AnarchistArtificer

I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren't a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very "influencer" shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it's all you see.

I love the word "Epochalypse", from the wiki page you linked

I think you've excellently captured the difference here. I didn't get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn't discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn't been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people's screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

I don't generally like AI generated images, but this is great

This is just needlessly hostile. You seem to dislike America, but imagine if the things that you dislike could change and America could be better. The article linked is a part of the process to understand and hopefully change things so that this kind of awfulness never happens.

Why be so unkind? You and OP appear to be on the same side, wrt being against gun violence.

I don't think you're necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people's varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can't tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can't really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there's going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I'm not going to try and change mind, I'm just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There's a lot of references I don't get, but I don't need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn't shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn't always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you've got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I've had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

I have both autism and ADHD, and whilst it's difficult to draw the line between the two, I do have some instances of inertia that feel more ADHD flavour than autism. I've also seen many of my ADHD friends struggling with something like this too, but it seems like it works differently than autistic inertia.

I think that there's a decent chance that understanding autistic inertia will help us to understand ADHD inertia, even if they're distinct modes

I really relate to your comment, and one of the most rage inducing experiences I've ever had was someone lecturing me on how I shouldn't call myself disabled, and then they badly explained the social model of disability to me.

However, I also find neurodivergent a useful term because I think that what we understand as disability is limited by our current world view. An example that feels analogous to me is how colonialist empires dismissed the art, culture and knowledge of indigenous peoples because they projected their preconceived values onto them.

I think that there's a lot we don't understand about autism, and how heavily normative society is holds us back. There are things that I am great at that feel inextricably linked to my autism. That doesn't negate all the difficulties I also experience, but the word "neurodivergent" and the conversations that have developed around it feel it carves out space where I can lean into my autistic traits in situations where they're strengths without having to be "super-autistic"; but also I can struggle in ways that neurotypical people can't fathom, and it isn't viewed as "negating" my strengths.

A large part of this is because the first chunk of my adult life, I broke myself by trying to act overly neurotypical, and like many autistics, I found that masking to this degree was unsustainable. Now, I'm much closer to a balance where I can pick my battles and not force myself to be something I'm not - like having tinted glasses for the office instead of expecting myself to somehow cope with my light hypersensitivity. In many ways, it feels like a different mode of being altogether - "wellness" for me looks different to "wellness" to a neurotypical, and I'd wager that "wellness" for you and other people in this thread would look closer to my version than the neurotypical version.

That being said, I agree that the way that people talk about stuff like ADHD and autism feels icky as hell. Personally, I find it more depressing to pretend that I'm not disabled, because actually, ignorance isn't bliss when I can't run from my reality. Sometimes things just suck, and they're hard, and pretending otherwise makes it harder to cope with because it's implicitly saying "I'm lying to myself because the truth is untenable".

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

I don't have time to elaborate much now, but I want to add my voice to the conversation.

I'm someone who often rants and rambles about the limitations of CBT. I think it's overused, is part of why. I've had 3 or 4 different courses of CBT, largely because I haven't been able to access any other kind of therapy. The last few years have been spent trying to get access to literally any other therapy and it's frustrating to be told time and time again that I'm "too complex". For me, it's about "right tool for the job" and there definitely are jobs where CBT is an ineffectual tool.

In this analogy, "jobs" aren't people, but particular situations and points in their life. Right now, I need basically any tool but CBT, because where I am now, I think more CBT would be actively harmful. I do feel that CBT was helpful for me, but that it has reached its limit in what it can offer me. I think the second course of CBT was probably useful, but anymore beyond that was pointless, for me. The second course was helpful because I wasn't in a place where I could effectively engage with the stuff the first time round, it feels like rereading what was once a difficult book.

It can very much depend on the therapist you get, but I think that's true for neurotypicals doing CBT too (which isn't to say that it affects equally, I think a therapist who you can't connect to is way harder to cope with as an autistic person, and probably more likely). But what I mean to say is that I think that CBT, when done well, has a lot of potential, especially as a front line treatment (it's very accessible to people who haven't done therapy before). There also branches such as trauma informed CBT, or eating disorder informed CBT, or indeed, neurodivergence informed CBT. I don't know anyone who has done CBT aimed at autistic adults, but I'm not the only autistic I know who felt CBT had helped them.

I think one of the tricky parts about CBT is how accessible it is. It is, in its base form, quite versatile, and can be tailored in more structured ways, as discussed above. It's probably useful to bring back my tool analogy here, because something that feels important is that when I talk about different tools, one valid way of looking at that is the therapy program by itself as the tool, existing separately from the therapist. In this framework, the therapist is someone who uses a particular tool to do a job, where the job is something that you're struggling with in life. This framing is useful because it allows us to think about bad therapists as people who are using a tool incorrectly.

