Relationship dating coaching therapy

Hi there,

I have a son who was diagnosed with Aspergers at 14, he is now 31. He is very successful in his career but reallly struggles with romantic relationships. 

im looking for a therapist in or near Hackney Wick to support him in making sense of it all. I’m a therapist myself, retired, and what I find difficult these days is every therapist I look at says they work with Aspergers & autism but non I’ve found have done any training for it. 

ssadly, all too often therapist lust everything under the sun as a thing they understand. This isn’t useful when looking for a a therapist with specific training & experience with an issue.

just wondering if anyone knows if any therapists, counsellors or coaches who they have found good.

im sure this isn’t unusual, it’s the subtle nuances he struggles with. He doesn’t know how to go from friend to girlfriend.

warmest wishes

Christine  

  • Thank you for sharing your experience. I have learned something that would  be very helpful.

  • You're most welcome.

    really notices how other men behave inappropriately to women and really doesn’t want to be like that.

    Yes, this can certainly be a problem for some of us, I think. While I agree wholeheartedly with the principles of feminism, I have come to realise that when it comes to romance, one can sometimes take "treating everyone equally" a little too far, such that one gives the impression of only platonic interest. I think it can also lead to to always leaving it too late to show one's interest, so that, for both parties, there might be fears of ruining what has become a valuable friendship. That it may take an autistic person much longer to read other people and to come to trust them only plays into this.

  • Hi there, thank you do much for your insight, I’m very grateful to you for taking the time to respond. I agree with you about the therapy work, it can be a good thing with the right therapist but this can be hard to find. It really does need to be someone who really understands Aspergers. We also had some trauma as a family, which is why I’m thinking therapist but probably a life coach would be better. 

    He talks to me a lot about his personal life (usually after a few beers), he worries about being the ‘creepy ‘ bloke and really notices how other men behave inappropriately to women and really doesn’t want to be like that.  

    His brother S is 3 years older, very good in company which has helped J to learn ways of being in company, S told me that he doesn’t notice when women are flirting when they’re out. 

    He swapped numbers with a friend of S’s a while back but didn’t contact her for 4 weeks. By this time the girl had moved on with someone else. When S asked J why he didn’t contact her, he said he didn’t have money to take her out so was waiting. He doesn’t understand that a call or a text explaining or just keeping in touch would be good to do. 

    I think what you talked about fits with how my son is. I’m meeting him for dinner next week and will talk through. He’s not much for reading books but have been looking for a book that’s appropriate and useful for him or a YouTube video maybe. 

    Anyway, thank you.......christine

  • Welcome, Christine.

    Before I proceed, I should point out that I do intend to sound a rather strong note of caution. However, I stress that I have nothing in principle against psychotherapy; in fact I have benefitted from it immensely - though as you rightly say, finding the right psychotherapist is crucial. I certainly empathise with your son, having spent all but a few short months of my nearly fifty years entirely devoid of romance in my life - though naturally, examples taken from my own life may not apply; so apologies if my rhetoric appears presumptuous in places (and please excuse the lengthy post - short ones take me far longer to write, as I'm a hopeless procrastinator when it comes to editing!)...

    I think it's important to be very clear that psychotherapy may be a very limited solution at best - because at it's heart, autism is not a psychological condition, but a neurological one (as I'm sure you're well aware!)

    When it comes to the "subtle nuances", it must be understood, that a large part of this may have much in common with the neurological agnosias - i.e. perceptual deficits, not just cognitive ones. People can very obviously tell that my eyes and ears are fully functional, as indeed they are; so they assume that I must be able to perceive approximately the same things which they do - but this is simply not the case.

    For example; if you tried to show me how to do something by demonstrating with your hands, I would struggle immensely to follow what you're doing, even if you went at a snail's pace and explained everything as you went along. I could draw a picture of your hands, or tell you about bones and tendons, but I'm often at a loss to translate another person's gestures into an equivalent for my own hands. As you might guess, this makes mimicry rather tricky. Since it's hard to perceive the correlation between another person's movements and mine, extracting any meaning from other people's gestures is incredibly difficult. Nor can I easily show my intent in this way, as I cannot picture how my gestures will appear to an outside observer. This is key to how we learn to communicate; and as I have found, social exposure and even work with an Occupational Therapist may yield only minor improvements. It is not a matter of semiotics - of recognising the meaning of signs - I simply cannot perceive what the physical action is which could even have any meaning.

    There is also the problem of attention and cognitive load. I do moderately well with facial expression tests - but only under ideal test conditions, where that is explicitly the sole task, there is very little time pressure, and there are no distractions (and very often a multiple-choice format, so I can strike out the "easy ones"). In a real conversation, picking up on the fleeting and far more subtle changes in expression is a different matter entirely. There is simply too much information coming into to my senses, it all comes flooding in far too quickly, and the separate senses don't gel into a coherent whole. I have to be constantly and deliberately refocusing my attention - there is no automatic "background processing" going on by which  the "gist" is picked up as if by osmosis. Meanwhile, all of this mental juggling distracts me from the noises coming out of the other person's mouth - so I can miss half of the words as well, especially things which are implied rather than spelled out explicitly.

    I have also become incredibly good at finding devious means to disguise much of this, so that it isn't immediately apparent that I'm struggling - but this tends to work only in broad strokes, rarely for subtleties (generally, it involves letting people think that I'm a lot more introverted than my true nature).

    Flirting is just about the most subtle form of human communication that there is, and it's a lot rarer than most others, so there is far less opportunity to learn "work-arounds" for any deficits. I have been told by friends many, many times that I have missed "obvious" signs of it; but I am simply unable to perceive them, let alone interpret them. It may be no coincidence that my one moderately successful romantic relationship was with a woman who worked with deaf and partially-sighted children - she did not make assumptions about what I was able to "read", and she didn't "read" things into my slightly odd postures, gestures, and prosody. Most people are far less accommodating, albeit unintentionally. Most likely they just subconsciously pick up the wrong "vibe" and assume that I am deliberately showing lack of interest. There is no corrective action that I can take, as I can never know when this is happening - the person doing the dismissing isn't going to explain to me why they're doing that, and maybe couldn't even explain it to themselves. To "get from friend to girlfriend" one has first to recognise the opportunity, and then to signal opportunity to the other person - and you have to get it just right, otherwise you might be seen as "creepy".

    Unfortunately, the old saying "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" all too often seems to apply to psychotherapists - their training primes them to read things in psychological terms, and they can be apt to disregard these perceptual and attentional effects; assuming them to be lack of desire, lack of practice, or lack of confidence (any of which may be present as well, of course). Suffice to say, this can result in a great deal of counter-productive frustration for the autistic patient - something with which I'm sadly all too familiar.

    To close; I emphasise again that psychotherapy may indeed do your son a lot of good; for example, anxieties may well have their part to play, as they do for me. My aim is certainly not the demonisation of "evil head-shrinkers". I just think it best not to get hopes up too high, to spare heartache should they be dashed, and that my comments might help you with deciding which therapists might suit your son and which may be making spurious claims. And of course, I don't doubt for a moment your loving commitment to your son.

    Best wishes to you both.

  • Hi Christine,

    You might want to have a look at our page on counselling and psychotherapy here on the NAS site - https://www.autism.org.uk/about/strategies/counselling.aspx - particularly the section which links to our Autism Services Directory for counsellors with experience treating people with ASD - https://www.autism.org.uk/directory/browse/cid=15~aid=1.aspx and the BACP therapist directory which you can use to search therapists by specialty, including autism - https://www.bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists

    Hope this is of some help,
    Ross - mod