Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all,
I'm looking for some opinions. I'm currently enduring (not enjoying) Art Psychotherapy. The short version is that I got diagnosed ASD at 35, three years after screaming for help at anybody who'd listen about my mental health (I literally had a phone call to check if I still wanted support and hadn't killed myself last year, which was...fun). I've recently started Art Psychotherapy but I'm struggling a lot with it. My therapist, while pleasant enough, is hellbent on dragging crappy childhood issues kicking and screaming to the fore and keeps telling me my Autism stops me from processing and that I "Have to learn to sit with it".
As a result I'm actually getting worse. She's determined that I just need to learn to 'experience fun' and that art will come naturally because most ASD adults are great visually and bad verbally. For me it's the complete opposite, I don't have any visual acuity, I'm a former teacher so everything is verbal analysis. I feel like on one hand she's completely ignoring the ASD in favour of mental health based on trauma (which is there to be fair) and rigidly sticking to that one helpsheet she read about Autism in her training and won't budge from a very narrow view of it. She's convinced it's just reluctance because it works in non-verbal children but I'm an extremely verbal ADULT.
I've tried to research how to approach Art Psychotherapy but the vast majority is based around children on the spectrum or advising parents of said children. Does anyone have any experiences of this or how to approach this? I waited nearly four years for treatment of any kind and I don't want to be jettisoned again if I tell them this is as helpful as a slush puppie in hell.
Thanks for reading this,
O.
what did u teach ?
Initially SEND until nobody could afford to employ it, then became a College level English and Maths teacher. I loved the act of teaching but the environment was nigh on abusive and destroyed me eventually. I worked with a lot of young people on the spectrum and several commented how similar my 'oddities' were to their behaviours but the college just saw it as 'you're not a team player because you're burning out on hundred-hour weeks, no oversight and overloads from four hour meetings'. I left it for my own health/sanity.