The University of the Self #101
High Intensity Therapy Session 4
High Intensity Therapy Session 4
This article follows on from number 3, which can be found here.
Part 2 can be read here.
Part 5 can be read here.
Content warning - this article discusses mental health issues
Content warning: this article discusses a therapy session, stress, mental health issues
Sometimes the writing happens more easily than others. This is one of those times when it doesn’t seem to want to happen at all. I want to - the desire lurks the corners of my mind, but I feel dull, blunted, fuzzy around the edges. I am struggling to focus - my brain works overtime to find and hook onto distractions. I’m trying. Everything is coated in a sticky soup. A toffee soup. These sessions are getting to me. The more they go on, the less fluent I feel. But if I don’t write, the biggest part of my identity is gone.
No driving or parking stress this time, as I got a lift. So, I spent the journey there looking out of the windows instead of planning potential hazards in advance. I took another bag of too-big clothes for the clothing bin but needed help to get them in. My left arm will not get better and raising it higher than elbow height seems impossible. More layers of the old me jettisoned. All my exoskeletons. I don’t want to keep them. I don’t want to be her anymore. Don’t want to be her ever again. I have lost so much weight I no longer know how much of the original me is left. It’s no wonder I don’t know who I am.
In the foyer, I look at the boxes of food. In the centre, there are as many pumpkins as can be balanced in a small space on top of one another. A bright orange jumble of them, mostly quite small, for our expectation of pumpkins, though if I had ever managed to grow one half the size, I’d be ecstatic. Pumpkins are so lovely it is hard to believe they are real. Knobbly ones, bobbly ones, shapely ones, wonky ones. This is pumpkin time of year – how many of these I always wonder, do to waste? A pumpkin is for nourishment, not just for Halloween. Though they are incredible difficult to prepare – it’s like cutting into a boulder. Next to the pumpkin pile, are dozens of packets of tortillas – they are a lovely golden colour and spill about like plastic toy coins. Next to them, a few of the bread rolls and a couple of breakfast pastries and doughnuts with greasy shadows under them.
I sign in. People here are starting to recognise me and say hello. I don’t feel as aware of my surroundings as I usually do. The box of silicone baking paraphernalia is still there. On one of the bottom shelf of the bookcase are some pairs of new shoes – flip-floppy low-heeled ones that would go well with a gingham tabard, a cigarette and housework. I can’t wear shoes like that anymore when I am out and about – they would never keep the soles of my leg braces in place. I’d be an accident waiting to happen. I really miss smoking. Don’t smoke my friends - it’s very bad for you and really tough to quit. Joy of joys! A cardboard box of homemade crochet blankets in stripy colours. I love, love, love crochet blankets and though I already have a few of them acquired from car boots and charity shops, I really want one. They are £1.50. One of them will be my reward for enduring another one of these sessions. My excuse will be that I always feel cold and want to wrap myself into invisibility after therapy.
I wait for a few moments in the computer room, scanning the now-familiar posters. The two women in the room next door are still quilting, their sewing machines rattling as the pretty piles of reconstructed fabric spread like intricate floral lakes. X pops their head around the door and says, the lift is working today – I checked. Oh goody!, I reply. And cringe. And on the way down the thin corridor to the lift, I chunter to myself – goody-goody-gumdrops, goody-goody-gumdrops. I press the button and ask myself, what planet are you on? My life is a permanent facepalm.
I have had some incidents this last fortnight of random words popping out of my mouth – like I am sitting there thinking about something, like a line from a book or I’m pinning a seam to repair a sleeve, and without thinking I am going to, a couple of words pop out of my mouth which have no connection to what I am doing. Bread Matthew. Or Brown, uh-huh, Scrabble. I don’t like it when this happens – it makes me want to cry. I feel as if I have momentarily lost control of myself.
This happens to me sometimes – the last time was a while ago when I was being put through a terrible interview for something and I was unable to say anything else at first but Matthew (who the flipping heck by the way is this Matthew character, and what is their significance in my brain? Answers on a postcard please) and the horrible person in charge kept threatening that they were going to terminate the interview if I refused to (direct quote) speak PROPERLY. I don’t want to share this with X yet. Folk don’t believe you – how can you write like this, write poems and all that stuff, and claim to have this happen to you? I can’t answer this. So shove that question where the sun don’t shine. I have been masking the hell out of all these behaviours all my life, keeping then secret. And I don’t want to do that anymore. You need strength to keep secrets and I don’t seem to have much of that anymore. Hence, this paragraph.
Anyway. Plastic pot plants. Window, room, room, squeaky plastic chair, blah-blah-etc. Oh yes – a framed photograph on the wall to my right of a beach scene – soft yellow-white sand and a slatted wooden walkway which probably takes you to the sea which I cannot see.
