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

In difficult situations one's first priority must be to keep oneself safe. Longman did that so I think he handled the situation well.

I have had six sessions of TA in the past when I didn't know I was autistic. I was being bullied at work and went along the the therapists view of the situation as me being the child and the bully being the parent. But it didn't help resolve things as the therapist had no idea of my huge terror and dread at the thought of confronting this person and no idea of my thought processes or coping strategies.

TA and CBT can perhaps help if adapted to autistic people but straight out of the packet they aren't much use to most of us.

Neither TA nor CBT will cure autism. Nothing will, I think we agree on that.

They can, however, make life more bearable, more predictable and less alarming and distressing.

I don't have a full picture of your steps scenario in my mind. However, is it possible that the other guy was alarmed and reacting badly to a big fellow bearing down on him and then brushing him aside? Perhaps he had issues about his lack of stature and perhaps he was reacting badly and not thinking about the other person's point of view? Were you buried in your own thoughts and not aware of him until it was too late? Were you able to accurately assess his intentions and attitude from his facial expression?

In response to RCS I have clutched at every straw to help me resolve my difficulties. Be it a gimmick, I did take it seriously at the time. But it didn't cure my undiagnosed autism. What the quack was doing was offering me TA as a way of resolving what he saw as lack of assertiveness in my explanation of my difficulties. Gimmick yes....in that context

Incidentally I had a bizarre experience today that fits in with the kind of scenario that felineaut introduced at the start.

I had to climb some steep steps leading to a passageway. But when I got to the top step someone took the immediate space in front and seemed to confront me.

I said excuse me, and he said "tell me first which way you want to go?"  I said left, and made to pass him. He wanted me to say please.

It was difficult because he'd got me right at the edge of the top step so though he was smaller he could easily have overbalanced me.

I just said excuse me again and pushed past. I was aware of irritation behind, and turned around to find he was trying to make a fight of it, so I just kept going and left him to it. It wasn't as if he was intending to go down the steps, he was hanging around.

Now I'm not sure I handled it right, but equally I would be interested in the CBT approach to finding a solution.

You get lots of people like that. They see a way of making an issue with someone at a disadvantage, climbing stairs. Or blocking someone in at a parking space and shouting at them (apologies for hijacking felineaut's original posting). What was I supposed to do I wonder.... sob apologies and beg him to let me pass, or kick up a fuss that might have escalated.

For all I know my random facial expression may not have been helping matters.

But lets TA/CBT the scenario

longman said:

To be honest I took the parent adult child Transactional Analysis very seriously, and I owe a lot to it.

that doesn't quite match

At the time I didn't know I was just being dumped with an in-vogue gimmick

?

To be honest I took the parent adult child Transactional Analysis very seriously, and I owe a lot to it.

I agree it is something people on the spectrum can adopt and use to great advantage. I try as often as I can to find the adult balance response in order to avoid sticky situations.

But for two reasons it isn't that simple - for one my eyes and facial expression aren't my best friend, and for another I'm prone to analyse - I'll spend pointless hours working out the adult option to numerous improbable hypothetical situations.

I don't care whether as some people say - this pragmatics/body language business is rubbish - no matter how hard I try, my eyes and facial expression aren't doing what I want them to do. I look angry or assertive when I don't mean to. I try to be adult in my response and my face tells a different story, and implies I'm being facetious, or mocking, or two-faced....

Added to which I'm tall, and used to handling authority (its the teacher in me) I really do look challenging, which isn't a good idea when you want to placate the situation. And I know other people on the spectrum who have this problem. Coping means becoming a whole lot tougher and more resilient than most people - and it shows....whatever else my facial expression and body language are doing. I'm generally a lot scarier than I mean to be (or can live up to).

Yes CBT might help you work out the best way of handling a situation. But it doesn't take away inherent autistic spectrum problems. A lot of people on the spectrum just don't have the "face" to front the diplomacy.

As to the other thing - I do tend to worry my way through endless solutions to things that haven't happened yet.

When someone comes up with genuine TA/CBT that is apt for autism I might take it seriously.

Not for the first time on this forum: I'll take a different view!

TA and CBT share some common ideas.

No matter how hard wired we are with our ASC we also have ability to think about situations and to make choices about how we react. Thinking and choosing can involve challenging your instinctive reactions. You have learnt to control your impulse to cross the road without thinking because you have learnt that stepping into a road with traffic is dangerous. You can do a similar thing in everyday situations like the one in your homework.

Choice 1: Choose whether you want to start yelling back at the other driver or stop and think

Choice 2: Choose whether you think it possible that you did something that annoyed the other driver

Choice 3: Decide if you want to apologise even if you don't think that you did something wrong.

etc

CBT doesn't work for everyone but it does work for some people. It has more evidence of efficacy behind it than many other therapies.

It's bound to attract people that don't know what they are doing. This doesn't mean that everyone who is practicing as a therapist is a charlatan. Challenge yourself to make a choice about this! Decide whether it is reasonable to dismiss the idea of CBT without giving it a chance.

Perhaps the problem is that many professionals don't realise just how different we are and they don't appreciate that their job is not to make us think and behave like NTs, that is impossible and damaging.

