me
Brain, do you remember Manual Lady?
brain
Of course. The one who was firmly convinced that emotions work like formulas in a textbook.
me
What formulas?
brain
The classic “therapy for autism” version: “sadness — it appears when you lose something, its function is…”, “anger — it appears when someone crosses your boundaries, its function is…”, and exercises like “mark which emotions you feel in this situation”.
And when you said, “nothing, just nothing,” you heard: “that’s impossible, you always feel something — try to name it.” So your shutdown was treated like a system error.
me
And us?
brain
We explained to her: for us it’s more like a Cartesian system. Pleasant or unpleasant, high or low. Coordinates, not textbook definitions.
And she said: “No, no — without naming emotions, there is no regulation.”
me
So what happened?
brain
We adapted. You learned the criteria like multiplication tables: “sadness = this function, anger = that function.” And for the sake of peace, you even added emotion labels to the quadrants. Test passed. Then we discovered that it has a name: Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect (1980) — and that the internet is full of ready-made diagrams for it.
Or, if you prefer, another level in the game of “guess the emotion.” Except this game does not unlock life.
me
So what was the real-life effect?
brain
None. You still felt like a battery on red — only now you were checking whether you were at 2% or already at 1%. In reality, what mattered was whether you had 2/10 or 3/10 energy, not whether the state was called ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’.
me
And Manual Lady?
brain
The smile on her face grew with every mastered formula. She breathed a satisfied sigh that she had “achieved success,” while you came home exhausted, as if after a marathon — carrying loss, confusion, and the suspicion that maybe you were broken.
And she kept repeating, with increasing confidence: “I won’t change you. If something works for you, then it’s good.”
Meanwhile, her neurotypical intuition kept trying to change us anyway — because how could someone function differently from the textbook?
me
And now compare that with your current therapist.
brain
A chasm.
No textbooks. No tests. She says: “I don’t see your brain as broken, only different — and my job is to understand it, not fight it.”
And she actually works that way:
she looks at energy: “You’re at 2/10, now +1 — so cycling is still safe,”
she asks questions so simple they feel revolutionary: “How does this work for you?”, “How does your brain solve this on its own?”, “How can you create a space that serves you?”,
she does not drag you downward or try to prove that you need to “feel more.”
The effect? One point more energy after a session. No frustration. No dysregulation.
It is the difference between a bicycle with sand in the chain and one that has just been oiled — basically the same tool, but a completely different ride.
Conclusion
This feels like a quiet revolution. I had only read about this kind of therapy before. Now I can feel it for myself — and I still look at it with disbelief.
I wish therapists like this for myself and for others in Poland.
Any resemblance to specific people or stories is entirely coincidental.