A Frequency I Never Asked to Tune Into

On stylised pain, emotional misattunement, and the quiet refusal to be anyone’s unconsenting mirror.

What kind of person tries to gaslight their therapist? This piece begins with that absurdity — and unpacks the double empathy problem through the lens of an autistic GLP, wired for resonance but cast as a confidante for curated chaos.

Sunday Musings …

It started with a sigh. One of those long, theatrical ones meant not to release tension, but to announce it. We were at work. Between emails. Between crises. Between any reasonable expectation of intimacy. And yet, there it was — the sudden need to “vent.” No preamble, no context, just the kind of dropped-in monologue that assumes its own urgency and expects the world to fold around it.

I braced myself. Not because I didn’t care, but because I knew. I knew what was coming would be less about truth and more about theatre. That I would be expected to nod, to murmur sympathetically, to perform the role of the good listener. And I am a good listener — not in the way people mean it, but in the way I am. My body receives. My mind processes. My whole system tunes in, whether I want it to or not. It’s not a skill. It's a structure.

But what they want isn’t listening. It’s validation. Preferably in their register, their rhythm, their storyline. They want to be witnessed — but only on their terms. And I can’t do that. I won’t lie with my face.

As she launched into her tale — full of practiced outrage, conspicuously timed pauses, and a few choice lines that felt suspiciously like they’d been rehearsed — something in me recoiled. Not because I didn’t understand, but because I did. Too well.

And suddenly, there she was: Irina. Staring down her therapist in Boy Parts, spinning truth into aesthetic, warping the clinical gaze with stylised chaos. Not asking to be helped, but to be believed. Or more precisely, admired. I remember thinking when I first read it: this is absurd. Who tries to gaslight their therapist?

And yet — here I was. At work. Gaslit not by a manipulator, but by someone so used to performance-as-connection that they couldn’t imagine showing up any other way.

This isn’t about lying. This is about what happens when truth is replaced by brand. When pain becomes product. When vulnerability is staged, not shared.

The double empathy problem: not just miscommunication, but mismatched intentions

I don’t think she meant harm. I rarely believe they do. But harm doesn’t require intention — only a mismatch of expectations so wide it collapses the possibility of repair. She thought I was listening. And I was. But not the way she thought.

This is where the language of misunderstanding often fails us. Double empathy problem sounds clinical. Neutral. Like a mutual fog, a soft confusion between communicators who mean well but can’t quite find the same channel. That’s part of it. But what I’ve come to realise is that for me, the disconnect isn’t just in the words. It’s in the why of the words.

Neurotypical communication often centres clarity. Impact. Performance. It’s built to persuade, or at least to be received on the terms it was offered. There’s an implicit goal: here is what I feel, here is what I need you to mirror back to me. The words may be dressed as confession, but they are rarely uncertain. They’re packaged. Labeled. Served up like content.

But I don’t receive that way. I’m a gestalt language processor. I don’t build meaning through line-by-line transmission. I don’t decode your sentences so much as I tune into them. What matters to me isn’t your point — it’s your pulse. The texture of your emotional field. The way your energy coheres, or doesn’t. I register metaphor, cadence, breath. I notice when your words speed up but your eyes go flat. When your phrasing is too clean. When you’re narrating around something, rather than from it.

And when that happens — when someone speaks without presence, or performs a feeling they’re not actually having — it lands in my body like static. Disorienting. Jarring. Not because I’m confused, but because I understand too quickly that I’m not being invited into a real interaction. I’m being used as a screen.

They think I’m quiet because I’m processing. I am. But not the way they think.
They think I’m pausing out of care. And maybe I am.
But mostly, I’m stunned.
Stunned by the emptiness in their words.
Stunned by how much they seem to need the theatre more than the truth.
Stunned by the fact that I’ve become — again — the unwilling therapist for someone who doesn’t actually want to be known.

They read my silence as grace. Or distance. Sometimes wisdom. Rarely, if ever, the thing it actually is: a boundary.

What hurts most is that my silence isn’t passive. I’m not nodding along in agreement. I’m bracing against the ache of witnessing someone contort themselves into a story that doesn’t need to be told — at least, not like this. Not to me. I don’t need the performance. I don’t need the arc. I would rather sit with their confusion than pretend their coherence is real.

But that’s the fracture point, isn’t it?

They want to be seen on their own terms. I want to see what’s true.
They want resonance without risk. I want connection that starts with truth, even when it’s chaotic or unformed.
They want to be received. I want to meet.

And when that gap is too wide, there’s no bridge. Only silence.

The cost of being a ‘good listener’ when you didn’t sign up for the role.

The thing about being “a good listener” is that it’s rarely about listening at all.

People seek me out because I don’t interrupt. Because I sit still. Because I don’t rush to fill silence with reassurance or interpretation. They say they feel safe with me, and I don’t doubt that they do — but often it’s not the kind of safety I would choose to offer. It’s the safety of being unchallenged. Of being able to monologue without consequence. Of knowing I won’t call the performance what it is.

They think my stillness is compassion. And sometimes it is. But more often — especially in these moments — it’s something else. It’s stunned confusion. It’s a system glitching in real time, trying to reconcile the words they’re saying with the absence of emotional resonance beneath them. Trying to find coherence in something that was never meant to hold truth, only shape perception.

