How do you find talking to therapists?

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.

Pixie, if done properly therapy isn't a crutch it can be life changing and life saving, having someone walk beside you through your personal tanglees forest and ask if thats wood or a tree can make you see things from another perspective. A therapist is someone you can be honest with, but who dosen't know you outside of the therapy room and has no biases or preconcieved ideas about you. They can also be someone, who in a crisis, holds your hair out of the way whilst you emotionally vomit, this in itself is good, you don't need all that stuff inside you and having a safe space to let it out is good.

I've had a few years of therapy on and off, and whilst I can't say life is always a bed of roses, I do feel better about myself and when the negative self talk starts up I have tools to deal with it, like reality checking. That is, I have a thought about myself or a situation and the doom loop starts, I've learned to pause and ask myself how likely is that to happen really? Therapy has given me tools and taught me how to use them to fix myself, different therapists can have a different tool box too. As to worth, well how do you measure that? For me it's not being haunted by ghosts of the past so much and held back by them, the ability to hand back the negativity to someone that they have placed on me. We all have someone like that, often a teacher or someone who's inner nagativity was stuck on us and stayed and been internalised, it's not nor ever was ours, things like empty chair exercises help to shed give it back to the person it belongs to. It sounds daft, but it really does work, it's very powerful to be able to stand in your adult self, hlding your child self by the hand and saying to that person, 'how dare you lumber this child with such rubbish!'

Pixie, if done properly therapy isn't a crutch it can be life changing and life saving, having someone walk beside you through your personal tanglees forest and ask if thats wood or a tree can make you see things from another perspective. A therapist is someone you can be honest with, but who dosen't know you outside of the therapy room and has no biases or preconcieved ideas about you. They can also be someone, who in a crisis, holds your hair out of the way whilst you emotionally vomit, this in itself is good, you don't need all that stuff inside you and having a safe space to let it out is good.

I've had a few years of therapy on and off, and whilst I can't say life is always a bed of roses, I do feel better about myself and when the negative self talk starts up I have tools to deal with it, like reality checking. That is, I have a thought about myself or a situation and the doom loop starts, I've learned to pause and ask myself how likely is that to happen really? Therapy has given me tools and taught me how to use them to fix myself, different therapists can have a different tool box too. As to worth, well how do you measure that? For me it's not being haunted by ghosts of the past so much and held back by them, the ability to hand back the negativity to someone that they have placed on me. We all have someone like that, often a teacher or someone who's inner nagativity was stuck on us and stayed and been internalised, it's not nor ever was ours, things like empty chair exercises help to shed give it back to the person it belongs to. It sounds daft, but it really does work, it's very powerful to be able to stand in your adult self, hlding your child self by the hand and saying to that person, 'how dare you lumber this child with such rubbish!'

Hi Cat, thanks for your reply. I'm glad that therapy has helped you - I'm not against it at all, I just can't see it working for me. But we're all.different