i need a new therapist

[Glides]

the reason why: a recent conversation with my mother where she revealed that I had been diagnosed on the autistic spectrum right around the same time that i started middle school.

that and reading a forum post somewhere on reddit about the tendency to "mask" symptoms and now i want to address that. i've already got severe depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and whatever you call it when multiple people have assaulted you. i've got all of those things. so now that's just one more thing, i've got a cornucopia of mental illness. it's a fucking miracle i've made it six goddamn years posting here with all the anchors with chains around my neck.

oh yeah, and the gender identity thing, that too. last therapist pretty much said outright that gender confusion was a sign of mental illness unless you'd had it as a small kid, and so i was just done. four years of CBT out the window. i need something else. have no idea what to look for to address all of this trauma. there's so goddamn much of it, and it pisses people off to deal with me. i don't know how to deal with myself. i don't know how to have the life i want, or even what life i want. i don't know any of it. i'm 24 and i feel like i'm still a child sometimes. i feel like a child being told to do grown up things or else.

I mean, is there anyone equipped for someone who is barely human, or someone who had never been human before? like a human skin and a body but the mind inside is just a shell or a faint outline of what human can be classified as? like how do you deal with that? the last therapist sure as hell couldn't cut it. so i don't know who the hell out there can do that. not to mention how the fuck do i get therapy that good that doesn't cost like the price of buying a house? i don't know. i've been posting here for six years. all i have to show for it is not intentionally being an asshole anymore. that's the only victory i have, that i was the worst incel who ever lived and i was so bad at it that even the incels rejected me. cuz i just wanted to be loved and cared for, and i wanted to be validated, and that doesn't mean shit unless you can give it to yourself.

i just want to cry all the time and my body never lets me.

[Enail]

You're human. None of that stuff disqualifies you from being human. And the CBT is not out the window; those are skills that you've built that you get to keep even if the therapist who taught you them turned out to be shit about gender.

And it's not unusual to need to change therapists sometimes if they turn out to be a bad fit for something you need to be working on at the time, even if they were useful for other things in the past, so you don't need to find a magic therapist that's perfect at everything, just one who's got what you need for some of the next steps.