Better word than "Alien"

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If your therapist finds herself projecting herself onto the patient you should inform her that she should seek another occupation and find yourself another therapist.

Outsider? Visistor?

How about "deity"?

I think alien is a cool word unless the way you said it indicate you hated it. I learned a lot from CBT and breaking the habits of negative thoughts. I think it works for anxiety very well. Your therapist might not be a good one, but it doesn't mean CBT wouldn't work.

Yes. It could be that she associates the word 'alien' with immigration, and 'illegal aliens' crossing the border from Mexico. And is oblivious to the fact that even most children use the word 'alien' in the pop culture sci fi sense of meaning "little green men from Mars who arrive in flying saucers".

Therapists can be amazingly myopic.

My parents starting sending me to shrinks in...I dunno when...elementary school.

Decades later they would tell me about how the shrinks would 'intimidate' them.

When I was a kid I would "draw stories". Divide a big sheet of paper in blocks running right to left, and top to bottom, like the cells in the Sunday comics. And then use pencil and crayon to draw the action in stories I made up. And my parents would explain this to the shrinks, and retell how I would call each installment of these adventure stories "episodes".

The shrinks would get angry at my parents and snap "NO eight year old child would ever use a big word like 'episode'".

If these shrinks had ever ...pulled their heads out of their asses, and had ever watched the Sixties TV shows that their own kids were watching back then they would have noticed that every episode of....Bullwinkle Cartoons, Batman, the Green Hornet, and "Get Smart" (a TV comic spoof of James Bond), always ended with a voiceover guy announcing "that its for this episode of the show. Stay tuned for next week's episode!".

It was the most natural thing in the world for a kid with crayons to ape television, and call his creations 'episodes' like how they do it on TV. But the word 'episode' is also a jargon word used by shrinks and social scientists themselves in their own trade- that has a certain meaning. So I guess they get stuck in the rut of their own jargon, and cant even see the obvious non jargon usage right in front of them.

There are a lot of candidate words for how you were perceived: odd, quirky, etc.

But those terms describe what other people feel about you.

I think "alien" is an excellent description of how you felt.

Ask her what she finds to be negative about alien...then ask if the answer seems ableist to her.

Even so, your therapist should not be projecting her own dislikes or traumas on to you.

How about “Unique”?

I think she has good intent, but has missed the point. She maybe thinks of an alien as a grotesque creature from another planet. Not human. She thinks you are using it to say you don't value yourself.

You might need to rephrase what you meant rather than find a new word.

I take it you meant that you feel like you have trouble relating to other people in a way that makes it seem like you are in a strange place where the social rules of are different to what you expect and it feels overwhelming trying to learn to communicate with the people around you. It's not that you are inhuman or disgusting, but that you feel a little outside of what everyone else is doing and how they are developing networks and friendships with each other. You know you are a human with worth, it just feels like the gap between them and you it very difficult to cross.

And they say autistic people don't understand metaphors and analogies, but it seems like you need to break this comparison down for her.

Maybe a different analogy like a rabbit trying to live with cats. They're cute and inoffensive.They don't understand each others body language. A rabbit will bow it's head for a cat to groom, but the cat will look at the rabbit like it's crazy. Grooming is how rabbits bond, but the cat gets up and walks away.

How do YOU feel about it? Does it have the same meaning for you as the word Alien? If it does...great. If not, there's nothing wrong with your original choice. CBT doesn't mean you have to be coerced into using different language that you don't feel comfortable with just to please your therapist.

Hybrid

Xenos

Mutant

Well, there is one thing that would be better than "alien"...your name.

Clearly the definition you were looking for is "misfit". Again, probably due to her personal projections onto you she sees "alien" being seemingly less positive than the synonyms.

Xenomorph XX121?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(cr ... _franchise)

(Ok, that is not really how I feel - more like being Wolverene or Odo from Star Trek Deep Space 9)

I once saw a tv show - it was a scifi variation on "The Most Dangerous Game". The "man" being chased / hunted was a robot, but he looked human. At one point he found a cabin with tools and weapons and a hidden set of blueprints for his own schematics.

It meant he could modify his programming and "fight back".

The hunter wanted a more interesting game, and had left all those things for him to find.

I always wanted to find MY blueprints, and be able to fix me so I could fit in.

Like the Island of Misfit Toys.
"Why am I such a mis-fit
I am not just a nit wit
just because my nose
glows
WHY don't I fit in?'