Relationship dating coaching therapy

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.

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

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