What you said about you coping when your life was at its most stressful (and clearly was for a long time) and then this starting when the pressure eased off is actually quite normal. We go into survival mode and its only when we can stop and look around that we really react to all the stress - and you'd saved up quite a bit by the sounds of it!
I got on really well with cbt but only because I'd got to a place where I was well enough to work with it - at my sickest I wasn't well enough to function let alone start to work on my behaviour and beliefs that had built up over a lifetime.
I found the extreme anxiety terrifying - I had always been anxious to a certain extent but this took things to a new level. I was scared that I'd lost myself completely and would never come back. I used to have paranoid delusions and hallucinations as a result of the stress and this just served as evidence to me that that was it and I had lost it forever.
For me it was like being a small child waking up from a nightmare in the pitch dark, with shadows/shapes and unexplained noises. That kind of primal terror, all encompassing and completely exhausting and no space to think about anything but your survival, jittery from the huge amount of adreneline running through you.
My therapist told me that when you believe things are real (even if rationally you know they aren't), then your body reacts as though you are, you start getting ready to fight or run, you are flooded with adreneline etc. Of course this feeds back to your mind and creates a vicious circle.
I knew what caused my anxiety, I knew that I needed to 'focus on my children' and stop paying attention to my worries as yummyhoney helpfully pointed out, it didn't mean I knew how to do it though.
As I said for me CBT has been really helpful - but I spent 9 months doped up on antipsychotics (they turned me into a complete zombie - I couldn't be trusted for long on my own or e.g. looking after the kids, going to work) till I was well enough to come off the tablets and then start CBT. I do worry how well the cbt will work when a major crisis happens though, I've had a couple of incidents where I have then struggled to put my cbt into practice.
I found medication the key to making me well enough to start therapy. If its not working for you, then maybe ask whether you can try a different medication. Are you under gp led care? Have you had a psychiatric assessment recently? If not could you request one, especially as you seem to be feeling worse than you were?