3:03am November 11, 2014

My psychiatrist and his talking talking talking.

It took me a long time to understand what my psychiatrist was doing. I’m not saying this of any one particular thing. I mean that nothing that he did made any sense to me at all until years down the road. And even when they made sense to me, they didn’t always make sense. As in, they didn’t always strike me as the most effective things he could’ve been doing.

One of his favorite things, though, was to talk. Incessantly. To people who weren’t talking back, especially. So if I was too shut down to respond to him, he’d come into the room (generally either a psych ward bedroom or an isolation room) and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk.

His favorite topic was people who had figured out what language was for. Only years later did I realize that this meant he realized I didn’t know what language was for, or that I didn’t consistently know, and that he was trying to tell me what language was for… by using language. The flaw in that plan should be obvious.

I know that I heard the Helen Keller at the water pump story no less than dozens of times.

I know that I heard stories about his previous patients who learned to talk after he talked at them incessantly for weeks, months, years on end. I sometimes wonder if they learned to talk just to get him to stop talking!

Some of them, to be fair, already knew how to talk, but had stopped talking due to depression or trauma or something else like that.

He said I reminded him of a girl who behaved exactly like a cat, right down to only eating off plates on the floor.

He talked about working on the black wards of institutions that were still race-segregated, and wondering what his main patient there thought of this crazy white boy talking at her all the time. But she did get better and leave after he convinced her he was willing to listen to her story.

And that’s generally how the stories went: He would talk, and talk, and talk, and indicate his willingness to listen, and eventually his patients would start talking to him little by little, and somehow they’d get better and get out of the institution. Generally.

Or he’d tell me stories about autistic people he’d met and how they learned what language was for. Because apparently whenever he met autistic people, he made a point of figuring out at what point, and how, they worked out what language was for.

The thing was, I didn’t need a shrink talking at me in NT-speak about other people’s experiences.

I needed an autistic person talking to me in autistic-speak about experiences that I also shared with autistic people.

As soon as I got exposure to that, that’s when my language skills started coming online consistently. (Before that, they came online inconsistently and without any clumped-together knowledge that language had meaning. So sometimes I communicated perfectly, sometimes I couldn’t communicate at all, and most of the time was spent in the grey area in between.)

I’m just slightly baffled by my shrink. Then again I’m always baffled by my shrink. He was sometimes incredibly perceptive, sometimes incredibly obtuse, and always incredibly unpredictable. On the one hand, he was aware of the gaps that existed between my knowledge of the world and other people’s knowledge of the world, and he was more consistently aware of those things than anyone else in my life. On the other hand, he was completely unaware of the ramifications of those gaps.

(Speaking of gaps, WTF is a ramification?)

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