If I was comtemplating any sort of counselling or therapy again I'd want the professional to demonstrate their knowledge and experience of good practice in working with autistic people. After all, you wouldn't send your diesel car to a mechanic who could only fix petrol engines would you?

Reading your experience it does make me wonder the extent to which people who lock themselves away aren't so much responding to their autism, but to the damage done by inadequately qualified incompetent therapists.

I've encountered young people on the spectrum who would suffer anything just to avoid another therapy session. And I'm amazed at the way some therapists can only address even adults by bringing out the little pictures from social stories in order to communicate with their patients in baby talk.

I do wish NAS read these exchanges, but I don't think they do. There's an article in the latest Your Autism Magazine spotlighting the online community, but I don't get the feeling reading it that the NAS knows much about it. It is just a promotion (the latest magazine though is one of the best ever).

There is an urgent need for some sort of policy on therapists, especially involving young people. The process as you describe is about stripping away current beliefs and strategies and trying to get the patient to take on new ones, supposedly better.

If that happens over and over it must totally destroy any capacity to develop coping strategies, and must be totally demoralising. It is not therefore surprising people deteriorate and become totally introspective.

Therapists who are engaged in helping people with autism must not only have autism awareness but a clear idea of the risks of mishandling therapy on the long term wellbeing of people on the spectrum.

Coping strategies are hard enough to develop without some misguided underqualified quack therapist wrecking them. Maybe if the process was better understood a lot fewer people would suffer the way they do now.

I underwent CBT on a one-to-one basis for 3 years. I only have two things to say about it.

1. Astonishingly, an allegedly qualified psychologist working for the NHS failed, utterly, to spot my autism despite a 3 year realtionship with me and repeated failures to notice that what she said to me, similar to the scenario above, made absolutely no sense to me.

2. All she achieved was to drag up my past and leave me to dwell on stuff I would really rather have left behind me. She destroyed whatever peace of mind I'd ever managed to scrape together, shattered all of the 'coping' strategies that I'd been able to develop (she constantly told me that my actions and reactions were 'wrong') and blamed ME for REFUSING to adopt the strategies that she suggested.

Utter crap, totally innapropriate for an AS person, and took me from a coping adult to an utter emotional wreck. And it was my fault for not co-operating.

This is all true, read it as you will.

Lastly, in the scenario above, I would be angry and confused as to why one of the unsane ones thought that blocking me into a space that they wanted me to vacate would be logical, when it blatantly isn't. In this situation, I can state categoricaly that I would be overwhelmed by fear and confusion, my adrenalin would be through the roof, with all of the associated physical effects, and I would do anything to get away. I couldn't deal with it, I'd run for my life.

Seems to me that this is an extreme situation. Almost everyone would feel scared or intimidated by a total stranger yelling at them as they went about their business.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to help you deal with situations that make autistic people anxious but don't affect neurotypicals, situations that we find challenging but NTs find it hard to see the problem.

longman nails it again!

I can't get on with CBT. Whilst transactional analysis is all well and good in theory; it is very NT way of looking at things.

I recall a good many years ago now seeking some counselling on my (then-undiagnosed) AS difficulties......the advice I got was that I needed assertiveness training. I was introduced to the idea of Transactional Analysis: the parent-adult-child theory.

At the time I didn't know I was just being dumped with an in-vogue gimmick - didn't really matter what I came for, just something to give someone with what in those days was classed as immaturity problems - hasn't quite got the hang of adulthood - an easy way of explaining away autism.

Therefore it does make me wonder if that's what your therapist is up to. The idea of parent-adult-child is that some people fall into a "child" state of mind that lets people tell them what to do, others have a "parent" telling people what to do mentality, and that what you have to aim for is a balanced sensible mature "adult" way of responding.

So looking at the scenario, if you are inclined to the "child" side of the scenario, you'd react to this as if the other person was being being parentish, and be all sorry, or you'd act in a parent-like way yourself and talk down to this person. What you are supposed to do (and will eventually do after a lot of similar exercises), is come up with some response that calms everything down. So your therapist wants to know how you feel - parent-like or child-like, how you would react and how you'd cope with the upset.

Trouble is this sort of thinking hasn't anything to do with autism. It doesn't recognise that noise or aggression might be harder to process, that it might be harder to placate the other person because your look or response might make things worse, that you cannot ensure the right body language, or facial expression or turn of phrase that achieves the adult reaction your therapist may (if I read this aright) be leading you round to doing.

I might be wrong. Just my reaction to this idea of exploring scenarios of challenging situations doesn't show much understanding of autism. Does the therapist have a sound background in autistic spectrum?

Transactional Analysis originates in the work of Penfield and Berne in the 1950s. The idea is you have certain innate preconceptions or experiences that cause you to behave the same way in similar situatiions. Transactional analysis is supposed to help you break out of these pre-sets.

But autism deprives you of a lot of the mechanisms needed to analyse these scenarios and develop better social responses. So this approach, while you might explore some scenarios doesn't address the fact your real difficulty is not pre-learned responses but understanding exchanges at all.