I haven't said this in years, but please would you help with my (CBT) homework?

Pleased to meet you too Felineaut and glad to hear that you are not too far from where you want to be, also thanks for challenging some of the thinking in the thread. The RCPsych reference contains some content that has perhaps evaded some of the therapists that have been discussed on the thread.

CBT is not just a talking therapy, it is not a nice chat over a cup of tea! There will be therapists who don't get this but there will also be people who haven't heard this from their therapists. Sometimes we are bad at listening and sometimes people are not good at explaining things. Autistic people are at a disadvantage in such conversations but it is no less shocking that someone can take a patient along for so long without getting the basic and crucial ideas behind CBT across to the patient. Autism is hard to spot and diagnose and I'm not altogether surprised that a CBT therapist might miss this. There are many people on the forum who have had highly qualified Psychiatrists and Psychologists fail to diagnose them. Spotting the signs of autism through a cloud of consequential, or simply concurrent, comordities is not straightforward.

Two ideas stand out from the RCP slides.

1) Challenge. You have to learn to challenge your thinking and your reflexes. You have to learn that it is possible to change your mind about things. You have to learn that we may be more rigid than many people but our minds are not set in stone.

2) The Socratic method. This is all about picking things apart to work out what is really going on. It is about not accepting things because they have always been that way. Progressively refining your thoughts about something and listening to other people's contributions and learning to unpick their arguments and preconceptions and working towards a true and fair view of a situation rather than listening to your prejudices.

These approaches should be taught, to the subject, by the therapist using examples to bring the techniques to life. This teaching can be a mixture of training and education but it is better if the subjects understands why rather than just learning how, parrot fashion.

A previous manager at a previous organisation labelled me as Socratic long before I got my diagnosis. I had no idea what this meant so I read Plato's Republic. This explains what Socrates was about but also explained what an irritating person he was. So irritating and persistent with his challenges that he was put to death! So irritating and persistent that he strikes me as probably autistic. His lack of diplomacy and persistence of detached analysis struck a chord with me. I know that this diplomatic deficit means that I won't ever be a successful politician but I can learn to take the more abrasive traits in hand as well as I can.

Pleased to meet you too Felineaut and glad to hear that you are not too far from where you want to be, also thanks for challenging some of the thinking in the thread. The RCPsych reference contains some content that has perhaps evaded some of the therapists that have been discussed on the thread.

CBT is not just a talking therapy, it is not a nice chat over a cup of tea! There will be therapists who don't get this but there will also be people who haven't heard this from their therapists. Sometimes we are bad at listening and sometimes people are not good at explaining things. Autistic people are at a disadvantage in such conversations but it is no less shocking that someone can take a patient along for so long without getting the basic and crucial ideas behind CBT across to the patient. Autism is hard to spot and diagnose and I'm not altogether surprised that a CBT therapist might miss this. There are many people on the forum who have had highly qualified Psychiatrists and Psychologists fail to diagnose them. Spotting the signs of autism through a cloud of consequential, or simply concurrent, comordities is not straightforward.

Two ideas stand out from the RCP slides.

1) Challenge. You have to learn to challenge your thinking and your reflexes. You have to learn that it is possible to change your mind about things. You have to learn that we may be more rigid than many people but our minds are not set in stone.

2) The Socratic method. This is all about picking things apart to work out what is really going on. It is about not accepting things because they have always been that way. Progressively refining your thoughts about something and listening to other people's contributions and learning to unpick their arguments and preconceptions and working towards a true and fair view of a situation rather than listening to your prejudices.

These approaches should be taught, to the subject, by the therapist using examples to bring the techniques to life. This teaching can be a mixture of training and education but it is better if the subjects understands why rather than just learning how, parrot fashion.

A previous manager at a previous organisation labelled me as Socratic long before I got my diagnosis. I had no idea what this meant so I read Plato's Republic. This explains what Socrates was about but also explained what an irritating person he was. So irritating and persistent with his challenges that he was put to death! So irritating and persistent that he strikes me as probably autistic. His lack of diplomacy and persistence of detached analysis struck a chord with me. I know that this diplomatic deficit means that I won't ever be a successful politician but I can learn to take the more abrasive traits in hand as well as I can.