I imagine most trained therapists have some knowledge or experience on how to use CBT as a tool, because it's so accessible. Some people become experts in one particular tool, and some people learn it and never use it again, but find their knowledge of that tool useful in understanding the overall landscape of what's available.

My point is trailing away a bit, so I'll try to sum up where I'm going with this. Some people say that CBT is an inherently harmful tool, even when used skillfully by a Good Therapist (TM). I disagree with that, but I sympathise. I see the harms they point out and in my opinion, that could be improved by having therapy in general be more accessible, especially more specialised therapy yours - I think CBT works as a first step, but only if it's not the last and only step. Some people believe that CBT is inherently harmful to autistics specifically. I think I disagree with this one, but I'm a lot more split.

Here are a couple of autism/disability specific limitations that I found: 1.) I am physically disabled in a way that makes it hard to budget energy. Sometimes I have to deal with situations where I need to do more than what my body is capable of, and if I push myself too far, I will make things much worse. I didn't find CBT techniques very useful for situations where I would be paralysed by anxiety because I'd be having to choose between wetting the bed and attempting to get to the bathroom and hoping I don't fall (it's easier to change a bedsheet than to come back from the acute injuries of a fall). No-one should have to make decisions like that, but I regularly have to and it sucks. My anxiety is pretty reasonable in those situations, I can't logic my way out of it with CBT methods. Once you get the bad brain stuff out of the way, what can remain is the fact that sometimes things just suck and have to be weathered. Excessive use of CBT thinking in these situations often led to internalised ableism, where I put too much onus on myself to do or think about things differently, when my disabilities do put some practical limitations on me.

2.) An autism related example involves how coping with change is rough. I have a particular cereal that I have had for years, it's my old reliable and is one of my safe foods. One day, I see that it's packaging has changed a little: nothing too major, just the shape of the box and one of the logos. This makes me anxious and I do not like it for reasons I can't explain. My CBT trained instincts might ask about why I'm anxious - do I fear that the formula has changed? Is the new box size likely to cause issues with storage? Realistically, none of these capture the issue (the formula change thing is a valid fear, but I checked online and got confirmation that the product itself was the same). I don't know why this makes me feel uncomfy and none of the therapists I've worked with have either. We hit a wall on this problem, which makes sense to me - like, as helpful as CBT has the potential to be, it can't realistically (and doesn't aim to) make me into a neurotypical. Maybe CBT tailored for autistics might be better, but I don't know.

So to cap off those examples, the question was "when used by a Good Therapist (TM) who understands autistic people, is CBT inherently harmful to autistics?" and my answer to that is that I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's probably limited in some ways, but I don't know if that's unique to CBT. Most if not all therapies are likely to share the same problem, because in my eyes, the harm here stems from a normative way of looking at things.

Brief vocab lesson, "normative" roughly means "things that are considered normal and acceptable at a systemic/societal level to the extent that they're built into the unspoken assumptions we make when perceiving the world". The unspoken assumptions are tricky. Like when I say I want garlic bread, I mean garlic bread with cheese, because that's the only way I have ever, or would ever have it. A friend inadvertently broke my heart by ordering the wrong thing (because I'd told them I wanted garlic bread). I was devastated, but it was an important lesson in how your unspoken assumptions can sneak up on you when you meet people who don't share them. Normativity is how those assumptions interact on a societal level. Like if I say "imagine a couple, in love", you probably imagine a man and a woman, which is an example of heteronormativity, the implicit belief that being straight is the default. This doesn't mean that imagining a straight couple in this scenario is bad, it's just a way of saying that we should be mindful of the consequences of normative thinking, especially when with responses that are automatic, or when we build stuff on top of our assumptions

In theory, being aware of this stuff could mitigate a lot of the autism related issues with CBT. I'd argue that the reason why ABA is so harmful is because normativity is baked into it. That's part of why I believe that ABA is always harmful, no matter the therapist. In my view, "Good Therapist" and "Good at doing BA" are mutually exclusive, and I wouldn't be comfortable getting therapy of any sort with someone who endorsed ABA.

In terms of other therapies, there's been some research on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) for autistics, I believe. That's the one that's most been recommended to me (if I could get a bloody referral, angry sounds).

This got longer than planned because apparently I'm using this comment as an excuse to procrastinate, my apologies for rambling. I can't tell from your post whether your interest is academic in nature, or whether you're asking this because it's a possibility you're considering for yourself. If the latter is the case, my answer is squarely "worth a try". Bad therapists happen across the spectrum of different therapists, and much more common than that are therapists who aren't a good fit for a particular patient. It can take time to find someone you click with and even then, I remember spending most of my sessions thinking "ugh, I don't know what the point of this is, it doesn't make a difference". It did though, it just snuck up on me.

God, I love the internet.