Published on 12, July, 2020
For about maybe seven months now, I've been using BetterHelp for private therapy. I can't say I've found there to be any progress, though I'm not sure I'm going in with the right expectations. My therapist tries to get me to reframe my thoughts. Use less negative language, try to imagine more positive outcomes to situations, that sort of thing. "What would it be like..." is her common language for this. To which my response is often along the lines of "Well that would be unrealistic because xyz". She also tends to point out my "yets" as hopeful, despite my assurance that it's just to avoid an absolute statement. I can't tell if I'm being too rigid and set in my ways, if her approach is ill effective for autism, or a bit of both.
For anyone that uses a therapist, how do you find your engagements with them?
I think your therapist is right to try and get you to reframe your thoughts, it sounds like your thoughts are a railway track with stuck points and everytime someone wants to go in a different directions you shoot off down the negative track. It sounds ot me as if she's trying to help you with catatrophising, somethine which autists are really good at and believing that the worst case scenario will be the inevitable outcome of any action. It's a really hard cycle to get out of because it all seems so logical and experience based, but it dosen't have to be this way, you can have other options and experiences than this doom loop. I wonder if like many autists, when you think about doing something new or different, a negative outcome is easier to imagine than not knowing what the outcome will be? Us autistic people often aren't very good with the unknown and the unpredictable, we want consistency and constancy, when in reality we have to get our heads around the fact that the only constant is change.
Stick with it and try and allow yourself to imagine a scenario where things go well, you don't have to tke it outside your head yet, but just let it sit there for a bit.
You're right, I do catastrophise pretty well. The roadblock I put up for myself is "What if I commit to all of these changes, and find out none of it was worth it?". And yeah it definitely feels like a reasonable line of thought based on logic and experience. I want to have the outcome guaranteed before I try, which life rarely allows us.
For me, not knowing what the outcome will be is a negative outcome in and of itself. Even if I do something experience has taught me will turn out fine, like getting on the bus and going to the local retail park, leaving to do it feels like stepping into the woods at night, watching and listening for predators for that off chance something does go wrong.
I'll stick with the therapy for now. If nothing else I've got a sunk cost fallacy going on where I really want to extract something valuable from it.