As always, names are changed-- in this case, abbreviations are used for my good therapists, and mischievous nicknames for some pretty bad therapists.
"Dr. L. would have some good advice for me on this," I often say to myself when I am having a difficult moment.
But then I remember that I am no longer working with Dr. L.
An undisclosed medical condition forced Dr. L. into sudden retirement in June, and after six years of working with him-- the longest I have worked with any therapist-- I found myself having to find someone else.
I have been to several shrinks since age eleven. The past thirty years of on-and-off therapy have taught me some valuable lessons, not the least of which is that finding a good therapist is an art. In a sea of "just okay" and bad shrinks, I have had three terrific ones, including Dr. L. I started working with a new therapist, Dr. P., in June, but I'm considering looking for someone else if something doesn't click in the next couple months. She is nice and open-minded enough, and in the beginning I was feeling optimistic about her. However, I have since begun to feel that things aren't clicking as well as I hoped they would. For one thing, I am not convinced that she is intimately familiar with the nuances of autism, particularly in terms of what it generally looks like in cis women*. For another, I find that she often misses my point. Plus, she will often ask me a question right after I say something that contains the answer that she is looking for. For example, I might tell her that I have known somebody for twenty years, and two seconds later she will ask, "How long have you known this person?" It makes me feel like that she isn't listening, or at least isn't completely processing what I tell her, let alone appreciate where I'm coming from.
What was great about Dr. L. is that he knows what autism looks like, including in cis women*. Unlike an alarming number of the psychological community, he knows it is a varied, colorful, complex, and nuanced spectrum, well beyond the stereotype of train-spotting, hyperliteral, STEM-genius cis men. In fact, on the day that I first met him, he said that he knew after speaking to me for about a minute that I was neuroatypical-- he has that kind of radar for autism, picking up on more subtle, less stereotypical cases like mine. After talking to him for about ten minutes, he also commented, "What I am hearing is someone who has experienced a great deal of loss." These comments clearly reflected someone who is highly knowledgable about autism as well as someone who quickly picked up on a common denominator in the stories I related.
Dr. L. was also good at validating my feelings while trying to help me sort through them. Sometimes I would tell him a story about a memory from my teenage years in the 1990s that had come back to haunt me, and I would say, "I feel like even among the autism community I have stories about traumatic interactions that are really unusual." He would tell me, "Believe me, this isn't anything I haven't heard before from an autistic person" and he would elaborate. You name the esoteric experience, he's heard about it at least once and often has some great insight into it. Sometimes, he would also ask me very disarming questions that would make me rethink my perspectives on certain issues. After getting to know me, it was also easier for him to contextualize any new information I gave him.
And finally-- and this is not a trivial issue-- Dr. L. laughed at my weird, gallows sense of humor. And that's important.
Aside from the importance of finding a therapist who understands your situation, it is important that this person is interested in little anecdotes about something fun you did over the weekend and appreciates your sense of humor. After all, if you're working with a therapist once a week, you are not going to have something "bad" to talk about every week-- sometimes not even for months at a time. Why should you? And being able to have everyday discussions with and laugh with your shrink is important. It helps them to see the whole person, and not just where things aren't working. Plus, it helps you feel more comfortable working with them.
I have had only two therapists besides Dr. L. who I really clicked with. The first one was Dr. F., whom I saw during my senior year of high school. He was the second shrink I had been to, after my shrink that I saw in elementary school whom I have since dubbed Dr. Bonehead (more on him in a bit). After the first or second session together, he commented, "You're a very intense person." Just like Dr. L., he spotted a common denominator right away. The other one, Dr. G., was someone I saw in my late twenties when living in New York City. Like Dr. F. and Dr. L., she was able to appreciate where I was coming from and help me to understand my feelings. She helped me to come to terms with a painful personal loss of two friends who had recently ghosted me (this was in 2008, one of the worst years of my adult life).