We’re discussing my cognitive dissonance. I tell X that I tried to do a little research and ended up on a site which said that there were four different kinds – disconfirmation, compliance, justification and dissonance. X hadn’t known about four kinds and wasn’t sure of the website’s correctness, but we have a good go at discussing what they might mean. The website gave an example – like when you tell people that you are into healthy living then go round the back to smoke a fag and eat a pie. I dunno, I muse. It seems a little oversimplified to me. X agrees. My cognitions and my behaviours conflict. There is disconnect between my beliefs and actions. Distortions cause me to enter into further spirals and distortions. I am contradictory values – and my values and viewpoints are often not viewed positively by other people. How accurate, I ask, is the evidence behind what I am thinking? X replies, good question. I feel doomed to always be contradicted in thought and behaviour. You might have views, advises X, which might not be socially acceptable. They ask me how things might be if, when I have a thought, I ask it if it is a valid, accurate, relevant thought. Can I challenge it? Can I choose not to engage with it? The brain pulls you towards your thoughts. I feel exhausted and want to switch off. Isn’t thinking hard enough already? Perhaps I should doubt every thought I have. Is it possible to control your thoughts and rinse out the stains and creases before you hang your words on conversation’s line? I am pretty sure I am missing the necessary mental machinery to do this. How many more layers are required before I open my mouth? I say all this and wonder if this is what being obtuse means.
I draw X a rough sketch of my brain. This is what thinking is like in there, I say. I don’t know why I have drawn sort of atoms floating in vaguely north, east, south, west positions. I wasn’t aware they were there in my head but they managed to appear on my instantly-produced drawing so my head must know that they exist.
We discuss how much I struggle with processing and how I cover it all up with a smile. We discuss how I wait for one catastrophe to take eventual precedence over another – how what I don’t process accumulates and the result of this is autistic burnout. I have been on burnout for weeks on end – I am scorched – my mind is charcoal. I breathe out clouds of invisible smoke. This is what happens when you try to put yourself out there.
We talk about my endless loops. My eternal looping. Is it possible that I can learn to spot when a loop is coming? This won’t be easy, I explain. Not when there are so many of them and all the loops are different severities and strengths – hot thoughts, hot cognitions. What is my sense of emotional regulation? I haven’t a clue. Though I know that the ‘hot’ manifests itself as burning, beetroot cheeks and itchy skin.
X makes a start at explaining double empathy to me. My face is watching them, but my mind is so very tired. I am not taking things in as they hope I am. I scribble down ‘double empathy – some of my behaviours are not my fault – it’s the wiring. It is so exhausting being in your own head.’ I have been working on trying to understand it. Do people with autism lack empathy – absolutely not. This is a huge, damaging misconception. The way a person with autism interprets and expresses empathy is different to the way a non-autistic person interprets and expresses it. When the two meet, the non-autistic person might assume there is no empathy, because that empathy is not following the ‘normal’ ways of doing so. The two forms of empathy fail to meet in the middle, and both end up misunderstood. Different experiences lead to an “empathy divide.”
It seems that the person with autism, in my experience, has to work a whole lot harder and is expected to learn and integrate themselves into non-autistic culture, rather than the other way round. I can’t help thinking about how many people unfriend me on social media, or cease their contact with me, leaving me forever obsessing and worrying about why. I think maybe the double empathy problem has a lot to do with it. Maybe this is why so many people leave me out of things, dislike me, insult, dismiss and bully me. Everyone assumes the fault is mine. I think about the nasty little private messages urging me to ‘seek medical help.’ I am feeling a lot of anger. I don’t aways get things right – but neither do I always get things wrong. This is why I am learning to stay away from social media – I can mark other people’s posts with a love, like, care, sad or angry face, but commenting much in any depth is something I don’t feel able to do anymore. I am really trying to keep my opinions to myself. Instead, I write and write here – send my soul out into the ether.
I find it especially tough when I read people’s posts ‘coming out’ as neurodivergent, and the floods of supportive comments which follow. I state right now how glad, how utterly glad I am to read this support – this support is how it ought to be and I feel relieved for the person and take a lot of comfort in it on their behalf. But I also feel very sad, confused and triggered. When I did the same in a very small way a few years ago, I got negativity. Disbelief. I felt like a fake, a liar. I was devastated. I was utterly doubted. I got unfriended. Ignored. People talked about me behind my back. There were little, amazing lights of empathy which I clung onto like lifesavers. Because that is what they were and what they are. In those years since I have slowly crumbled into pieces and cannot put myself together again. Humpty Dumpty had a big fall.
I tell X all of this and apologise. I feel whiny. But X says they understand and that it must be really hard. It is. I have finally confessed how I feel about this, having kept it to myself for so long, swallowing it down again and again. I am tired of living with its burden. There are too many burdens as it is.
Determinism. X mentioned that too. I have that to think about when I have a spare moment. I ask about happiness again. Is it nothing more than the temporary absence of distress?
The session ends and I am really looking forward to buying one of the crocheted blankets and burying myself beneath it.
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