Tags: #autism #therapy #psychotherapy #emotions #regulation
me
hey brain, do you remember Manual Lady?
brain
🤨 of course. That one who was fiercely convinced that emotions work like formulas in a textbook.
me
what formulas?
brain
the classic ‘therapy for autism’: 👉 ‘sadness – appears when you lose something, its function is…’, 👉 ‘anger – when someone violates your boundaries, its function is…’, 👉 exercises – ‘mark which emotions you feel in this situation’.
And when you said: “nothing, just nothing” – you heard: “it’s impossible, you always feel something – try to name it”. So your shutdown was treated like a system error. 🙄
me
and us?
brain
we tell her: ‘hello, for us it's the Cartesian system 📊. Pleasant/unpleasant × high/low. Coordinates, not definitions from a book’.
Her: “No, no, without naming emotions there’s no regulation!” 😂
me
so what happened?
brain
we adapted. You learned criteria like multiplication tables: ‘Sadness = function this way. Anger = function that way.’ And for peace and quiet, you added emotion labels in quadrants too. Exam passed. ✅ Then we read up that it's called Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect (1980) – and that the internet has ready-made exercise diagrams.
Or as some prefer: another level in the ‘Guess Emotion’ game 🎮. Except this doesn’t unlock life.
me
so what's the real-life effect?
brain
Zero improvement. You still felt like a 🔋 battery on red – only you were checking whether it was 2% or already 1%. Because in reality, what mattered was whether you had 2/10 or 3/10 energy, not whether it was called ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’.
me
and Manual Lady?
brain
ah, the growing smile on her face with each mastered formula. She breathed a sigh of pride that she ‘achieved success’ 💪📖, while you returned home exhausted as after a marathon – with a sense of loss and wondering if maybe you were broken.
And more confidently repeating: “I won’t change you if something serves you, then it’s good.” Only her NT-intuition kept trying to change us – because how is it possible that someone functions differently than in the textbook?
me
and now, compare with your current therapist.
brain
a chasm 🌉.
No textbooks, no tests. She says: “I don’t see your brain as broken, just different – and my job is to understand you, not fight against it”.
And indeed she does that: 👉 looks at energy: “You have 2/10, now +1 – so you can safely go cycling 🚲”. 👉 asks questions so simple they’re 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?”. 👉 doesn’t pull you down, doesn’t prove you need to “feel more”.
Effect? +1 energy after session, no frustration, no dysregulation. It’s like the difference between a bicycle with sand in the chain and one freshly oiled – same tool essentially 🚴♀️, but riding is completely different.
Conclusion
This is a revolution. I only read about it before, now I feel it myself – and still have disbelief in my eyes. I wish for myself (and others) such therapists in Poland.
Coincidence of people and stories is entirely accidental.