Libby Banks (is querying a therapy book)

The Click That Made Me Make Sense: BDD, Chronic Pain, and the Body’s Quiet Corrections There are moments when I feel like my face snaps into place.

Sometimes my face literally snaps into place - warped geometry suddenly making sense when a joint realigns. That's not poetry. That's proprioception.

Masking is usually an automatic survival adaptation, not a conscious choice. Whose legibility gets recognized depends on race/class/gender/other systemic privileges. While masking “works,” it’s harmful + exhausting. The goal is systems that don’t demand performance for basic regard.

Masking isn’t just about appearing neurotypical - it’s about appearing coherent enough to not be discarded in an ableist society. Masking is often strategic legibility: seeming “stable enough” to maintain access to care and connection (which should not be nearly as conditional as they often are).

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

To clarify: fawn/freeze/flop aren't conscious weapons - they're involuntary trauma responses. But when Cinderella gets dismissed as "passive" for surviving systematic abuse with her humanity intact? That misreading is what I want to demolish. Resilience under those conditions isn't weakness.

Fairy tale retelling for someday: Cinderella as autistic trickster-survivor, weaponizing fawn/freeze/flop - not passivity, but tactical intelligence. Each "yes, stepmother" is data gathering/strategic positioning. The ball isn't escape - it's her liberation. Revolution disguised as compliance.

Smart or Oh So Pleasant? I Dissociated Into Both Elwood P.

Reckoning with the Harvey quandary and dissociation and identiy over on the newsletter today.

The ADA is 35 today. Rights are inherent - but protections are lent. The ADA built scaffolding, not permanence. Policy choices don’t erase our rights; they just dare us to live without them.

Yes please!

Thing I didn't expect even though it makes sense: unmasking would make my writing weirder and better. Dissociation was eating all my metaphors. My voice is more whimsical, sharp, and, well, mine.

High-Masking Isn’t Low Needs - It’s Expensive Survival "You seem fine!" they proclaimed, congratulating my camouflaged collapse, mistaking borrowed functionality for comfort.

High-masking doesn’t mean low support needs - it often just means a potential collapse is delayed.

Unmasking doesn’t mean a breakdown. It’s a bill coming due.

A piece about misrecognition, diagnostic debt, and what care really costs.

My autistic flow ≠ my dissociation. One is deep immersion; the other is sheltering grace. Both are sacred. But when you mistake my grounded intensity for self-protection? That’s a category error.

Reclaiming Rogers’ Revolution From Therapy’s Neutrality Trap My first weeks of graduate school, I learned two things about Carl Rogers: first, that I could mirror "unconditional positive regard" so perfectly in mock therapy sessions that a professor called it "...

Carl Rogers didn’t invent talk therapy (that would be a wild claim) - he sabotaged it.

New piece on radical empathy, congruence, and why we need Rogers with teeth.

Just completed a CEU series with After Violence Project, focused on supporting family members of individuals sentenced to death or executed. Clinical training that dignifies invisible grief matters.

A person with grey hair wearing a necklace, smiling at the camera.

Also, this is 40. It’s been a gentle birthday so far, and this evening will be fajitas and red velvet cake.

A couple in sunglasses poses in a Carlsbad Caverns, showcasing the natural landscape behind them.

“Baby, it’s dark, and we’re in love!” - Wyatt giving me artistic direction for this photo from my birthday trip to Carlsbad Caverns yesterday. Today, I am 40, and I am grateful for my joyful/goofy/surprising life.

FAIR! I don’t know if I have ever had the other problem where my intentional overtures have been read as friendly (I am NOT subtle because I never “learned” how to flirt in a way that doesn’t involve me channeling Ado Annie in a consent-forward non-coercive way), but that makes sense, lol.

A smiling person wears a “not flirting, just autistic” shirt.

Pinned post time!

- Leftist/elder millennial/autistic/chronically ill/practitioner-researcher/writer
- Happily partnered with my AuDHD dreamboat, @fuzzymac505.bsky.social
- BIG reader/Swiftie
- Developed a radical therapeutic modality and writing a book - more info at www.libbyiscomplex.com

First-ever book proposal submitted. Sitting with the quiet buzz of hope (and some fear). To every survivor of carceral mental health systems dreaming of kinder care - I am thinking about y'all.

Refuge Architecture: Building Sanctuary in a Burning System Purists often demand bonfires.

New piece RE: the complex ethics of "sheltering in place" when it comes to providing services in a harmful system of care.

Animal Crossing, Biff the Hippo, and the Revolutionary Power of Googling Your Pixelated Pals The Paralyzing Screen

Today’s piece explores how seemingly benign games can replicate neuronormative coercion - complete with guilt-trips disguised as cute villager dialogue. When attempting to restart ACNH, my PDA autistic brain whispered: "The hippo will shame you." Spoiler alert? He didn’t.

One person with short, grayish hair is smiling and leaning on the other person, who is wearing a large black hat and round sunglasses. This person has curly, reddish hair and a beard, wearing a black vest with gold buttons. Behind them, green leaves are visible under a clear blue sky.

One person has short, gray hair and wears sunglasses, while the other, with curly hair and a beard, wears black-framed sunglasses and a light-colored shirt. They are smiling, with their faces close together

Two Swifties smiling and taking a selfie in a bathroom, standing in front of a mirror with toiletries and personal items on the counter.

Two people smiling and taking a selfie in front of a large skeleton in a museum.

Two years today with Wyatt. Grateful daily for my beautiful, funny, brilliant, and kind home in a person.

The Books That Wait for You The first book I read after the drought wasn’t the heavy therapeutic tome I had expected to break the curse.

I wrote about autistic burnout and reclaiming a cherished part of myself in this essay. CW: parental loss, domestic violence, chronic illness.

Sanctuary Walls, Not Cages: How Boundaries Free Radical Congruence Two of therapy’s most sacred myths insist:

Some very hot therapeutic takes about boundaries that should be much less hot than they are IMO.

Also, some of my tentative upcoming piece titles so you can get a sense of what I am about:
Sanctuary Walls, Not Cages: How Boundaries Free Radical Congruence
Reclaiming Rogers’ Revolution From Therapy’s Neutrality Trap
High-Masking Isn’t Low Needs - It’s High-Cost Survival in a Hostile Construct.

Big lesson I learned from the last time I was in flow: totally okay to write 4 therapy essays in a day, but try to space them out when it comes to actually publishing them because that is less stressful.

(Also, lots of wry/thoughtful psychology writing coming y'all's way. Excited to share!)

The Art of Strategic Disappearing: How Fawning and Flopping Build Sanctuaries in Hostile Systems They call me “spacey” when I’m running complex threat calculus.

CW: Pathologization, systemic harm
Here is a new piece about how fawning/flopping become autonomy-preservation engines and should be treated as neutral survival tactics. www.libbyiscomplex.com/p/the-art-of...

Grief Waits For a long time, I thought my feelings after my father’s death were mostly anger.

CW: Parental loss, grief

Sharing layered grief for my beautiful and complicated AuDHD father. For those sitting with absence today, you are seen.

Are you a ‘super hearer’? Why some women can hear electricity, ticking clocks and their neighbours chatting from four doors down

Cute how they keep inventing new names to help women not realise they’re autistic

(I know I am not the first person to use container in therapy AT ALL, but I think less often it is focused as an act of mutual aid or radical mutuality, and that resonated in this room.)