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13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 286

Loves trees -

I have also had a hard time pinning down what exposure is right for me because I don't always know exactly what my fears are. After several occasions of asking myself during a panic attack "What is it that you are so afraid of?" my answer is the same, I think - I'm alone and I'm afraid there is no one that is able to help me. When I went through severe withdrawal from an anti-anxiety medication 18 months ago is when this fear really came to the forefront. Previously, my safe people were able to "cure" my anxiety by being there. During and now after the withdrawal, this is no longer the case. I'm lucky that I have a few close people who are great cheerleaders, but I have also realized that the path to recovery is one I must take alone, and that no one else can make this happen for me. It's tough, to say the least. Give yourself permission to take it easy for a bit, and remember that we're all here for you!

Teebs

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 6252

Sunny

It is actually recommended that you don't do this on your own because you are going to stay in a panic state past the point of comfort. The councillor/therapist/safe person, is only to help if you get past the point you can't close out the attack on your own. This seems to be a sort of shock therapy. A sort of immersion. If it is in your face enough you will build coping skills to handle it. I personally and this is just personal mind you, think it is backwards. But then there are always two thoughts on everything. I think that jumping in off the deep end, so to speak has too much of a chance to make it worse. If some one helps you through it, it becomes the opposite, just plain exposure. My preference. I still think if you build coping skills you can handle any exposure rather than doing exposure and building skills for each one. Maybe this works for some one with only one bad phobia.

I would enjoy comments from anyone else that has tried it.

Here for you

Davit.

Ps I will ask my therapist on Wednesday about it.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 356

Hi Sunny, Teebs, Davit,

Thanks for posting here. I am still trying to understand this all better.

Teebs, I agree with you. I am not sure what bringing on an attack would help with. Actually I think i was raised with the "If it doesn't kill you it will make you stronger" and I also think that when I worried as a child, I was left to deal with it on my own because they thought if I saw that nothing bad happened in the end, I would be cured of my worry and anxiety. This was wrong. I am an adult today with anxiety issues so this technique of leaving me to be anxious all by myself was wrong I think. What I think I did need at that tme was comfort and support and encouragement when I worried or felt anxious. I didn't get that.

I continue to ask for that today from people around me and this weekend I had a bad weekend and I think I have slowly realized I cannot keep doing this to myself. The attacks were bad and were made worse by the people who were around me at the time. Just because they say they want to help doesn't mean they will be able to at the time of the attack.

I woke up this morning realizing I have to go it alone in terms of recovery. I want the people in my life to be my cheerleaders during this painful time but they have shown time and again they cannot fulfill that role. There is nothing left for me to do but to face this. My main negative core belief is "I am alone.". During an attack I really don't want to be alone. But I do not have anyone who can be with me, my attacks make them too upset.

My weekend was so bad I am going to have to avoid some things this week to give myself a break from exposure to things that wake up my dragons. At least that is how I feel right now.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 1665

I wonder if this type of exposure might best be done with a counselor nearby to help you through it.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 6252

Teebs

Don't feel bad, I tried this type of exposure and two things, one it nearly made me sick, and I have good coping skills, and it did take away the urge to panic. But I am much farther ahead than you. I'll keep flogging this " exposure is not the answer, it is reinforcement of the answer.

Yes, the dragons and all the emotions that go with them are not the problem, the problem and the answer,is how you look at them. How you perceive them is going to dictate how you act and feel. If you believe them you will have negative thoughts and emotions and they will hurt you. If you do not accept them as true then they can not hurt you. They will fade away.

When you can do this. When you can make them fade away, then wake the dragon (exposure) to prove you have the power to make it sleep again. The more times you can wake it and make it sleep the more it fades till it is gone. But exposure is no good if you can not make the dragon sleep, it only feeds him.

