Published on 12, July, 2020
My therapist said that I should spend time in the autistic community to get a better sense of myself as an autistic person so I can work out what is anxiety and what is autism (so I know what to bother trying to fix). I find this very hard because it's a spectrum so therefore we are all different. So how are any of us supposed to be able to define what is our autism and what's not? How are we supposed to be able to draw a metaphorical box around which bits we shouldn't waste time trying to fix? Not sure what I'm asking, but any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thank you for your replies. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to reply to you each individually, but my responses would get repetitive if I did that so I'm just going to write this and hopefully that's OK.
All of your responses seem to back up what I was thinking about how complicated the link between autism and anxiety is, and how you can't really expect to just neatly separate them and treat them individually.
I guess I'm sad because I thought my therapist understood autism and so I feel disappointed now. Part of me worries that we are all wrong, and the therapist is right, and I'm therefore I'm avoiding helping myself. But I try to imagine what it would be like to just ignore my autism and go ahead and restart doing things I've cut out of my life (for example driving, I stopped because it made me anxious) and it just feels like I'd be going back over old ground and getting the same result, which seems really foolish.
I am going to look more deeply at my triggers as you have suggested and try to manage my anxiety whilst respecting my autism.
I guess the therapist's suggestion was helpful, but just didn't end up supporting her theory
Thank you