Declaring Victory While the Monster Still Lurks
I got calm. I didn't get better.
I melted down one month after I was laid off from my job of 15 years. The layoff happened right as we were moving into our new home. We were facing a fresh mortgage, and our income divided in half. We were still adjusting to having my mother with us, and the daily issues of dealing with chronic disease and pain. I know she thought she was helping me that day, but I remember just collapsing in her room, and screaming for someone to make it stop. Not her words, but everything I was feeling. That was eleven years ago.
This is what I’ve been unpacking this past week. I’ve spent a lifetime worrying more about other people’s comfort than my own safety. I learned early that my safety depended on other people’s comfort. Every resource offered me when I asked for mental health support placed the problem internally. Therapy taught me to observe my own behavior as the proof of the issue. Medication numbed me to the point the pain was tolerable. So I stayed in environments that continued to gradually deplete me.
The way I described it to my therapist this week was this: Half of the trauma I’m carrying wouldn’t exist if it had just been okay for me to lose my shit once in a while.
I’ve known for quite some time to warn people away from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) (at least as a single modality). Because it usually doesn’t work for neurodivergent people - that I’ve known. But this week I began to understand the scale of harm it actually created for me.
Insidious Trauma
Harm that accumulates through repeated, non-violent, often well-intentioned experiences rather than a single identifiable event, and is hard to name precisely because no single instance looks severe enough to count.
After the event I described above, I began seeing a psychologist who was passionate about CBT methodology. She insisted on guiding me through 15 minutes of mindfulness in every 50-minute session.
Something that has stuck with me was a conversation we had about the difference between empathy and compassion. I was struggling to adjust to living 24x7 with someone experiencing chronic pain. I walked out of that session with a new perspective and skill — quell the empathy when I knew I was feeling too much and park it in compassion instead.
What I know now: I didn’t change how I felt, I simply learned to bury it under a different word so it was no longer acknowledged.
I’m sure I was supposed to connect the mindfulness to the compassion. When I look back with logic, I’m sure that’s the mechanism. But that’s not what happened. I didn’t have sufficient mental health to even come close to understanding that, never mind trying to process and activate it.
The empathy never left. It just got suppressed and ultimately, over the course of a decade, I burned out. Mom’s pain got worse and worse, and I never stopped feeling with her, I simply pretended.
In my experience, empathy is a noun. An event, something that happens. Compassion is a verb, an action you take. As soon as I began to acknowledge my empathy again, I started to come back to myself. I started to heal.
And as I continue to heal, I notice the depth of the harm that I’m mending. I’ve often said CBT gave me some helpful tools. But in general, those tools camouflaged my neurodivergence, placed the problem in me rather than helping to identify external causes for my anxiety, and delayed identification of changes that would be more healthy for me for decades.
Here’s what life was like for me using the toolkit that psychologist gave me:
Diligently using mindfulness to bear the commute to work so I could mask for eight hours and use mindfulness to bear the commute home.
Diligently using mindfulness to suppress angry reactions so I didn’t have to assert boundaries and engage in difficult confrontations where I would fail due to becoming non speaking
Diligently using mindfulness to try to focus on connecting with the people in my training room while conducting 40 hours of training each week under fluorescent lights glaring off the screen, the hum of the air conditioning, and the intermittent sounds of flushing and air dryers in bathrooms behind the training room.
Being praised in the hallway for my always calm demeanor.
Diligently using mindfulness to keep a supportive, calm face on in the evening while mom tried to keep a brave face on a pain spike of 16 on the ten point scale.
Feeling like I needed to try harder to get better at mindfulness because the anxiety never stopped.
Continuing and increasing the medications because the anxiety never stopped.
The CBT toolkit allowed me to continue the “I should”s. Which distanced the “I can’t”s.
I don’t have control of my access to words unless I have control of my environment.
I don’t have sustained capacity unless I have control of my environment.
I don’t have safety to show my authentic self unless I have control of my environment.
I was borrowing from capacity I did not have. I thought I was depressed. She thought I was depressed. So everything we did was focused on depression and anxiety. None of it addressed the underlying burnout. And that’s the harm of it all. It actually held me in the burned out state rather than surfacing the things that would make my life feel more congruent.
CBT seemed helpful. The underlying harm of the approach was not obvious. It often still isn’t. It placed the problem in me rather than the environment. The psychologist didn’t recognize that there was an underlying issue. She treated the observable symptoms.
Iatrogenic: adjective meaning induced unintentionally by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures.
Just treating the symptoms (depression and anxiety in this case) doesn’t necessarily create harm. But it becomes harm when the thing beneath them is allowed to progress and cause more damage or trauma without acknowledgment, and even more problematic, with the framing that what you are doing will fix you, that disassociating from the symptoms that are driving you to seek care will cure you, and that regulating your physical reaction IS you succeeding, is the cure, is all you need to get back to living your best life.
The psychologist and I declared victory when the monster was still lurking under the bed. I spent the next decade believing we’d won.
This post was written because of thoughts that occurred to me while reading Chris’s post:
I’m not going to try explain how this post relates to hers - but I related deeply to much of what I read there, and this post would not exist without hers.
I also was able to write this post because I'm not living it anymore. Two amazing therapists over the past three years made this recognition possible. The modalities that helped me were chosen because they prioritize environment and internal experience rather than just symptom control.
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"I got calm. I didn't get better." That landed like a stone.
The first thing that comes up is a simple interpretation that gains depth when you consider what it's doing. If you are calm, you are perceived as better. If you're better, you are fixed. If you are fixed, you no longer need help. And the cycle repeats. The therapies log another data point for someone they "helped." And the therapies keep getting offered to people they harm.
I haven't tried CBT, but I know what you're describing. The treatments I was offered included talk therapy, biofeedback, SSRIs, SNRIs, SARIs, and eventually, when the chronic stress became physical, muscle relaxants, nerve blockers, and opioids. These were all aimed at the downstream effects of being autistic without knowing it, not the source.
The source was the mismatch between my neurology and nearly every environment and relationship I inhabited. The pattern recognition that sees more than the room can hold. The translation labor. The constant remapping. The carrying of contradictions nobody else seemed to notice. The inability to put into words what I was actually experiencing. The world that provided no validation for any of it. The load that accumulates silently under the surface.
When I tried to describe what I was experiencing to professionals, I usually described it as rage held under the surface, which was the closest I could come to naming the load. Inevitably, the conversation almost always turned back to me. Are you safe? Are others safe? Which reframes suffering as threat and hands the problem back to you as a failure of emotional control.
But it was never emotional. It was the weight. Decades of accumulated load carried in a heavy pack I'd been trained to pretend wasn't there. The rage was what happens when a body carries that long enough. (And no, I never busted up a grocery store with a baseball bat, or anything like that. The "rage" stayed inside me.)
And it only began to come into focus with an accurate name after the whole system collapsed. After the bottom dropped completely out.
Where's the justice in that? There isn't any. What there is, maybe, is the makings of a map. My hope is that the next person doesn't have to wait for the collapse to get the accurate name.
This fits neatly into a piece I've been writing called "The File", which is one I haven't felt confident releasing yet. But the universe keeps offering me seeds of encouragement. This is one of them.
Thank you for writing this. And for the seed you grew from mine.
I relate to all of this and feel like I am always trying to figure it out - I’m now working with brain-spotting and a female AuDHD therapist because I got so tired of translating!