CBT, any good?

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I have been offered CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy ) to help with my aniexty and depression.

Has anyone been though a CBT course? Did it help you?

I couldn't afford it, but I got some of the basics in self-help form from Nick Dubin's book Asperger Syndrome and Anxiety and it was helpful. I have heard some people at WrongPlanet saying their CBT therapists weren't very good, but in principle it works well for aspies because it is logical. If I were in your position I would take up the opportunity.

PS: This is a useful page descibing how CBT works for anxiety:
http://www.cognitive-behaviour-therapy. ... nxiety.htm
I went to see one of these therapists, but only once and couldn't afford it after that.

My anxiety is much better now anyway because of supportive friendships, medication, self-help CBT and other factors, so and I am basically OK and happy, but I would still like to go if I can to find a better way of knowing what to do on those few occasions when there is conflict and I have a meltdown.

Thanks. I live in England so get it free on the NHS so guess I'm quite lucky.

Mind you I have suffered with these problems for many years and it has taken a really bad period of aniexy for me to be offered this therphy so may faith in the mdical profession isn't great.

It didn't do squat for my anxiety. Exposure therapy in a user-friendly environment that is identical to the real world helped me a lot but once a small change occurs, I have to re-start again. There's nothing wrong with my thoughts just my environment which doesn't fit my thoughts. I need my environment to change for me not the other way around but that's not likely going to happen very often.

In my experience, CBT has not been helpful. That's not to say it can't help someone else, of course. CBT is based on changing your negative, automatic thoughts and assumptions that lead you to tell yourself that things will never work out, that you are worthless, or whatever else you might be telling yourself that is making you more anxious and depressed. My problem is that I didn't have these thoughts and was actually quite rational in assessing my own situation and my environment, so having a therapist insist that my thinking was wrong was not just unhelpful, it was infuriating. (And yes, I know how it sounds... that I actually was wrong in my thinking but was too stubborn to let go of it.)

Thanks. Guess I've got nothing to loose by giving it a try.

Cant go on taking multiple aniexty, depression and sleep meds for the rest of my life.

I am waiting for CBT but I am not diagnosed with Aspergers or Autism; I am diagnosed with Social Anxiety, Depression, Anxiety and Agoraphobia etc. I have book after book on cognitive therapy and have tried the techniques on myself with no success so I am not feeling overly hopeful about the therapy (my support worker seems to think that it will change my life....and I have doubt about that in some ways) for certain reasons:

1 I am already aware that thinking thoughts such as "No one likes me" are illogical as statistically, given the number of people on the planet, someone has to like me somewhere lol. It can also be a result of misinterpretation on my part as, if I am honest, I cannot tell if people like me or not. Also contrary to many with social anxiety I am not easily embarrassed, especially about things such as walking into lamp-post as I have always been clumsy and am used to it lol. I do it a LOT. Tripping over is another classic I do as well as dropping things. Those kinds of things don't worry me. I have, however, been bullied a lot because I get socialising so wrong so I just don't want to get it wrong again and end up getting told off.

2 If I were to say to them that I am not good as socialising, they would take this to be negative thinking when it's actually an observation based on experience. It will then be assumed that I think of myself as a failure because I am not good at socialising and this is not true either...I don't expect myself to be perfect and accept things I am not good at, but it does cause me problems in regards to functioning in certain ways. I base my assessment of my socialising abilities on the fact that I cannot make friends and have an inability to maintain friendships when I do accidentally make them lol. I have trouble reading people and get socialising horribly wrong unless I stick to memorised scripts. Even recently I was ripped apart on a forum board because I forget myself and made some social faux pas not to mention being accused of being down right obsessed with my interests.

Even the friends I do have will often tell me to shut up and let them speak because I forget or I get told off for not responding to something they have said. Then I over compensate by responding to everything and am accused of being someone who always has to have the last word and so on.

3 I don't really understand the social world all that well and some of the social conventions it uses don't make logical sense to me. For this reason I can have difficulty understanding other peoples points of view in regards to them although I try not to be lacking in understanding...I am not a cold person by any means and have strong feelings. I don't mean to upset, annoy or offend people and certainly don't intentionally set out to.

4 Somehow I feel different to the majority of people...I am not good without my routines and I am worried they will try and change them. This is causing me much fear and anxiety as I don't cope well with change. I need routines to organise myself and I also need a sense of sameness or my world feels chaotic. Yet people will constantly try and change my routines and tell me I have to compromise and in those ways I just can't...all it does is make me worse and cause me to have a major meltdown which then gets misinterpreted as anger. I can be flexible in ways that don't compromise my routines or sense of sameness though. My quirks are rarely understood by most people and I function more easily without too much people involvement. Firstly the people involvement overloads me and secondly routines are messed about with and that distresses me further. I am worried they won't understand my need for routine or sameness, although I guess I don't have to do anything I don't want to so it may be an unreasonable worry. I just find people are not understanding of them and if I am to learn to have friendships etc then that can cause quite a problem.

5 Removing my social anxiety will not help me with my deeper social issues so will not help me in that way.

6 If I say I can't tolerate a lot of social interaction without overloading they will assume that A, I just need to change my thinking from I can't tolerate to I can cope and B, that keeping me out in a social situation will help the anxiety fade and cause me to relax when actually it will have the opposite effect and overload me.

7 I have had these problems since childhood and never could get socialising right even before I started becoming anxious about it. I was never someone who could mix well before my anxiety developed.

I'll see what the therapist says when I see them, but the above is based past experiences with the psychiatric support services. I just wish they would stop telling me to breathe...it doesnt not work lol. I'm not prone to hyperventilation and meditation when I tried it did nothing to stop me overloading. What I call an anxiety attack may not always include things like hyperventilation, shaking, sweating etc but, as was the case the last time I went into the city center, seem to be more a case of being overwhelmed and becoming increasingly flustered by all the noise and visual stimuli coming at me from every direction. This was made worse by the fact that I couldn't find my sunglasses, it was a bright sunny day and I am light sensitive. That's before I have to deal with any social stuff! All I wanted to do was go somewhere quiet!

I have tried every relaxation trick in the book to stop an overload from happening whilst being able to remain in the situation that is overloading me...they don't work, only removing myself from the situation works but then that can be seen as avoidance and that is what they are trying to stop me from doing. In the words of my support worker "she copes by locking herself into her own world and avoiding those things that make her anxious and we are hoping with the right therapy..."

I really wish people would let me have my quirks and help me to find ways to function around them instead!

yes, very good. you have to do the work though.

Two weeks ago had a very distressing experience that left me with something that seems a lot like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I realised this yesterday and this morning when I reacted with extreme anxiety to two situations which brought to mind the incident that happened at the end of last month.

I don't want my mind to start deeply embedding that extreme anxiety pattern, so I started 'CBTing' myself ayesterday s soon as I became aware of what was happening to me. I think my cognitive behavioural approach is helping (although I expect that the anxiety will probably will crop up again for a while, due to my currently unstable moods). I am sure it would have been worse if I didn't recognise what was happening to me and if I didn't start the process of dismantling the fear with logic.