What Therapy Missed When I Asked for More Than Symptom Management

I didn’t want a mindset shift. I wanted the systems hurting me to stop.

Many years ago, I walked into a therapist’s office after spending months vetting the right one for CBT. I came prepared. Autistic burnout, CPTSD, and a sprinkle of trauma. A full menu.

Me: “So, I need more than symptom management. I need to fix causes. Overhaul capitalism. Dismantle racism, queerphobia, and ableism. I want equity, not coping skills. Rest as resistance, not avoidance.”

Therapist: “How about we call that anxiety, prescribe you some meds, pretend it’s all in your head, and just tweak your outlook instead?”

Me: “How about I piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining?”

This is an essay on CBT. And on the many times I was forced to believe it was the only option autistic people had.

It’s also about the moments I didn’t give up. The nights my body remembered what my mouth had softened for years. The realizations that came too late, or exactly on time.

I’m writing this now, at midnight, after my brain decided to drag me back to 2022. It’s not a therapy success story. It’s a map. Amalgamated experiences, hard-won clarity, and the kind of advice I wish someone had given me when I was still blaming myself for why it didn’t work.

What CBT Really Feels Like When You’re Autistic and Misunderstood

CBT = Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Not Cock and Ball Torture. But the confusion? Valid.

First things first. If you’re here because you thought CBT meant cock and ball torture, I’m begging you to clear your search history. This is about cognitive behavioral therapy.

But let’s be honest when I talk about CBT online, the kink community shows up in my DMs like, “Yes, Mistress.”

And in a way? The confusion makes sense.

CBT, for many of us, does feel like sanctioned psychological sadism disguised as help. Except in this version, I’m paying €140/hour to be told my trauma isn’t real.

Why CBT Often Fails Autistic Minds and Traumatized Bodies

When your brain is wired for pattern detection, “reframing” becomes denial.

Let me be clear: CBT works for some people. But when you’re autistic or ADHD and especially if you’re also Black, queer, and carry complex trauma, CBT starts feeling less like a tool and more like a blunt instrument.

It’s built on the idea that your thoughts are distortions that can be corrected. That if you just reframe your perception, the pain will lift.

But what if your thoughts aren’t distorted?

What if your fears have receipts?

When Therapy Gaslights Reality Instead of Addressing It

When someone tried to set my house on fire. They realised I wasn’t catastrophizing. I was describing what no one wanted to name.

CBT teaches us to question beliefs like “people don’t respect me” or “I’m unsafe in these spaces.”

But if you’re a neurodivergent Black woman in a white-dominated workplace, being disrespected and unsafe is not a distortion. It’s a pattern.

A white CBT therapist once suggested I was “catastrophizing” when I expressed fear after someone tried to burn my house down for being an outspoken Black woman.

The person tried to do it at three am a few weeks later. Neither the Swedish Police nor therapist believed the very tangible threats I was living under and still do as a public person. Not being believed just entrenches trauma for us Autistics especially when we have zero reason to lie or think in a way that makes us feel worse. We want solutions.

That solidified for me that a system that firstly wasn’t designed with me in mind, and barely has cultural competence in place, could never help me retrain thoughts that are often shaped by observable patterns. Which, by the way, is the very rigidity many autistic people are diagnosed through.

Where’s the logic in that?

We need to talk less and heal more even in therapy.

Autistic Rigidity Is Not Defiance, It’s Survival Strategy

What you call rigidity, I call a structure that kept me alive.

Autistic rigidity is not oppositional defiance. It’s structure.

Every time I tried to “restructure” my thoughts in CBT, my brain would snap back like a stretched rubber band. That’s not resistance. That’s neurology.

We’re not rejecting new thoughts because we’re negative. We’re holding onto the logic that kept us alive.

If the world hasn’t proven safe, why should my brain reframe reality to make it prettier? That’s not healing. That’s delusion. And if I started doing that, we’d need a second therapist to treat the consequences of that reframing.

