I resisted therapy for a long time. Partly pride, partly the fear that a stranger would confirm what my anxiety had been whispering for years: that I was fundamentally broken.
CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — was my first experience. My therapist called it "thought challenging." I called it arguing with yourself on paper.
The core premise: our thoughts influence our feelings, which influence our behaviours. Anxiety often runs on thoughts that are distorted — catastrophising, mind-reading, all-or-nothing thinking. CBT teaches you to notice the thought, examine its evidence, and choose a more accurate one.
It is not positive thinking. It is accurate thinking. And slowly, after weeks of practice, I noticed that the volume on my catastrophic thoughts had begun to turn down. Not off. But down.
The homework was sometimes tedious. The progress was sometimes invisible. But CBT gave me something that panic disorder had taken away: the sense that I had some agency over my own mind.