(thread 3/3, continued from previous comment)

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> I am desperate for a coach. The therapists I’m currently seeing are not providing actionable advice. We spend most of our sessions introspecting and self-validating, which has run its course.

Given that you've got some form of ASD - so do I - it's possible you're misinterpreting the advice they're trying to give you.

I got frustrated with my therapists because I felt like they were trying to tell me I was "wrong". That there was something wrong with my logic. What I didn't understand is that they were trying to show me that there was something wrong with the INPUTS TO my logic. In the same way that it's not "illogical" to be colorblind, it's not "illogical" to be depressed - but it will feed factually inaccurate estimates into your consciousness in a way that can result in distorted behavior.

Imagine a thermostat that works perfectly, but whose temperature sensor is set 10 degrees too high. The AC will always be on, even though the thermostat is working perfectly! It's correctly interpreting incorrect inputs.

You're the thermostat. And because you can ONLY see the world through those distorted inputs, it's hard to see that they're distorted at all. They just look like the world.

What therapists are good for - or at least what they were good for for me - was helping to point out patterns of behavior and teach me about the repeating cycles in my own life. They could point out that my judgements one week differed from my judgements another week because one session had been in a particularly bad depressive episode and another had been during one of my rare breaths of air. (My particular depression takes the form of something more akin to a baseline-lowered bipolar II; I get occasional mild hypomanic episodes but it's usually just getting back to baseline-ish health.)

They could also help me understand my emotions as things somewhat distinct from myself. And just like inattentive ADHD might make it hard to focus on your own life, emotional processing problems from ASD can make it hard for us to understand our OWN emotions, too. We can't always read ourselves any better than we can read other people. Insofar as we're not naturally talented at emotional processing, we need help to understand ourselves. Or we at least need a lot of hard work at it.

As a concrete example, something I always hated was advice to "practice self-care". How the hell was I supposed to practice self care? I already wasn't doing anything, I was already eating like Jabba the Hutt, I was already playing video games all day! How was I supposed to go any easier on that than I was?

But from my current understanding, I can explain it a little better.

Remember how I've been framing all of this as a sort of environmental barrier? Well, self-care means "devote your energy towards environmental improvement and towards replenishing the emotional energy you're expending trying to overcome that environment".

For example, for me, self-care is not not cleaning up my room. It is, in fact, cleaning up my room. Why? Because a cluttered environment is distressing and distracting for me. It creates an environmental barrier that worsens my mental health. And as a result, it adds a tax to everything else I do. I'm paying "interest" every day I don't clean my room, so cleaning it is like paying down credit-card debt for someone in financial trouble. It's a way to stop the rate at which things backslide.

Or for me, self-care is not playing video games all day every day. Because what that often is for me is avoiding things that are distressing me. They're still there, they're still distressing me, I'm just not focused on them (so they can never become salient enough to act). Instead, I have to take care of those things that bother me, THEN go play video games to let my brain wander the way it wants to after burning some of that energy.

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The broad point I want to make here is this: you are trying to make big, sweeping changes to your life. You can't actually do that. What you can do is make small improvements that start to tilt your life in the right direction. And then down the line, you'll have more tools to make other small improvements. It's a process of building momentum, not a thing you do all at once. You cannot "change your life". You can take one small action that will eventually lead to a chain that will, almost imperceptibly, change your life eventually. That's true even for neurotypical people, but it's especially true for you and me, buried as we are in multiple layers of emotional and motivational processing problems.

You CAN beat it. You just can't beat ALL of it TODAY. And you are NOT a bad or broken person for struggling. You're just a human being trying to do something very hard.