Autistic therapist / therapy
Do you like your therapist? How do you find a good therapist? Does having an autistic therapist help? I'm a late diagnosed woman (low support needs and high masking), it's been just over a year and I restarted therapy in January. I'm wanting to gain more insight into my autism. I know all the obvious things like how I get overstimulated, I struggle to maintain friendships, I felt like I was different somehow my whole life, reading is very very easy and socializing is very very hard (spiky profile), I have outsized emotional reactions, etc. I wanted to restart therapy to find out about the stuff I don't know about yet because I'm lacking the insight. I want a professional's input to help me discover other ways the autism is effecting me without me having realized it. I feel like, without the insight I don't know what -else- I struggle with becuase that's just my normal. I need someone to point out to me that something isn't normal though. I feel like my therapy sessions are missing that lens of seeing everything through the autism and gaining that insight, though. Have you experienced anything similar? How did you deal with it? Does the kind of help I'm looking for make sense / exist? Thanks for your thoughts everyone!
(I have come to realize that autism isn't something that's directly treated because it's not a behavioral pattern that you can change like depression or anxiety can be. I feel like my depression and anxiety are pretty well treated and under control at this pount though, so seeing everything through those lenses hasn't been helpful. So, it makes a certain kind of sense that we're not "treating" the autism, I don't think I'm proposing that either, it's just that continuing to focus on anything else isn't helping. I just want to know what else I'm missing in terms of being autistic so I can address it and make my life a little more accommodating to my reality.)