I have been suspecting that I may be autistic for about a year and had been really nervous to being this up to my therapist. Before the session I sent her a list of some reasons and well as links to the embrace-autism site and a few other things.

In the session I explained to her that based on the online tests like the AQ etc it seems likely that I am autistic and wanted to explore it. Because of what I typically talk about in therapy……I actually expected her to agree with me and be open to exploring it together.

Instead she essentially told me that she didn’t even read through everything that I sent her. She said she doesn’t have much experience with autism except for when she was a teacher following students school accommodation requests. Then she asked me some questions but ended up going into this long ass tangent about complex PTSD (her specialty) and essentially explained away every autism trait that I brought up that I feel I have by saying it’s a ptsd symptom.

I could go into the examples but it just went so so poorly :(. I didn’t feel supported at all and I feel so weird because I really liked my therapist before this. I wasn’t really planning to seek diagnosis but now I’m considering trying to find a psych and new therapist who specialize in autism even though I honestly don’t even know if I am autistic.

Does anyone have experience or resources about autism in the context of complex PTSD? She told me to look into both and compare because she thinks a lot of autism traits and PTSD symptoms are similar but honestly looking into it only convinced me more that I’m autistic.

Anyway I’m just ranting I hope that is ok. I’m stressed because I think she handled the situation really irresponsibly and I don’t wanna go back to her I’ve been seeing her for like 5-6 years. I just can’t believe a therapist that admitted to not know a lot about autism tried convincing me that I’m not autistic.

Does anyone have advice about finding a good therapist that understands adult undiagnosed autism?