Talk Therapy

I'm kinda curious, how many here have done talk therapy for one reason or another?

Did it help? Was it useful to engage in?

The reason I ask is, about a month and some ago, my doctor believed that talk therapy would help me work with anxiety, as well as identifying/processing/explaining some emotions (Something I realized how bad I am at after reading much of "FInding your own North Star"). I'm ... honestly, quite hesitant in how useful this will be. Part of me really hates asking others for help...including doctors. So I normally don't go to see a doctor unless it's a really bad issue. I'm not really sure what part of me believes going to doctors as a bad thing. I'm kinda under the assumption that, at this point, that psychotherapy isn't really useful.

i'm not really into a lot of psycho-babble either. but you can hardly judge this objectively without even trying it. so, my advice is: if you don't find the whole idea fundimentally objectionable, like i do, then give it a go. these kind of therapies depend completely on the therapist and the patients ability to develop trust in them. if you have serious trust issues, as i do, then it probably won't work. but nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the old adage says.

Yeah...I have trust issues too, and I can't really say I trust anyone really besides my father (and there it's even less trust). I'm not sure how open I can be with someone like this, either. Generally I'm fairly open, but I tend not to volunteer too much information, at least in person. I do a bit better online.

I don't find the idea itself fundamentally objectionable, but I do question how likely anything is to work. The danger I think I'll run into if not careful is I can go in thinking this and not won't make any progress at all...kinda like self fulfilling prophecy.

Luckily, I suppose luckily, I have about two months to try and figure this out. I have a meeting with my psychiatrist in 1.5 weeks, although things are mostly okay-ish, so I'm hesitant on meeting with him.

Well it depends on the doctor. Here's my experiences:

I went to a counselor before and didn't get much out of it, but when I went to a marriage counselor with my ex I found it VERY useful. The difference? The personal counselor just talked about "feelings" (Yeah, difficult for us aspies, and of course I knew nothing of AS at the time so it didn't come up) and it seemed like his goal was to just listen to any venting I wanted to do and then to tell me I'm "great" (you know, like positive affirmation kinda stuff).

The marriage counselor one the other hand, didn't do that at ALL. His goal was to put everything into very specific terms, and to teach us to communicate. For instance, my ex likes to use metaphors a lot, so whenever he would use one, the counselor would stop him and say: "OK what exactly does that mean? Give me an example".
I learned a lot from him about putting my ideas into terms that actually make sense to other people, and to break down what others (and I) say into terms that make sense from a logical point of view.

Of course my ex would like to say that the "marriage counseling" didn't work, because the marriage failed. But, the doctor told us in the beginning that the goal was not necessarily to repair the marriage, rather it was to break down the barriers between us so that we could more clearly see what exactly we had and if there was anything left (and for my part, there wasn't)
Obviously you don't need a marriage counselor, but my point is that if you do go to someone, try to find one that focuses on the "mechanics of things" and can actually teach you the things you want to learn, rather than just someone who is there to build up your ego, which frankly doesn't work very well on aspies anyway!

slugger wrote:Obviously you don't need a marriage counselor, but my point is that if you do go to someone, try to find one that focuses on the "mechanics of things" and can actually teach you the things you want to learn, rather than just someone who is there to build up your ego, which frankly doesn't work very well on aspies anyway!

This is fantastic advice, thanks.

You're right, building up my ego won't really work...I hate being complemented (weird, perhaps, I know..) and rather constructive criticism. I'll definitely keep this in mind the first few sessions..if it turns into a whole 'ego boosting' thing, then I definitely won't stick with it.

Maybe I can somehow lay down this idea of focusing on techniques and the "mechanics of things" in the first session, kinda be upfront in that I can't deal with just being complemented...and likely won't vent - I have a hard time with that too.

I've tried talk therapy twice. The first time was a complete waste of time and money. It was like I was talking to a wall. She was baffled when I emailed her telling her I wouldn't get back there. She thought "we were making progress"...

The second time was this year. The guy would talk all the time about what he saw as a relationship between some trait or something that I did and some symptom of the diagnosis he had given me. But when I'd mention these technical things directly (because I always want things to be as clear and well-defined as possible), he would tell me not to get hung up on the diagnosis.

And he loved to talk about "love". I would ask him to define what it was that he was talking about, but he insisted in talking about... "love" (no definition given). He too thought "we were making progress", in the sense that I trusted him in some special way. I didn't. Then one day I got fed of it and I just stopped going, like I had told him at the very beginning that I would eventually do.

