Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to sandy_tyras, cadhla, and idea_fairy!!!!!! Hope it's a great one, and may you never run out of hippos!!!

River: The training I'm looking for

I am, gradually, coming out of multiple decades of some combination of chronic mild depression, flattened affect, Asperger syndrome, ... I have never visited a psychiatrist and have no idea what to call it. In any case, I am slowly gaining the ability to both feel emotions and to respond to them in others. There are some skills I need, and don't have.

• Mainly, right now, I need whatever will help me live with and help a person who has recently developed a chronic, life-altering disease. She needs all the help and emotional support she can get, and I'm currently unable to provide it or even to figure out what she needs. She is highly emotional, and has a lifelong hatred of the psychiatric profession that will probably make it impossible for her to get help in that direction herself.
• Related to that but more generally, I need the ability to communicate with people who become upset (whether angry or tearful) easily, and are incapable of thinking or communicating rationally when in that condition.
• Longer term, I need the ability to communicate with normal human beings on an emotional level: to read emotions in others and especially to make sure that the emotional message I'm sending matches what I'm feeling. I'm coming out of decades of unwittingly having my emotions and motives being completely misread by people close to me. This includes both the ability to recognize someone else's tone of voice and body language, and to control my own so that other people can understand it.
• I need the correct vocabulary for talking about this kind of thing.
• I need to know where to find the help I need, what it's called, and how to get it, preferably from my HMO, Kaiser. All I know for certain right now is that it's somewhere in the social sciences, but probably not psychiatry.

This post is primarily for my immediate reference when talking this morning to someone from Kaiser's psych department or whatever they call it, but suggestions from the audience are certainly welcome. I'm particularly interested not only in suggestions of where to find the training I need and how to ask for it, but of what other skills I need. I need to know the dimensions of this hole in my mind that I've only recently discovered.