Exposure Therapy -- Week 3

Hi, everyone! As you may know if you follow my twitter or if you read my April update post, I've been doing intensive exposure therapy for a little over 3 weeks now.

A little background information: I found out at the end of March that I needed to be able to go to a gynecologist appointment by the end of April so that I could get my very essential birth control prescription filled. I have about a billion reasons for why that task, which probably seems very mundane and unexciting to most people, is so difficult for me. I won't go into specific detail here, but the main ones are my fear of germs, social situations, and the combination of a deathly fear of throwing up and fairly severe motion sickness. My appointment was scheduled for April 30th, and I began a regimen of intensive exposure therapy.

Now, I was able to get one final refill on the birth control, so I technically don't have to go in to the doctor until mid-July, but we've still kept my original appointment and kept to my exposure therapy plan on the off chance that I might actually be ready by then.

I probably physically could do the appointment (which is about a week and a half away), but I will likely end up rescheduling it to sometime in mid-late June just to make it easier on myself. 

I've kept to my exposure therapy plan quite well, I must say, but it is taking quite a toll on me. I'm shifting fairly rapidly between exhaustion and anxiety, and my anger (which had settled down a bit over the last 6 months or so) has been much more quick to trigger. I'm having a hard time finding the time to do everything I need and want to do in a day, which isn't fun. I'm spending about 4 hours total each day doing therapy activities between the exposures and the mindfulness practices.

So what am I doing for exposure therapy?

First of all, I'm not doing traditional exposures that you see in cognitive behavioral therapy. Well, technically I am, but they're different in the way that I do them. Traditional exposures work like this: you create a fear hierarchy and you slowly move up it, exposing yourself to the anxiety causing situation over and over until you no longer feel any anxiety and then moving upwards on the hierarchy. However, I haven't found cognitive behavioral therapy to be useful to me, so I've been doing acceptance and commitment therapy instead. There aren't many resources online about the exposure side of acceptance and commitment therapy, but what I've been able to piece together is this: the exposures themselves are very similar to CBT ones, but instead of doing the exposures to train yourself to not feel anxiety, you are instead training yourself to feel the anxiety and keep doing what you want to anyways. 

Most of the exposures that I've been doing are sentence exposures. Basically, I wrote down different anxiety-provoking sentences based on a number of my fears and I write them out over and over again to feel the anxiety. Over time, I do eventually stop feeling the anxiety, but that's not my goal. Soon, I should be able to transfer from doing sentence exposures to doing real life exposures. 

I've also been listening to YouTube videos that have audio like that of a waiting room. Most of the ones that I've found are ASMR videos, which isn't ideal, but its better than nothing.

Another thing that I've been doing is watching dashcam videos from cars to get used to the motion before I actually drive around in a car in real life. After discovering how sensitive I am to the motion, I put together a subliminal audio to tell my subconscious mind that I have not been poisoned (that's what your brain thinks, so you get motion sickness). So far, its been working pretty well. I have started to sit in an actual car, but I haven't gotten up to driving around yet.

That's about it. Its costing me quite a bit emotionally, but I do think that I've been making some progress. I'll try to post another update in a few weeks time to let everyone know how the exposure therapy is going. 

Love always,

Sam

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Journal Series: I am a Snowplow Parent to my Anxiety

Hi, everyone! My apologies for still not posting as frequently as I'd hoped. If you read my April update, you'll know that the past month has been pretty busy. Even though a lot of the other excitement has calmed down, I'm currently working on some pretty intensive exposure therapy, and its taking up a large amount of my time. Even when I'm not working on it, I'm often too tired to really have the mental wherewithal to write posts for this blog. But I hope that this will make up for it a little bit. Its the second post in my journal series. If you haven't read the first, or the post I made about the series, the premise is this: I take an entry from my journal that I would like to publicly talk about, and I expand on the entry. This means giving more background information and talking about the entry in a way that I believe will be beneficial to other people. With that all being said, this post is about something that I honestly just realized about myself; that I am a snowplow parent to my anxiety.

"I've come to the conclusion that I am a snowplow parent to my anxiety. Even though I hate it and yell at it and scream at it, when it yells and screams at me, I generally do everything in my power to remove the reason for why its yelling and screaming at me, because I hope that by removing the obstacle, it will not have a reason to yell and scream at me again. Of course, this doesn't work, and its highly unproductive and useless, but I still do it all the same."

You're probably familiar with the term "helicopter parent." It's been pretty popular for years and many parents have been accused of acting like that. A helicopter parent essentially follows their child around constantly, hovering over them like a helicopter, making sure that they are safe from the wide world. A snowplow parent takes all of that a step further. You might have heard the term recently in reference to the college applications scandal that's been in the news. Snowplow parents basically remove all obstacles in their child's way, similarly to what a snowplow does. They overprotect their child to the degree that their child never learns to deal with hardship--because they've never encountered it!

So how does that apply to my anxiety?