And what’s worse — they often praise me for it. “You’re such a good listener.” “You always know how to hold space.” “I don’t feel judged when I talk to you.”

But I’m not holding space. I’m holding my breath.
And I’m not judging you — I’m trying to locate you.
Because I don’t know where you are in the story you’re telling me.

Over time, this kind of misattunement doesn’t just hurt — it corrodes. It hollows out the trust I might otherwise offer. Because I realise I’m not being related to as a person. I’m being used as a backdrop. A screen onto which someone else can project their carefully assembled identity. And if I don’t reflect it back — if I fail to play the role of affirming audience — the connection falters.

Not because I’ve withdrawn.
But because I never truly arrived.

I’ve sat across from people telling me their deepest truths with eyes that never meet mine. I’ve listened to stories that have no emotional centre, delivered with perfect inflection but no weight. I’ve nodded along to confessions that were clearly not meant to be heard — only performed.

And what I’ve learned, painfully and slowly, is this:

They don’t want me.
They want a mirror.
And I don’t reflect what isn’t real.

That’s the cost of being read as a “good listener” by people who never asked how I listen, or what it costs me to keep receiving what doesn’t want to land. My body feels the dissonance even when my mind can’t name it yet. My system absorbs what others deflect. And when I can’t metabolise it — when it piles up unresolved, unauthentic, untethered — I shut down. I fade out. Not out of cruelty, but out of necessity.

Because there is nothing lonelier than being present for someone who has no intention of being present with you.

The difference between resonance and reception

There’s a difference between reception and resonance. Most people don’t know that. Not in their bones.

Reception is passive. It’s what happens when sound bounces off a wall. It’s hearing. Nodding. Absorbing words with no particular shape. Most of the world moves like that — scanning for meaning only when it’s been underlined, italicised, handed over in a script that matches their own.

Resonance is different. Resonance is relational. It’s what happens when someone’s truth lands in the body of another and vibrates — not because it’s identical, but because it’s real. Resonance doesn’t require clarity. It doesn’t ask for polish. It asks only for presence. The willingness to show up as you are, without disguise.

My system — my GLP, pattern-hungry, rhythm-attuned system — is built for resonance. I can sense when someone is speaking from a place of internal alignment. When their words match their breath. When the energy behind what they’re saying is the same as the surface. When I tune in and the signal is clean — maybe messy, maybe uncertain, but emotionally true.

Those moments? They are rare.
And when they happen, they are precious.

A conversation with a real signal — an unmasked one, raw and unrehearsed — makes me feel more alive than almost anything. Not because it’s tidy, but because it’s true. That’s all I ever want from people, really. Not their logic. Not their structure. Not even their self-awareness. Just:
Let what’s happening in you be what you offer.

Because I don’t need people to make sense.
I need them to be honest in their nonsense.

But too often, what I get instead is chaos in costume. Pain that’s been styled and framed and filtered, then handed to me like a gift I’m expected to unwrap and affirm. There’s no resonance in that — only static. And static is not neutral. It clogs the system. It burns.

People mistake my ability to hold complexity for a willingness to hold their curated chaos. But they are not the same. I can hold contradiction, rupture, grief, rage — as long as it’s real. What I cannot hold is performance that demands response, but refuses relationship.

That’s the heartbreak of this wiring.
I know what it feels like when someone is present with me.
And I know, instantly, when they’re not.

There is no middle ground. No gentle grey.
Either the frequency is live, or it isn’t.
Either I’m meeting you, or I’m meeting the version you think I’ll believe.

And I can’t lie to myself about which is which.
Not anymore.

Final Movements: Gentle refusal, not rejection

I didn’t say anything to her that day. I never do, really. Not directly. I’ve learned — sometimes the hard way — that confronting the performance only deepens it. That asking someone to be real when they’ve already chosen spectacle doesn’t invite connection. It invites defensiveness. Shame. Retreat. A doubling down on the mask.

So I don’t name it. I just… drift.

It’s not dramatic. I don’t ghost. I don’t cut off. I don’t play the part of the wounded confidante who suddenly demands better. I simply become a little less available. A little harder to find. A little slower to respond. Not because I don’t care — but because I do. Because I know that if I stay, I will start to disappear into the role they’ve written for me. And I’ve done that enough times to know what it costs.

My absence is not rejection. It’s refusal.
Gentle. Quiet. But firm.

I am not punishing you. I am protecting me.
Because I can’t keep showing up in places where my presence is mistaken for a prop.
Where I am cast as a backdrop to someone else’s curated unraveling.

I’m not disappearing to hurt you.
I’m stepping back because there’s nothing left to meet.
You were never with me.
You were with your story.
And I don’t know how to stay in rooms where I’m not allowed to arrive.

The frequency doesn’t lie.
And when I stop feeling it — when I stop being it — that’s my signal.

Sometimes I wish I could un-know this part of myself. Un-feel it. Turn the dial down, detune the antenna. But I can’t. This is how I’m wired. This is how I survive. And sometimes, it’s also how I heal.

To anyone who has ever met me on the real frequency — thank you.
You may not have known it, but you made me feel possible.
And that’s not a small thing.

Because when you’ve spent most of your life being the backdrop to other people’s stories, being met — truly met — is the closest thing to belonging you’ll ever feel.