I'm 6 sessions into my anxiety CBT and I feel like I've made no progress. My therapist said she doesn't know anything about autism and she's not here for that. She also dismissed my social difficulties as "overthinking". Unlike my phobia CBT, where I was making visible progress each session, I feel like I've made none with this therapist. I'm starting to realise that CBT is maybe not the right approach for what I used to describe as anxiety, but might be better described as "overwhelm".

In search an article explaining autistic anxiety, I found this brill article by Dr Megan Neff. Autistic Anxiety and Anxiety: What's The Difference? It describes what is often called anxiety is actually a form of overwhelm. I love this article, because it describes how it is for me. I avoid new places and feel uneasy around strangers, because of the amoust of processing my brain has to do to navigate it, and in the case of people, not to appear like too much of a socially inept freak. I have to figure out what kind of person they are, and then which set of scripts is appropriate for the situation, and having to do that on the fly is exhausting. I have difficulty processing things in real time. My emotions especially. I need to be away from the situation, in a place where I don't have any external stimuli to deal with, and then I can work through it and experience the feeling. If I'm lucky, I might even be able to put a name to it.

It also means that if someone has upset me, while I might feel a twinge of "this is bad", it's not till I'm alone that I'll actually really feel upset about it. But then I feel like it's too late, because the other person will say something like, Well why didn't you say so at the time?

Going to a new place alone has the same effect. There's a big void, and that's scary. But if I go over the route on a journey planner, if I can use Street View to walk the journey over and over again, take screenshots of landmarks, be sure of the route, then that void gets filled in, and it's not so scary. I was able to travel to a hospital in a part of central I'd never been before by doing this, and because I'd done all this planning, because I had the visuals, when the time came, a lot of that void had been filled in, and my anxiety was under control.

I don't see how CBT can help with this? I think maybe the exposure therapy part of it might be useful. If I just take longer and longer journeys until I eventually stay somewhere alone overnight.

What I do know is that I need to conquer this overwhelm sooner rather than later. I need to move out this house, but the whole process is so overwhelming.

What I really need is a video guide, an Autistic's Manual on Independent Living, that goes over everything someone without support needs to know to get through life.