well.. therapy absolutely helps you figure out your needs as an autistic person (complete with a real diagnosis) and helps you develop safe coping strategies for this and being queer in a hostile place.

A good should help you build a real support system and protect your self-identity from harmful family, including forming a plan to leave them. And learning to love yourself, awkward as you may think you are.

I guess I see a lot of things in your post that a therapist could and should help with. I'm wondering if you had good ones, and what they were doing with you in that time.

Just as you wouldn't go to a surgeon or dentist and let them work without a treatment plan, you should agree on your goals and the modalities a therapist intends to use to get you there, at the beginning. And you can refer back to this to see if you're making progress or not.

Unfortunately like all healthcare now, you often have to research and become your own self advocate first. You should fire a therapist long before you spend thousands and years doing nothing. Bad therapists are out there, a lot of them. But good therapists can move mountains.

Yeah, the modern society teaches us that if we have any problems, be it health, financial or anything else, it's all fixable and we are supposed to fix it. Yet there is so much we don't have control over. Mental health problems are especially hard to tackle, as there are so few options, they are expensive, time consuming and often don't really help.