I was aimless before I started therapy, then I only got more and more aimless while I kept going. All in all I think it was a bad thing for me to have his influence in my thoughts. He wasn't even a bad psychologist. He just... didn't "get it" at all, but he thought he did.

I've come to the conclusion that "talk therapy" with no specific structure is worse than useless. It's actually harmful. At least for people like me. But technically-driven talk, like the marriage counseling Slugger mentioned, does sound to me like a potentially helpful thing.

anagram, i think the therapists you've had just weren't very good. some are but most aren't. as a matter of curiosity, what were you looking for from these therapy sessions? i get a slight i'mpression that you possible didn't really know yourself. perhaps that's why they didn't lead anywhere.

shock_the_monkey wrote:i get a slight i'mpression that you possible didn't really know yourself. perhaps that's why they didn't lead anywhere.

Isn't that what a therapist is supposed to be skilled at helping you with? (This is a rhetorical question.) It's not like this was a hidden theme in the sessions.

I don't think they were particularly bad. Just limited. Remember that Asperger's is barely known at all in my country.

I think they were bad at recognizing that their approach was simply not for me. Especially the second guy, he kept insisting that I needed to adjust my perceptions in the very opposite way of what I later realized I actually needed. It seems to me like the vast majority of psychologists around here will think of systematic approaches (both by the therapist and by the client himself) as essentially negative. I think it's a matter of outdated school of thought. They like to "humanize" things that are better dealt with as just mechanics.

anagram wrote:Isn't that what a therapist is supposed to be skilled at helping you with? (This is a rhetorical question.) It's not like this was a hidden theme in the sessions.

I think yes and no.

Personally, when it comes to meeting the doctor about anything..or therapy, or anything like that, I tend to research whatever it is we're going to discuss in a high amount of detail. There's only been a handful of times when I went to a doctor and said "please fix me", and usually those were times when I had little choice. If I have the choice, I tend to just read a lot about whatever i'm going in for.

I did this with the aspergers diagnosis as well. I suppose that's one reason why the entire diagnosis lasted maybe 1 hour and 15 minutes. Maybe not the most accurate diagnosis possible, but meh.

The problem, for myself, is that's how I'm going to approach talk therapy. If it's like the AS-diagnosis, I'll bring in paperwork from tests, notes on what I thought of the night before in prep, and so on. I literally spent about 4 hours preparing prior to the AS diagnosis. I really hate unknown circumstances..so I tend to prepare heavily for whatever it is I'm going in for.

So yeah, with that said, I personally believe it's important to go in with a guide about what one hopes to get out of it.

For me, I hope to get the following out of my meetings:
1) Better ability to understand my own feelings (I can tell happy, angry, sad..but I rarely can put a pinpoint on *why* I'm feeling those..and it doesn't get more detailed than that).
2) Better communicate my feelings. Even if I'm feeling pain about what someone is saying to me, I tend to just kinda clam up until they push enough buttons that I get more annoyed or just leave
3) Hopefully some better communication skills, here and there...maybe some ideas on how to better hold conversations. Especially conversations that I'm kinda forced to be around. e.g. like after my meeting tomorrow, walking back to the office with my boss. I can't hold up conversations with him at all.

TDT wrote:The problem, for myself, is that's how I'm going to approach talk therapy. If it's like the AS-diagnosis, I'll bring in paperwork from tests, notes on what I thought of the night before in prep, and so on. I literally spent about 4 hours preparing prior to the AS diagnosis. I really hate unknown circumstances..so I tend to prepare heavily for whatever it is I'm going in for.

I don't know if my shrink realized how much of what I said in therapy was really just a repetition of what I had posted here during the week, which in turn tends to be related to what I've been reading or tests I've been doing. I did tell him that this is how it worked, but I don't think he understood the extent of it. Just like the "special trust" thing. I told him there was no such thing going on, but he didn't seem to believe me.

I started therapy with the specific goal of being able to work again (my levels of motivation and organization had plummeted over the course of a couple of months). I knew that this problem was one and the same with my identity crisis. But still, my goal was to be productive again. I needed a systematic way to approach self-analysis without getting lost in the process, so that it could render concrete results. I was always very clear about it. That's what I wanted/needed (but unfortunately didn't get) from therapy. I think the shrink only made it easier for me to get lost in the process.