line), I am deemed to need no help at all - so nothing preventative is ever in place to avoid endlessly repeating the cycle.

Regardless of what the crisis line worker was taught, the organisation that they work for should, at the very least, have something more robust in place for callers who don't respond favourably besides simply cutting off a call. No individual volunteer can hope to help every single caller, nor will a generic assessment (i.e. designed for typical psychology) of suicide risk be accurate for all callers, and it is folly or hubris not to recognise this.