But CBT kept insisting I rewire. So I did what I always do when I hit a wall—I started speaking about my experience publicly. I wondered if I was the problem. Maybe I was too rigid. Maybe I was too smart for my own healing. Maybe I was the flaw.

And then I heard the same story, over and over—from autistic people who felt retraumatized by therapy that gaslit their lived logic. People who were taught to question their clarity. People who were told to “challenge” patterns they had spent a lifetime surviving.

Laughter Isn’t Avoidance. It’s How My Body Survives Disclosure

My jokes are not distance from pain they’re scaffolding for survival.

CBT therapist: “How did that make you feel?”

Me: launches into a 3-minute monologue filled with jokes, sarcasm, and two metaphors involving Rihanna and war crimes

They’re laughing. I’m laughing. But in the back of my mind I’m wondering,

“Do they realize laughter isn’t my coping mechanism it’s my body releasing endorphins so I can handle the pain of what I just said out loud?”

If you’ve read my essay on autistic grief and alexithymia, you know: we don’t always respond in the ways people expect.

Alexithymia is the inability to identify or describe emotions. But the older Greek meaning is more poetic: “my feelings have no names.”

So when a therapist asked me to name what I felt, my brain offered a fun fact. Or a memory from 1998. Or silence. Or a joke sharp enough to keep the tears away.

CBT assumes I/We can name and reframe something we still haven’t even processed yet.

Sometimes the answer arrived a week later. Or in my sleep. Or during a shutdown in the IKEA self-checkout lane.

Change vs. Acceptance in Therapy: What Autistic People Actually Need

I didn’t need to be fixed. I needed to be believed.

CBT assumes change is the goal. But for autistic people, the first question is: change what, and for whose comfort?

Is my thought process hurting me, or is it a trauma-informed response to systems that repeatedly fail me?

Most therapists can’t help you with that. They live under those systems too. They’re shaped by the same biases—against women, against Black people, against queerness and neurodivergence.

It sounds bleak, but it isn’t. I know myself well enough to keep researching, keep pivoting, keep seeking what fits. My healing matters. My well-being is a priority. Not because I want to be someone else’s version of “functional,” but because I am no good to anyone—least of all myself—when I’m depleted and dismissed.

When I started exploring Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), I realized something important:

The problem wasn’t my thinking.

It was being asked to betray my logic just to make other people comfortable.

What Finally Helped Me Heal: EMDR, Somatic Work, and Less Talking

CBT wanted a timeline. EMDR gave me space to arrive in my own body.

CBT tried to make me explain.

EMDR and somatic therapy let me feel.

They didn’t ask me to narrate every wound in perfect language. They didn’t demand metaphors. They let my body speak in its own time. They honored autistic pacing, fast or slow and never forced a timeline.

And there was less talking.

I talk for a living. I talk to educate, to advocate, to translate pain into policy. I’ve built a career on naming the unspeakable and making it digestible. Voted one of swedens 150 best communicators. For an intermittently non-speaking autistic, I’m annoyingly gifted at speech.

But in therapy? I didn’t need another conversation.

By the time I arrive I had already mapped the why. I don’t need to then educate the person suposed to help me.

I needed movement. I needed my nervous system to be addressed not dissected, not pathologized.

I know why I am the way I am. I educate healthcare professionals on it. Don’t rewire me. Just help me find brain rest.

Why Traditional Therapy Spaces Overwhelm Autistic Nervous Systems

Fluorescent lights, masking, and eye contact. And somehow I’m the one being treated?

CBT assumes a sensory-neutral room, linear speech, and emotionally articulate clients. Which is hilarious.

I’ve been overstimulated by a lamp.

I’ve forgotten how to speak mid-sentence.

I’ve melted down because my AirPods connected to the wrong device. Twice.

Now you want me to “challenge my core belief” while I’m masking in your fluorescent-lit office, tracking your microreactions, and wondering if I’ve blinked too much?