Surviving exposure can go either way. It can breed panic or it can kill it depending on how you look at it. Are you terrified of it or are you satisfied it has no power. Your choice. Here we are back to coping skills. Does this make sense? There is no single thing. Nothing stands alone, they are all tied together.

Here for you,

your friend,

Davit.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 286

Davit - I have also read a book by a doctor who recommends inducing panic and staying there until it goes away, by my understanding to prove that panic won't harm you and that your worst anxious thoughts don't come true. This type of exposure never really made sense to me, because my fear is mostly of fear itself - I am miserable during a panic attack. So if I go into a situation and induce panic, my worst fear is in a sense coming true. I think this is where I am struggling with the experimenting with the gag reflex as part of session 7 to help me get over the gag feeling I have, too. I know I'm not going to stop breathing or anything like that, I just really don't like the sensation! So what do I learn by inducing the sensation?

I need to do some more thinking about the importance of addressing my negative self-talk and how it relates to my exposure success. I guess I never really thought about positive talk as a method of coping, but from your description it really sounds like it's tied in. For a long time I have felt like my anxiety is something separate from me - the dragons. I've told myself if I can banish the dragons I'll be fine. But your saying it's about me, not the dragons, has put it in a bit of a different perspective.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 356

I will think on these. i am in the middle of an attack. yes i have attracted people who are comfortable blaming me so that both of us sing the same tune: its all my fault in my eyes and theirs. this has left me without any real supports now to deal with the anxiety that seems to be getting worse some days.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 6252

loves trees

You will have to help me with this. I will use me as an example when ever I can. Some of this is going to cause pain but it is like cauterizing. It is necessary so healthy skin can grow. You do not have to post answers to any of the questions I ask, all you have to do is answer them to yourself. Set exposure aside for a minute and lets deal with core beliefs first and I want to deal with both of them. In one of my posts I mention getting a false message as a pre-schooler that built a core belief that I was not good enough, not just not liked. I carried it all through my life and saw every situation through that thought. I had others that I built on this theme also. And of course the negative thoughts that grew on these negative core beliefs. I am not afraid of anything falling on me because I never had a situation in my life to build a negative core belief that one would, so my attitude is positive. This is why I can cut down huge trees and step away when they get in my area with no panic. But the thought that they would not lie on the ground just right did, because I was still looking at life through that negative core belief that I was not good enough. So I became a perfectionist and would take chances with them to get them where I wanted them. This compulsion nearly got me killed a few times, but still caused no panic. But meeting new people would. ( you will notice it doesn't happen any more, I am cured of that negative core belief ) An incident this morning nearly brought it up again but I shut it down. You too will learn to do this. It was hard to reverse this negative core belief because it was there from early childhood. But more important was the fact that it was a false one. ( I just lost a friend because a jealous person though it was an inappropriate friendship. It was not so it does not bother me. It is his baggage not mine, it can not hurt me. ) See by looking at it this way instead of thinking I'm not liked it can not colour my thoughts. Of course it will bother me a bit but not to the extent that it would have in the past.

Okay. Now the questions: What in the past ( any point from this minute to when you were born ) caused you to think the way you do? This includes mental or physical abuse. Were there a lot of situations that make you think this negative core belief or just one. Did they keep cropping up as you grew. ( reinforcement of a negative core belief, a kind of bad exposure )

Are you thinking every time you have a failed interaction with people that it is your fault? Only your fault? And here is one that will hurt but you have to answer it. Are you doing it on purpose? ( as a safe out ) Even unconscious. Negative core beliefs are powerful things.

And here is a final one for now. If, big word that one, If all your core beliefs are that you are good enough has something recently caused you to not believe it, building a new negative core belief. Only once you can say, and mean it, "it is not true" then you can use exposure to prove it. Trying to prove it without believing it will not work. You can not force it. You have to want it and really believe it.

Enough for now, think on this and then we will get into how to build positive beliefs to bury the negative ones you are building negative thought on. It is in the posts but we can do it again.

