Do you love yourself? I know, it’s an extremely personal question. When a counselor first asked me this question I was taken aback. It’s offensive and puts one in a defensive position. And who likes feeling defensive? But therapy is about healing and I answered as best I could. Again, and again. I’m fairly certain every counselor, therapist, and coach I have worked with has asked me some form of this question. I do love…
The Purpose of Growth Embracing neurodiversity Have you ever felt like everyone understands the rules except for you? Me, too. And I’ve spent over a decade in therapy trying to figure it out. The main reason I sought help from therapists, counselors, and coaches is because I have always felt different. Like everyone else got the ‘Manual to Human Life’ except for me. As a result, I have always felt like an outsider. I think feeling…
Are you a religious person? An atheist? Agnostic? I consider myself to be agnostic. Mostly because I Don’t Know. If I had to choose any belief system to attach to, I would be a Darwinist. Natural Selection is the best explanation of the meaning of life I am aware of. When I think about ‘why we are here’, I can’t help but recognize how life persists through time and changes with each generation. In short, I…
Have you ever felt like the only person who didn’t receive a ‘How to Live Life’ handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I’ve felt like that my whole life. And it isn’t that I don’t like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world’ to the ‘outer world’. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I’m different. And don’t…
If you are in therapy or considering psychoanalysis this episode is for you. This episode is also for you if you have been wondering about neurodivergence, autism, or ADHD. This is the beginning of what I think will be a long quest and potentially a new direction for this podcast and blog. In this episode, I lay out my experience with psychoanalysis and my recent foray into learning about ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and neurodivergence.…
I used to think there was something wrong with me. AsI mull over my recent late self-diagnosis of Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) I feel the need to document my thoughts. This is the third of many posts to come on the subject. I started telling my neurodivergent story here and here and I think I’m going to be podcasting and writing about this a lot. My purpose in this essay is to illustrate the many ways that…
I ask this question as part of my journey to demonstrate that diversity is better than conformity. The idea, briefly, is that Life facilitates variety or diversity, yet we humans seem to resist this. We are all different, yet we do everything in our power to reduce this variation by trying to force each other to be the same. This journey was influenced recently by my exploration of neurodiversity and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD or…
Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think? Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end? I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What’s weird it that we try to not do this. When we have two…
My raw, early stages of self-diagnosis Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash Do you know someone who is autistic? Do you picture someone like Rain Man? Or someone like me? I’m Chris. I’m a smart, smiley, eye-contact-making, happily married father of four. Do I seem autistic? The answer is no. I don’t think many people would suspect me of being autistic. During thirteen years of therapy, counseling, and coaching no one even mentioned autism or ASD (Autism Spectrum…
Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant? I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off. I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice. It’s like a medical doctor with no bedside manner. If you can’t communicate with…