Turnabout

In my last post, I described a phone conversation involving a Cassandra group leader who saw nothing wrong with diagnosing a woman's husband with Asperger syndrome over the phone, based entirely on the wife's description of their marital problems and without ever talking to her husband, who was in fact not autistic.

There's more to the story. The husband separately contacted a Cassandra counselor, who was closely affiliated with the person to whom his wife had spoken. He described the problems in their marriage from his point of view. The counselor told him that she understood completely and that his wife's undiagnosed Asperger syndrome was clearly the cause of all the difficulties in the marriage. (In reality, she's not autistic either.)

The counselor invited the husband to attend a partner support group meeting to gain more insight into what he could do to alleviate his suffering from Cassandra disorder. Once there, he was encouraged to tell the group all about his wife's inability to understand how normal people felt, the misery that her affliction had brought upon him, and so forth. The group members told him that they had sympathy and compassion for him and that sharing his experiences was a necessary part of healing. Then they ranted about how incapable their own spouses were of giving them any emotional support.

And of course, nothing said could be disputed, no matter how hateful or absurd, as it was so important to validate the experiences of the poor Cassandra sufferers who had endured so many years of never being believed…