Chapter Eight - CBT
They say that knowledge is power, but knowing that it’s raining won’t make the sun shine. Still, I went into the sessions with a more than open mind - I grabbed them with both hands determined to get the most from them. And they helped. A lot.
There was no lying on a couch talking about childhood. It wasn’t a confessional. Just a room upstairs at the gp’s surgery with a qualified mental health worker. After listening to the nature of your problem it was down to business. What to do.
Now, I like language. I like the way that each and every word describes something tangible, a shared experience. I can remember first being surprised by the French word ‘deja-vu’. Who would have thought there would be an actual word for something so, I don’t know, sketchy? There were others like ‘schadenfreude’ or ‘angst’. It was like scaling a mountain alone to find a flag already at the summit - oddly reassuring.
The same applies to therapy. There are words for things and I don’t mean jargon or new age psychobabble. Real words for real things.
One of these - though it’s actually two words - is ‘intrusive thought’. We’re all familiar with ‘what if’ scenarios - what if it rains, what if I fail, what if someone doesn’t like me? The what-if is part of our risk assessment of life at any given time. It’s how we work out the best and possibly safest course of action for ourselves. But the ‘intrusive thought’ is more insidious like an odourless and toxic gas. It’s the crazy little pop-up thought - the unrestrained ‘what-if’ - and we all get them.
‘What if the world blew up?’ ‘What if I jumped off that bridge?’ Obviously, you’re not going to - it isn’t the same thing as having thoughts of suicide. It just pops in and out of people’s minds so fast that they don’t even notice. Unless you have anxiety or depression, that is. Then the volume is turned up. The subliminal image becomes a longer, more drawn out affair which appears to have significance beyond itself.
And to know this, to have words for it, is half the battle.
I’ve already mentioned ‘avoidance’. To someone with anxiety issues avoidance is a self-defence mechanism. It’s perfectly natural - if driving the car makes you anxious, avoid the motorway, right? Don’t go out at rush hour because of the traffic. Take a back road. Work out your route beforehand. Don’t go out at night. Don’t drive at all. Get a bus. But if the bus has too many people on it? You see where it’s going...
So having identified the intrusive thought for what it really is and that avoidance is structuring your world, what next? Another two words - ‘graded exposure’
I #anxietyattacks #anxietyattack #anxiety #panicattacks #anxietyanddepression