Orc
diagnosed autist
Staff
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2022
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I was forced into therapy as a kid, the kind you get shoved into when you're in special ed, I never believed in it, not even then, it always felt like theater, something you sit through to make adults feel better about warehousing you.
the idea that talking about your problems to a stranger will somehow lead to transformation is a luxury belief, it works if you're built like most people, if your brain follows the rules, if masking isn’t soul draining for you, but for people like me who are autistic, pathologized, unfixable by design, it’s just another performance, one you’re expected to do on command, with a smile, and the right tone of voice, and just the right amount of ''progress''
the whole thing is insulting, infantilizing, they talk to you like you’re a scared little kid who just needs to be shown the way, you learn early that expressing how you actually feel makes people uncomfortable, they withdraw, they change the subject, you become something they don’t know how to handle, so they don’t
that’s what therapy is too, a place where your experience gets rounded off and reframed so it can fit into a treatment plan, where they treat your trauma like a scheduling problem, where being realistic is called negative thinking, and adapting to being unloved is labeled a ''cognitive distortion''
they tell you to find ''healthy coping strategies'', as if the issue is how you're reacting, not the environment itself, as if this isn't the natural outcome of living in a world that was never made for people like you to begin with
i'm not masking badly because I haven’t practiced enough, i'm masking badly because my brain was never meant to, and when they see you failing to fake normal convincingly, they don’t revise the system, they call you dysfunctional
therapy doesn’t rewire your neurology, and it doesn’t give you a new world to live in, it just trains you to be more palatable, it polishes your mask and sends you back out into the same space that taught you to hide in the first place
it can’t fix what’s fundamentally incompatible
at best, therapy might help you function just enough to keep your job or avoid suicide, but that's not healing, that's maintenance, that’s damage control, you're not becoming whole, you're becoming manageable
people like to romanticize recovery, they want to believe everyone's redeemable, that everyone can ''grow'' but the truth is some of us were shaped too early, too harshly, under the wrong hands, and no amount of insight or journaling or worksheets will undo that, not when your entire baseline is misaligned with the world around you
and deep down, they know it too, that's why they get so desperate to convince you it works. they need to believe there's a ladder out of this, that if you’re still struggling, it’s because you didn't climb hard enough, not because the ladder ends halfway up and was never meant to reach people like you
they say ''it gets better'' but they never say how, they don’t say ''it gets better when you learn to lie better'' or ''it gets better when you stop expecting anyone to actually care'' or ''it gets better when you stop talking about what really hurts because even therapists flinch when you name it''
they want transformation stories.
but I don't have a before and after, I just have this, a personality that's never fit, a brain that won't comply, and a life that's easier to endure in silence than to explain out loud
if that's not fixable, then maybe it’s not broken, maybe it's just incompatible.
and therapy doesn't fix incompatibility, it just teaches you how to smile while it eats you.
the idea that talking about your problems to a stranger will somehow lead to transformation is a luxury belief, it works if you're built like most people, if your brain follows the rules, if masking isn’t soul draining for you, but for people like me who are autistic, pathologized, unfixable by design, it’s just another performance, one you’re expected to do on command, with a smile, and the right tone of voice, and just the right amount of ''progress''
the whole thing is insulting, infantilizing, they talk to you like you’re a scared little kid who just needs to be shown the way, you learn early that expressing how you actually feel makes people uncomfortable, they withdraw, they change the subject, you become something they don’t know how to handle, so they don’t
that’s what therapy is too, a place where your experience gets rounded off and reframed so it can fit into a treatment plan, where they treat your trauma like a scheduling problem, where being realistic is called negative thinking, and adapting to being unloved is labeled a ''cognitive distortion''
they tell you to find ''healthy coping strategies'', as if the issue is how you're reacting, not the environment itself, as if this isn't the natural outcome of living in a world that was never made for people like you to begin with
i'm not masking badly because I haven’t practiced enough, i'm masking badly because my brain was never meant to, and when they see you failing to fake normal convincingly, they don’t revise the system, they call you dysfunctional
therapy doesn’t rewire your neurology, and it doesn’t give you a new world to live in, it just trains you to be more palatable, it polishes your mask and sends you back out into the same space that taught you to hide in the first place
it can’t fix what’s fundamentally incompatible
at best, therapy might help you function just enough to keep your job or avoid suicide, but that's not healing, that's maintenance, that’s damage control, you're not becoming whole, you're becoming manageable
people like to romanticize recovery, they want to believe everyone's redeemable, that everyone can ''grow'' but the truth is some of us were shaped too early, too harshly, under the wrong hands, and no amount of insight or journaling or worksheets will undo that, not when your entire baseline is misaligned with the world around you
and deep down, they know it too, that's why they get so desperate to convince you it works. they need to believe there's a ladder out of this, that if you’re still struggling, it’s because you didn't climb hard enough, not because the ladder ends halfway up and was never meant to reach people like you
they say ''it gets better'' but they never say how, they don’t say ''it gets better when you learn to lie better'' or ''it gets better when you stop expecting anyone to actually care'' or ''it gets better when you stop talking about what really hurts because even therapists flinch when you name it''
they want transformation stories.
but I don't have a before and after, I just have this, a personality that's never fit, a brain that won't comply, and a life that's easier to endure in silence than to explain out loud
if that's not fixable, then maybe it’s not broken, maybe it's just incompatible.
and therapy doesn't fix incompatibility, it just teaches you how to smile while it eats you.
