4th Therapy Session

Mei-Ling Huang
2 min readMar 1, 2022

So we’re starting to talk about where my anxiety stems from.

  1. I had undiagnosed autism as a young kid. Mom knew and while Dad may have agreed with her, Mom was the one noticing the patterns as Dad worked full time. Mom worked more on-and-off. Sometimes I had a sitter, sometimes I didn’t.
  2. It was hard to be the eccentric/weird kid at school. Didn’t often have friends. Was isolated and bullied due to “being in my own world” and having “rigid hyperfixated interests.”

She wanted to know if A) I wanted to talk about anxious feelings, if I knew where they stemmed from and how they tie into my family history, B) how it impacted the various interactions/relationships with my parents, and C) how my racial background played into this.

I looked at her and went “Oh lord. Where do I begin? I thought you wanted me to do a creative exercise to show what my family was like.”

She replied (good-naturedly): “Of course. That’s where this begins. I can tell you have an anxious personality and I want to slowly dig into that. So whichever category appeals to you best, that’s where we can start.”

Therapist wants for me to draw up a timeline, marking down pivotal/essential events. There’s a lot to go over and when she started asking me to talk about my autism as a young kid and that I felt my parents didn’t quite understand me, she asked me to indicate where, on the Safe Zone board my feelings were.

I told her it was a little blurry between Zen-Safe, and feeling Anxious. It was admittedly a little uncomfortable, mostly because I know the first pivotal event was the move to Ottawa, and quite frankly I hated that period of my life more than any other.

We must’ve moved there during summer 1998, because I was ten years old, and left during the summer of 2000, because I vividly remember celebrating New Year’s Eve at my aunt’s place.

Still, though, it’s going to be hard to talk about my brother.

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