Here for you

Davit.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 356

Davit,

Can you elaborate more on what you say in these 2 posts and your perspective on exposure work in general. I realize exposure work is part of the program and I fully realize these are your personal thoughts on the topic. But I have struggled to wrap my head around exposure work - to understand what it is goiing to do for me. I don't fear snakes or tall buildings. I fear my feelings ( i think). Especially negative ones. I assume that what i share in common with someone who fears shopping malls for example or crowds is that being in that space brings on such uncomfortable feelings the person panics. Being around someone who is judging me, upsetting me in any way, can bring on panic.

Now part of my work that I did before joining here is to stop believing i deserved for people to do that to me as a rule (I have become more assertive vs. being passive). but when people are simply stating what they think ,or doing something they need to do, i interpret that as them abandonning or neglecting me or my needs. I admit that i interpret people's actions and motives negatively , which is where weeks 1-3 of the program are a godsend for me. Seeing that these negative thoughts are not based in reality helps me challenge a lot of them.Prior to this progrma, without understsanding it, I played "is this person lying or not" all the time. So I would try to determine if they 'truly' wanted to help me or "truly" liked me with almost each action or thing that they said. I can't keep doing that. I see that now.

Taking that stance of having to evaluate someone's every move around me has created anxiety. It served me well in that it got me away from a few people who were neglecting me early on in my life (childhood). It was a survival tactic at one point. But it doesn't work with people who are not out to 'get me'. So now i'm applying this anxiety based approach with everyone in my life when it really was only meant to get me out of a crummy situation that one time (childhood). I think this is how i have come to understand my anxiety.

Do I just keep challenging my negative thoughts over and over until the habit to have negative thoughts is weakened or is there other work? if so, is it exposure work?

So its been hard to understand how I would arrange exposure work for myself. I think my core issues are fear of rejection, fear of abandonment. I don't fear that a tall building will gobble me up but i think that i fear that relationships with other people will. I think. I am still unclear about my core issues. So far all i've figured out is that i have negative thoughts, dozens of them, and that I will do whatever will help me stop having so many negative thoughts in a day or at least reacting to them.

It helped to read what you posted here. as you can see I am still wondering about exposure work for my anxiety.

13 years ago 0 +0 / -0 6252

I just read an interesting article by a doctor who uses interoceptive exposure to treat fear of a fear. He believes that to do exposure you enter a panic state and stay there till it goes on its own. Sorry but is that not what we are trying to cure? If this worked mine would have gone a long time ago, because they always eventually go on there own. I do not believe you can force panic attacks to go. You have to convince them to. Is this why there are so many failures? I can accept interoceptive exposure ( inducing the symptoms of a panic attack to do exposure for fear of fear, or fear of an attack rather than the attack ) if you are capable of stopping the attack that this type of exposure will cause since it has to, to be exposure.

An example of interoceptive exposure is running on a tread mill till your heart rate is the same as it is in a panic attack to prove to you that it will not kill you. If you really fear that your heart rate this high is going to kill you are you not going to have a panic attack. So you have the panic attack and survive. Did this cure you? did this prove any thing? Not if you don't want to believe it did. So just doing the exposure could fail or make it worse. But if you believe that you are not going to have a heart attack ( truly believe it ) then the exposure will not bring on a panic attack, which is what we are aiming for is it not. I think this is preferred to forcing it. Just cause you can do it and survive it does not prove any thing, what about next time. I will stick with my idea that you have to change the way you look at something that causes an attack and use the exposure to reinforce the thought. It is all about negative and positive. It is about how you see it, not it, itself.

I was never a cowboy, I believe in training, not forcing. I think you have to train your mind not force it. Just my thoughts and it works for me, any thoughts on this people. Of course since I can stop an attack with thought I have no way of proving this. Besides it is pretty hard for me to bring on an attack, I just automatically go into positive mode.

A rather pensive

Davit.

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