Treatment, love, and limits

I have treated so many adults on the spectrum. A few successfully.

And what I learned in school has proven barely relevant to the process.

Clients who come in trapped in the prison of their mind are in a fight for their lives. No clinician, no person, can ever win a battle to break into the fortress.

It's what the fortress is guarding against that needs addressing. Most clients I've met are dying of loneliness.

Most are guarding, full time, against a pervasive and nameless panic, or, in Sylvia Plath's words, the "o-gape of complete despair".

To imagine I might outsmart a client's mind, as it builds and rebuilds its walls of protection, is to have no understanding of my own limits.

I hope that, as we develop more and more complicated ways to name and talk about symptoms, we will eventually come to the simple understanding that to learn to give and receive love, after one has learned to live without it, is the bravest, most heroic journey.

It is the only journey. The rest is walking in circles.