CBT wasn’t made for autistic minds. It was made for systems that demand compliance.

Meanwhile, my EMDR therapist works in low lighting, uses three different diffuser scents, and limits talking to what I can hold. We mapped the trauma targets. We take them one at a time. We slay dragons at my pace, not hers.

That’s therapy I can trust.

What Harm Looks Like in the Wrong Therapist’s Hands

You don’t get to experiment on people and call it care.

I’ve tried a lot of therapy modalities. Some helped. Some harmed.

Prolonged exposure was one of the latter. I’ll write more about that next time, but for now I’ll say this: If your healing depends on endurance rather than safety, it’s not healing. It’s survival theatre. And some of us already gave the best years of our lives to that role. We don’t owe it our nervous systems too.

Let me be specific about the kind of harm I’ve witnessed and survived when CBT is misused:

1. If you called racial trauma “negative thinking” after an alt-right group tried to harm me?

That’s not reframing. That’s actually … malpractice. Your refusal to decolonize isn’t my failure to regulate.

2. If you mislabel queer sexual trauma as “poor boundaries”?

You’re not trauma-informed. You’re retraumatizing people because you refuse to learn how power, gender, and queerness intersect.

3. If you apply CBT to autistic people with no neurodivergence training?

That’s not therapy. That’s adult ABA but now I am the one paying for it to be tortured and you give me paperwork after.

And yes, I’ve sued before. Won. And I’ll do it again.

You don’t get to experiment your lack of competence on people and call it care. You are not Marion sims.

Stop Trying to Reprogram Me

I program AI. I don’t need to be debugged by someone who doesn’t understand me

I program and mitigate bias in AI.

I don’t need to be reprogrammed. CBT tried to debug my trauma like it was a software glitch.

But I wasn’t malfunctioning. I was responding to centuries of harm coded into my blood. My body. My breath. If your therapy model can’t hold that complexity, it doesn’t deserve my mind.

For the People in the Back

CBT = Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Not Cock and Ball Torture.

But honestly? The confusion checks out. Both involve someone doing something to you that hurts, while insisting it’s for your own good. Difference is I dont consent in my case. And if you showed up on my page expecting the other CBT, I’m calling PETA. Too many cocks have suffered already.

How to Know if CBT (or Any Therapy) Is the Right Fit

Therapy should never ask you to betray yourself to appear “well.”

Therapy is not a vending machine. You don’t insert symptoms and expect the same snack every time. If you’re neurodivergent, racialized, queer, or carry complex trauma, choosing the right modality matters as much as choosing the right therapist. Here’s where to start:

Ask: Does this model require me to override my instincts to be considered “well”?

If the approach demands you perform comfort, eye contact, compliance, or emotional articulation before you’re ready, it may not be compatible with your wiring.

Ask: Does this therapy treat my brain style as valid or obstructive?

Autistic and ADHD minds often communicate and process differently. If the model assumes neurotypical pacing or expression, it might pathologize your protective strategies instead of understanding them.

Ask: Does this model separate real trauma from patterned fear?

If someone tells you racial trauma, queerphobia, or lived structural violence is “just a thought to challenge,” they’re not trauma-informed. They’re uninformed.

Ask: Does this method allow my body to speak, or just my brain?

For many of us, somatic processing (through EMDR, SE, or polyvagal work) offers access when words fall short. Especially when alexithymia or masking makes talk therapy feel like performance.

Ask: Am I being invited into acceptance or correction?

CBT often pushes for cognitive “change.” ACT and somatic methods start with noticing. That difference can determine whether you feel safe or silenced.

Support This Work

If this essay helped you feel seen named something you’ve lived, or gave language to what therapy couldn’t, share it. Send it to your therapist. Or your ex. Or the CBT practitioner who still doesn’t understand why your “negative thinking” was actually a safety plan.

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Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

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Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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