Warning: ranting.

Like many, I was fobbed of with an anxiety disorder NOS diagnosis. I assumed that what I felt was anxiety. Last autumn I got to the top of the waiting list for anxiety therapy.

And it was useless. It got to the point where it felt like the therapist was trying to push low self esteem onto me so she could cure me of it, and thereby cure my anxiety.

I tried to explain to her that my anxiety wasn’t based on irrational thoughts, but experience. If I have to go somewhere I’m not familiar with, I will get overloaded with all the new input. I will struggle to process it because I need to be alone to process. The same applies to my feelings. I can’t deal with them when I need to, because I can’t identify them. So all this makes me scared because I know it will exhaust me or make me shut down. I just see this void when I don’t have any reference images. The more I can fill in that picture, the less anxious I feel. Because I can process this in advance (eg using streetview to memorise a route and save landmarks so I can navigate).

No, she says. It’s because you have low self esteem. Now write down some bad statements about yourself and say them out loud.

In my quest to educate her, I came across this article and it makes so much sense why CBT wasn’t working. The anxiety diagnosis doesn’t fit.

Even after asking her to learn about autistic anxiety, she didn’t bother. So next session I gave her a printout of that article. Something told me she wouldn’t bother to learn anything from it, so I discharged myself.

Is what you’re feeling anxiety or overwhelm? Does the anxiety come because you know from your own experience that something will cause you to struggle? Is the feeling more akin to dread?