Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article talks about the importance of hope in a therapeutic setting. It also mentions hope's relationship to optimism and self-efficacy (in plain speech: how much you believe you can affect your life and surroundings, or how much control you feel you have). The specific disorders studied were anxiety disorders, which occur alongside autism with a unfortunate frequency.
For anyone who might not be familiar, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT) is basically the go-to therapy in the current age. There are a dozen or so schools of thought in therapeutic psychology, but when each was put to the test, only two consistently and repeatedly showed results: cognitive psychology, and behavioral psychology.
The first focuses on analyzing your thoughts, identifying patterns that destabilize you and giving you mental tools to shift your thinking. The theory is that if you shift how you think, positive change will follow. The second is more interested in your behavior: changing what you do, or how you do it so it's more supportive to a healthy and happy life. The theory is that if you positively change your behavior, your thoughts and life will follow suit.
Both theories worked, so people proceeded to combine them. In addition, rather than hyperfocusing on a person's past, as some schools of thought did, CBT is firmly focused on the present. The past is relevant because it's influenced the present, but the interest is improving the here and now. The emphasis is also to help you develop your own mental toolkit, which can mean less need of therapists over time and more stable day-to-day living. It's a good therapy, and I recommend it to anyone.
It's often the case that people only come to therapists when they're out of options. At that point, their hope is a flickering candle, which makes it difficult to create positive change. As such, a therapist's job is often to prop up the person's failing hope, and to offer more reasons to be hopeful. Doing the work of the therapy, which creates positive change, can then lead to more hope and increased recovery, which turns into an upward cycle as it repeats.
Results like this are probably why institutions upset me so much (I don't have personal experiences with them, unlike this person or this person). They're the death of hope for the person locked away. Institutions are psychologically harmful: they destroy self-efficacy and decay hope. They don't allow for personal growth or improvement. They are merely prisons for people who don't fit in. This is one of many reasons why most autistic advocates call for the end of institutions.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
Today's article talks about the importance of hope in a therapeutic setting. It also mentions hope's relationship to optimism and self-efficacy (in plain speech: how much you believe you can affect your life and surroundings, or how much control you feel you have). The specific disorders studied were anxiety disorders, which occur alongside autism with a unfortunate frequency.
For anyone who might not be familiar, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT) is basically the go-to therapy in the current age. There are a dozen or so schools of thought in therapeutic psychology, but when each was put to the test, only two consistently and repeatedly showed results: cognitive psychology, and behavioral psychology.
The first focuses on analyzing your thoughts, identifying patterns that destabilize you and giving you mental tools to shift your thinking. The theory is that if you shift how you think, positive change will follow. The second is more interested in your behavior: changing what you do, or how you do it so it's more supportive to a healthy and happy life. The theory is that if you positively change your behavior, your thoughts and life will follow suit.
Both theories worked, so people proceeded to combine them. In addition, rather than hyperfocusing on a person's past, as some schools of thought did, CBT is firmly focused on the present. The past is relevant because it's influenced the present, but the interest is improving the here and now. The emphasis is also to help you develop your own mental toolkit, which can mean less need of therapists over time and more stable day-to-day living. It's a good therapy, and I recommend it to anyone.
It's often the case that people only come to therapists when they're out of options. At that point, their hope is a flickering candle, which makes it difficult to create positive change. As such, a therapist's job is often to prop up the person's failing hope, and to offer more reasons to be hopeful. Doing the work of the therapy, which creates positive change, can then lead to more hope and increased recovery, which turns into an upward cycle as it repeats.
Results like this are probably why institutions upset me so much (I don't have personal experiences with them, unlike this person or this person). They're the death of hope for the person locked away. Institutions are psychologically harmful: they destroy self-efficacy and decay hope. They don't allow for personal growth or improvement. They are merely prisons for people who don't fit in. This is one of many reasons why most autistic advocates call for the end of institutions.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
I don't have any hope. I'm not a fan of CBT either, I feel like it tells people to play cognitive tricks to pretend the world isn't as bad as it really is. People have all these crossed wires in their mind and then some truth gets through and the whole edifice of cognitive tricks crashes down around them and then they are worse off than if they had not played the cognitive tricks in the first place. I know there is more to CBT than playing cognitive tricks and I am sure other aspects of it help people though.
ReplyDeleteI think hope is social, the only time I had hope was 2015 with the D&D group and 2016 with the open mic. After that I haven't had much of any. My experience has been that hope is derived from circumstances, not mindset. Obviously your mind could be distorting those circumstances one way or another but usually there has to be a baseline of substantial good things to start out with.
Sorry for the double reply but... I think the thing that builds the most hope is experiencing others' kindness, even when said kindness doesn't materially benefit you directly. You get a kind of "contact high". Modern psychology puts an emphasis on thinking positive thoughts which is good but positive thoughts have to arise from somewhere concrete, trying to make them pop out of thin air isn't very fruitful a lot of the time.
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