Dr. P. doesn't seem to be fitting all of these requirements. She enjoys listening to my anecdotes and laughs at my jokes but, as I've said, I'm not convinced she fully appreciates just what autism is and can be, and I feel her listening skills leave something to be desired. I don't think she's a "bad" therapist, but she might not be a good fit. I have had some "just okay" therapists as well as some awful ones, and I want to share a few stories to help my readers understand just how clueless and even inappropriate (nothing sexual in my case; don't worry) they can be, and that there's nothing wrong with looking for someone else if the shrink you're seeing doesn't seem to be helping. To make things easier to follow (and more amusing), I have given each of these therapists a mischievous nickname:
Dr. Bonehead: My first therapist, whom I saw between 1992-1995, ages 11-14. Nobody knew what autism was in the '90s beyond the Rainman stereotype, so I wasn't diagnosed. Dr. Bonehead meant well, but he didn't understand me at all. He told me I overreacted to the chronic bullying I experienced, he analyzed things that had no deep meaning, and he often expressed shock at my gallows sense of humor. And he seemed to think a good "cure" for my social deficits was to sit two feet away from me on the couch instead of sitting on the other side of the room. Hey, "normal" people would feel a little uncomfortable, but since I wasn't "normal," I guess he thought the answer was to throw me in the proverbial deep end and hope I'd swim. Oh, and he once told me my hair was sexy. While I don't think he "meant" anything by it (he had three years in which he could have touched me, and he never did-- not even a harmless pat on the shoulder), it was still inappropriate and, sadly, reflective of the culture back then when it was considered okay for thirty-something-year-old men to "compliment" adolescent girls like that. Again, I don't think he was trying to do something inappropriate; I think he was just clueless-- in many ways.
Dr. Uh-Huh: I saw this guy in my late twenties, in Brooklyn, for a few months before I started seeing Dr. G. I would tell him stories and he would just go, "Uh huh. Uh huh." I would ask him for some insight, and he would just shrug. Brilliant guy.
The Drama Queen: I saw her in Boston for a few months in 2014. She was inordinately convinced that I was harboring a repressed memory, which is just absurd because my episodic memory is better than most people's (Dr. L. said he has only worked with one other person in 45 years with a memory like mine). I have no trouble remembering traumatic experiences either, so I don't know where she was getting this. She also insisted that certain things in my life-- such as some drama in my extended family, which only came up because she actually had me make her a detailed family tree for some reason-- had a significant effect on me when I knew damn well it didn't. The family drama involved relatives I barely knew, and while I felt bad for my parents, who were at the receiving end of it, it had very little to do with me. These kinds of assertions felt like gaslighting. Additionally, The Drama Queen was Jewish, and she started asking personal questions to ascertain if I was "really" Jewish (that is, was my mother "born" Jewish? Nope, she converted-- I could see the wheels turning in her head when I revealed that). This is not just inappropriate, but irrelevant. Oh, and when I told her I was going to see cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker at an event to promote his new book, she said, "Maybe we can go together." Uhhh, that's a hard "no." Psychologists aren't supposed to interact with their patients outside of a professional setting.
The bottom line is that finding a good therapist is an art. It takes time, and sometimes you need to try several before you find one that clicks. There is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes they aren't a good fit, and sometimes they are just bad. And if you, like me, are a woman on the autism spectrum-- which sadly isn't very well-understood in much of the psychological community-- it can be like finding a needle in a haystack. My father said it best-- finding a good doctor of any kind, but particularly a therapist, is like trying to find a good mechanic. You can take your car to several mechanics who say, "I don't know what to tell you." And then one day you take it to someone else who takes one look and says, "Oh, I know what's going on."
Sometimes, you just need to keep looking when your therapist isn't working out. And there's nothing wrong with that.
*This is a very in-depth topic, and well beyond the scope of this blog post. But let's just say that even a lot of the psychological community remains ignorant of the different presentations of autism.
