Mental health professionals often use normalisation techniques. Trying to normalise someone’s experience is meant to help them feel better. But this has only ever silenced me, and made me stop opening up. It felt like what I was feeling was being invalidated & downplayed.

When I was 14 I felt anxious every time I went into the canteen because it was so loud and chaotic. The very first professional I saw said ‘but don’t you think your friends feel like that too?’ NO, because they didn’t have a panic attack every time they went in there.

Recently I opened up about some difficulties I have because of my autism that most other people don’t have. I was told that I was being hard on myself and comparing myself to others is unhelpful. I didn’t want to be told this. I needed my difficulties to be validated.