daughter is afraid of everything it seems!

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My 7 year old daughter, soon to be 8 is afraid of unexpected and unexplained noises, dogs of any size, crane flies, moths, butterflies, big poops that she thinks won't go down the drain, anything she perceives as disgusting like her cache of unwanted and unconsumed glasses of milk she she hides. We tell her to empty them in the sink, she does but it's curdled and will run away screaming.

I don't know what to do or how to help her. I'm reluctant to get her into some kind of therapy because it didn't work for me when I was a kid. It might today. Who knows?

I just want her to be a bit more well-adjusted, y'know?

There can be overlap between autistic rigidity and OCD - I myself currently have a diagnosis that can't differentiate between the two of them.

Therapy, if you find the right therapist, can really be a good thing. You want to find someone who specializes in autism and OCD. In the meantime, we found some help for my son with the book What to Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck - we did have to explain that he didn't really have OCD (he has obsessions and compulsions, but they are not related to each other the way they would be in traditional OCD) but that many of the things he needed to do were the same.

You might also find out how much of this is fear of sensory overstimulation: the loud noises are something that can be intensely painful for a person on the spectrum, and for someone who is hypersensitive to light touch, dog fur, being licked, and insects can be excruciating. This might also be the case with gross things - they may smell too strong. For a lot of those things, we finally figured out that acknowledging that my son was hypersensitive and that he needed help was what finally helped him learn - so, we got him earplugs, a hoodie and a baseball cap that he could use to reduce visual and auditory overstimulation.

There is also a kind of "on/off" thing that my son had as regards pain, maybe something like that is going on with cleanliness? My son couldn't differentiate between something that might kill him and something that barely hurt at all - and so he freaked out over every paper cut and scratch in the same way as when he needed stitches (if you can't tell the difference, then everything might potentially kill you, right?) It took a long time to carefully label things with degrees for him: we had to help him figure out EXACTLY how hurt he was and give him the language to describe it.