What is your experience with therapy? Have you tried it? Wanted to try it? Hesitant to try it? Overwhelmed? Did you have a bad experience?
Recently I have noticed some neurodivergent people have had negative experiences with therapy. Here I want to clarify my own story about how both therapy and neurodivergence are helping me heal and become the person I want to be.
Briefly, I have been in therapy, counseling, or coaching (I use the general term therapy to describe all of these forms of help) for thirteen years. I began my healing journey after a divorce and retiring from my career to be a stay-at-home dad. I have seen over a dozen specialists over those years and continue to see a therapist today.
Recently, my current therapist suggested I complete several autism and general neurodivergence self-assessments. I was surprised to discover I scored quite high as autistic. This began a new type of healing for me where I considered for the first time that, perhaps, there was nothing wrong with me that required fixing.
The shift in me was so significant that I shifted the focus on my podcast and writing to document what I am learning. Instead of feeling broken, I am starting to come to terms with being ok. Being different isn’t a bad thing, after all. This has been and continues to be, incredibly freeing.
But I also realized that my psychoanalytic journey is also extremely helpful. Just not in the way I thought it would be.
Therapy helped me build a practice
I used to think it was funny when lawyers and doctors talked about having a practice. I’m like, ‘If I’m paying you a bunch of money, I don’t want you to practice on me. I want you to already know what you’re doing!” And while that’s humorous and all, I get it now.
A practice, to me, is something you do because you know it works but it might not be directly linked to a particular outcome. My practice is a series of things I do almost every day. I say ‘daily-ish’, because Dan Harris of 10% Happieruses this phrase and I like it. I don’t put pressure on myself to be militant about my practice, but I do it all frequently enough so that it is maintained as a critical part of my life.
My practice grew out of therapy, although I didn’t realize I was building it. Over the years, I tried all of the things that were supposed to help. Journalling, meditating, exercising, and a healthy diet were all components supposed to make me feel better. More generally and ambiguously, having a good mindset and being mindful were also supposed to help.
I considered my early attempts at each of these things to be failures because I couldn’t see any direct results. But I kept at them because, well, you never stop hearing about these things in personal growth circles. It’s like the broken record of solutions, amirite?
I realize now that my problems stemmed from expecting immediate and specific results. Despite having convinced myself I was being patient, I wasn’t. But I practiced enough of these techniques regularly enough (ish) that I started to see changes.
I didn’t associate changes in my moods and beliefs with anything I was practicing
The first result I noticed was being able to catch myself in a limiting or irrational belief. Instead of automatically inserting a behavior pattern when I was triggered or angry, I started being able to sort of watch myself react.
I had been taught about the observer’s perspective, but I had never seen it in action. I thought this was something I was supposed to learn more familiarly. Like most of therapy, I thought I was supposed to teach myself intellectually and then make it happen within myself. It never occurred to me that healing didn’t work like that.
Generally speaking, that was my whole problem over the past thirteen years. I expected certain causal relationships between my intellectual understanding of a thing and changing my behavior and beliefs. Fortunately, meditation eventually led to a shift in my body.
Getting out of my head and into my body changed everything
Somewhere along the line, I realized I understood everything intellectually but that I wasn’t seeing any real change in myself. I eventually stopped trying to intellectualize the lessons and started experiencing them somatically and emotionally in my body. This is when things started to shift. When I started learning about neurodivergence things took off.
I could attribute my newfound ability to take the observer’s perspective to meditation, but I was also experiencing other new sensations. I was getting more in touch with my body, my values, and my emotions. While I felt like meditation was helping, I couldn’t identify specific causal relationships between new habits and results. All I could say was that I was changing.
And changing was enough. So much so that I learned to let go of my intellect a little. It wasn’t helping me that much anymore, anyway.
Over the years I honed in on what I think are the most helpful techniques. I make it a priority to do them daily-ish, trying not to miss more than a day or two once in a while. I have a positive experience with each element but think the combination has emergent properties. I can’t explain it, but if I stop any one of them for long I can feel it. This is an entirely different way of knowing than I am used to.
Less intellectual, more somatic
My practice now consists of several elements. I can’t tell you how they work or what, specifically they do. But I believe they are the changes in my behavior that help me change my thoughts, emotions, and actions. Here’s a list of things I do daily-ish (I included links to older episodes on some topics):
- Meditation. I meditate regularly 4–6 days a week for 10–20 minutes. Frequency and duration change with opportunity, but I try to never miss more than two or three days. Meditation helped me turn off my analytical and intellectual mind to find my emotional and somatic parts
- Awareness. I think awareness is a skill. Being aware is a critical first step to any personal work and meditation has helped me really understand this.
- Mindfulness. Meditation has taught me how to be in the present moment throughout my days. I can’t quantify this, but I spend a lot of my time being mindful of what I am doing and not thinking about the past or future. To me, this resembles the ‘not doing’ and Wu Wei concepts from many religions and belief systems.
- Exercise. Currently, I am doing 20–30 minutes of yoga daily-ish, which I count as exercise. Over the years I have done 20–30 minutes of treadmill, HITT, and body weight workouts 4–5 days a week. My workouts have made me aware that prioritizing flexibility is more important right now so that’s what I’m doing. Paying attention to my body is a recent skill I attribute to my practice.
- Mindful eating. I don’t diet, but I try to eat more protein than I normally would and watch refined sugars and processed foods. I don’t drink anything but water, coffee, and beer. I’m always thinking about that last one, but I’m still a human.
- Journalling. I have journaled almost every morning for 10–15 minutes since before CoVid. I developed this habit before meditation and it is probably one of the most critical elements in understanding my emotions and values.
These are things that work for me, and they can work for you, but you must develop your own, personal practice. A good therapist, counselor, or coach can introduce you to the tools and help you design a practice that works. I’m sure there are other ways, but these tools are readily available and have worked for lots of people.
I don’t think I knew what healing was.
And I’m not saying I know now, but I do recognize how far I’ve come. I don’t think I would have learned as much from a neurodiversity self-diagnosis had I not gone through the past thirteen years of therapy. It’s almost as if everything happened the way it was supposed to. Only I didn’t understand that until now.
Therapy taught me how to build my practice to build a new life for myself. Therapy might be able to do the same for you. I’m sure there are other ways. I think the most important things I have learned are that:
- Healing will not look like what you think it will look like.
- You might not get specific results from specific actions but there could be combined effects that materialize in unexpected ways.
- Creating a practice of beneficial activities is likely to be a critical part of anyone’s healing path toward change.
Remember, this is just one dude’s experience. I’ve put in a lot of work and am seeing significant results, but no one can tell you exactly what you need to do for yourself. Doing the work is a critical part of healing, but only you can figure out what that looks like. There are many people here who can help, but a lot of the work you’ll have to do yourself.
Good luck and good healing. If I have any advice it is to learn how to get more into your body. Listening to and learning to feel music could be a good start.
In this podcast and video, I go into more detail about my practice and the pathway I followed to develop it. If you like this kind of stuff, please consider subscribing to one of them and/or my Medium page.
Podcast audio:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/14288182
YouTube video: