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?
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Good move bailing on that therapist. When their only tool is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
I’m one of those lucky folks that has classic anxiety. And severe depression. And a handful of other things, all filtered through AuDHD. And it’s really fucking hard to tease out one of those threads because the knot just pulls tighter. A knot soaked in lived experience, seasoned with copious amounts of self-reflection. Sometimes I know what’s coming and actively avoid it, sometimes to the point of dissociation. Sometimes I don’t know what’s coming, and my brain goes haywire with possible scenarios, most of which are awful and self-spiraling but induce anxiety regardless. But it’s all intertwined, feeding off of each other and everything else to create that Gordian knot.
I feel like I got really lucky finding my current therapist/clinic, because that was the first place that wasn’t completely useless. That said, there are still periods of frustration. As knowledgeable as he is, he still struggles to grasp the extent of things. And because I’m “high functioning” (we both hate that phrase but it was agreed that it would be used as a placeholder for “lived my entire life being intelligent enough to mask my way through most situations until the mask fails and I go into a tailspin”), the mask gets taken for granted sometimes, as if it’s an outside support structure I can lean on as opposed to something I dedicate great effort (and lots of mental duct tape) into maintaining.
It can be difficult finding the correct fit for therapy. The more layers people have, the harder it gets to find someone that can handle all of them. That said, take this as a learning experience. Bring this knowledge to the next therapist and be upfront about it. The process sucks. But for most of us, it’s all we can do.
Best of luck to you, truly. You’re not alone.
I saw this anxiety simulator recommended by people with anxiety and I can’t relate to it at all. This is not what I’m thinking at all. And now it makes sense why the therapist was struggling. She needed to fit me into one of those boxes, except I didn’t fit. So she tried her best to shove me into the low self esteem box.
Edit: this one too
Great article. Thanks for sharing!
