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Psychological Flexibility and Dryer Balls

Writer's picture: Danielle Aubin, LCSWDanielle Aubin, LCSW

Autistic therapist online california Minnesota

It’s really fascinating to be an Autistic therapist for many reasons but one is that I get an inside view into the struggles of being Autistic as well as the struggles of a clinician trying to help Autistic people. One concept that I have found profoundly helpful as a clinician as well as Autistic person is psychological flexibility.



I first heard of psychological flexibility while training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy very early in my career. Psychological flexibility is a fundamental aim of ACT but is also present in all sorts of psychotherapeutic modalities especially those that incorporate mindfulness. I generally define psychological flexibility exactly as it sounds, the ability to change our minds, adapt to, and accept, reality.



To flesh this out, I have an example of how unexamined psychological inflexibility has impacted me. I realized literally today that I have always been super stressed by having dryer balls. I am perpetually worried that I will lose some of them and then I won’t have the 6 that I originally bought. Why is this so distressing? Well, I’m Autistic and I want things to stay “right” and the same and this caused me to just be low-level stressed every time when I walked near my dryer or saw a dryer ball. After realizing this, I felt an almost immediate letting-go since once I knew what was happening, I was able to let go of policing the dryer balls because the realization itself released me.



As you can imagine, being Autistic can be inherently counter to psychological flexibility for many reasons, some of which are our need for routine and predictability, taking things literally/inflexible definitions, and just general inflexibility when it comes to life and anxiety around change. My relationship to psychological flexibility has actually changed as my identification with Autism has deepened and grown. There are so many areas of psychological inflexibility that I am just beginning to uncover about myself that have caused me immense discomfort that I had no idea I was doing.

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