Autism and Anxiety: Social Anxiety

Many if not most teens and adults with high-functioning autism report feeling anxious. This often stems from being chronically misunderstood by neurotypicals. The pressure to conform and “fit in” causes many of our neurodiverse clients extreme stress. Today, I want to take a moment to discuss social anxiety and the toll it takes on individuals with autism.

Autism and anxiety make life challenging and lonely

If you’re on the autism spectrum you may feel like you were born with a different operating system than everyone else. This doesn’t make you defective or broken. But it does make your life complicated when you’re expected to do things just like everyone else and be able to read the unwritten social code. Perhaps, you struggle to understand social nuances, facial expressions, sarcasm, humor, or body language. And often this translates to social difficulties.

Autism and Anxiety is Common

If you can relate, know you’re absolutely not alone. Many of our clients share that the thing they are most scared of is making a mistake or others becoming frustrated with them. They want to be liked and accepted despite some of their unique differences. However, many individuals with autism spend the majority of their life being chronically misunderstood by neurotypicals who are not familiar with autism. After a while, this causes a profound sense of self-doubt and can have a very negative impact on their overall sense of self-esteem. Self-doubt then gives way to social anxiety and often a tendency to isolate to avoid further stress.

When this happens, simple social interactions like starting a conversation can feel overwhelming and cause you to feel extreme anxiety. Perhaps, you feel like you know what to say. Or you worry that what you say will be misunderstood. You fear social rejection, even though you want close relationships, so you don’t make the first step and try. This causes feelings of loneliness and isolation.

Masking Your Autism and Anxiety

In order to fit in, you may have tried masking your autism traits. But, I would be willing to bet that it was hard and stressful for you to do so. Perhaps, you were always afraid you would “slip up” or get too comfortable and people would see the real you. That’s a very normal thing to do and a typical reaction, but it is so detrimental to your self-worth.

Perhaps you’ve studied social interactions and social rules at length. You have tried to understand why it seems so effortless for neurotypicals. But that is exhausting and usually doesn’t help much as you’re likely to encounter social situations that you were unprepared for. When the outcome wasn’t what you hoped for, I bet you felt discouraged and even worse.

You should not have to change who you are at the core to make others like you. Furthermore, continuously masking your true self is simply not sustainable and will likely cause more harm than good. When you do make a mistake (which we all do… often) you will find you become extremely self-critical and hateful towards yourself. You will likely ruminate and obsess over it thus causing your social anxiety to become even worse.

Autism Therapy Can Help You Cope with Social Anxiety and Thrive

When you come to counseling at Open Doors Therapy, we will first begin by affirming your worth and validate your struggles. Our autism therapists will help you learn to love yourself and have confidence in yourself. You are not broken, defective, or weird. You are awesome and unique.

We will help you overcome your anxiety social anxiety by teaching you social skills and coping skills to help you deal with the anxiety social situations bring you. Our goal as therapists is to help you reframe the way you view your neurodiversity as a bad thing because it is not. We want to help you learn to like yourself and recognize your value in the world. Then, we will move on to learning to seek out companions that are accepting and kind. People who will value your friendship or affection and treat you with dignity and respect.

Our talented team of autism therapists offers individual autism therapy, autism group therapy, and online autism group therapy in California to help clients with high-functioning autism cope with the challenges of social anxiety.

Begin Autism Therapy in California:

If you’re struggling with social anxiety and the challenges of interacting with those in a neurotypical world, we would love to speak with you. We are autism experts and well versed in the issues neurodiverse individuals experience. To begin autism therapy in California, follow these steps:

1. Contact us for a free 30-minute phone consultation using this link. You will meet with one of our autism therapists.
2. Like us on Facebook. On our page, we post useful information about our autism therapy clinic.
3. Sign up to receive our newsletter.

Autism Therapy Services offered at Open Doors Therapy:

Our autism therapy clinic located in the South Bay Area serves teens and adults on the autism spectrum. We help high functioning individuals who identify as having Aspergers, high functioning autism, undiagnosed autism traits, and their families.

Right now, we are providing all our autism counseling services online. Our autism therapists offer a variety of autism services including individual counseling for autistic teens and adults, parent counseling, and group therapy.  Also, we run several different social skills groups for neurodiverse working professionals, college students with autistic traits, gifted youth & caregivers, autistic adults, women who identify as neurodiverse, a summer social skills college transition training program for youth transitioning to college, teens & caregivers, and a mothers group. Contact our autism therapy office for more information on our services or to schedule a consultation.

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