You might know that I've been using acceptance and commitment therapy since, oh, October of 2018. I'm not going to go into an in-depth explanation of acceptance and commitment therapy, as its not really relevant here. However, know this: a lot of information in acceptance and commitment therapy is given through metaphors. One of the metaphors that I recently learned about is treating your anxiety like a child instead of a big scary monster. Its probably easier to treat your anxiety with loving kindness, even when its acting out and screaming, if you see it as a child, instead of something that's big and scary. But that's not entirely the point. Basically, I was asked to personify my anxiety as a child. The exercise asked me about my parenting style--when my anxiety child is yelling and screaming, do I respond in kind (As in, do I yell and scream back)?

Anyways, I was meditating today, when I had the thought that, quite apart from my reaction to my anxiety acting up (although I suppose that this is part of my reaction), I act like a snowplow parent to my anxiety. Over the past 5 years I have become increasingly more isolated from the world. And this is because whenever my anxiety takes offense to something and starts yelling at me, I generally try to prevent it from happening again by removing myself from that kind of situation. When one of my classmates mentioned throwing up, I switched classes so that I didn't have to be near them. When my IBS began developing and I kept getting migraines and panic attacks, I left regular public school, even though I was only halfway through 8th grade. When one of my classmates asked about my digestive noises (from my IBS) at one of my class meetings in 9th grade, I blushed, lied by saying that I hadn't eaten breakfast and I was hungry, and then begged my teacher to let me do one on one meetings. When my long panic attacks began reappearing, I stopped going to the one on one teacher meetings and to essential doctors appointments too.

Of course, this has done little to actually stop my anxiety child from screaming at me on a regular basis. All it has done is isolate me and prevent me and my anxiety child from learning to deal with the stress brought up in situations like that. In my attempt to protect my anxiety child--and myself as well--from the hardships of life, I actually made it that much less prepared to deal with said hardships by refusing to give it any practice.

In conclusion, I am a snowplow parent (or maybe just a really intense helicopter parent) to my anxiety.

So how do I fix it?

Well, truthfully, I don't think I have a 100% guarantee on anything that I try, but recognizing that this is A) something that I do and B) something that is actually harmful to my wellbeing, seems to be a good first step. Understanding that my attempts to protect myself and my anxiety child from the difficulties of the world have actually made me less prepared to deal with them and less likely to take risks is progress. After all, pretty much everything you do in life comes with a little risk, and if I can't let go of my instinctual barrier, I'll literally just stay in the same place, stuck, for the rest of my life. And I don't know about you, but that doesn't really sound pleasant.

But what should my next step be, now that I've recognized that this is a problem? I think I'm already on a pretty good track, what with all of the acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness that I've been doing. Learning to live in the moment and to accept everything that comes with it, even the unpleasant things, seems like it should help me become a little more relaxed and less overbearing parent to my anxiety child. I'm going to work on that the next few weeks in addition to the other things that I've been doing. With any luck, I'll be back then with an update on how things are going. Again, it all depends on how exhausted I am from exposure therapy, but I'm going to make it a goal that I will come back and update everyone on how I'm doing with my goal to not be a snowplow parent to my anxiety.

I hope that this post is helpful in some way to other people. Perhaps it will help you recognize whether YOU have been being a snowplow or helicopter parent to your anxiety. I wasn't so lucky; it took me years to realize this and by now, its going to take a lot of work and effort to get my life back on track. But I hope that someone out there reading this will recognize the truth of what I'm saying and perhaps realize this before your anxiety parenting style has derailed your life.

Love always,
Sam

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April Update (from my Patreon)

Hi everyone! Wow, a quarter of the year has gone by already. March was... eventful, to say the least. I turned 19, I withdrew from both of the allergy medications that I've been taking, we removed our kitchen counters and had new ones put in, I believe I discovered the truth behind my current "allergy" headaches, and I started doing exposure therapy again.

My 19th birthday was nice and quiet. I meant to have a bit more of a celebration as usual to make up for the fact that I did close to nothing on my 18th birthday, but that didn't happen. I wanted to wait for some nice weather to do anything, but we've been busy on all of the few nice days we've had since then. But my dad made me cupcakes and snickerdoodles and I got some cool presents, so it really was nice. I especially liked the cupcakes. I haven't had cake (or cupcakes) since I went low-fodmap 2 1/2 years ago, and these turned out really good.

Withdrawing from the allergy medications was actually harder than I was expecting. I've been taking Claritin (and occasionally allegra or Zyrtec; for a while I was switching back and forth) since May of last year, and for some reason I ended up with some truly awful withdrawal headaches. Luckily, they went away after about a week but its still wasn't fun. Withdrawing from the Flonase was easier.

The weekend after my birthday my uncle came over and helped us rip out all of our kitchen counters. We had new ones put in the following Wednesday. Well, we had most of them put in on Wednesday. Some of the pieces weren't cut properly and they had to come back and finish on Friday. This all caused quite a bit of disruption in my usual routine, which wasn't fun with my anxiety. But I got through it, and that's all that matters.

I've had a suspicion for a while now that the "allergy" headaches that I've been getting (or at least the ones I've been getting since I stopped using the cefaly on a regular basis) are actually from dryness in my nose. I have no clue about the mechanisms involved or why they present in the way they do. What I do know is that they go away when I put bacitracin ointment in my nose. Unfortunately, I'm sensitive to bacitracin (or more likely the petroleum base), so I had to find a different method of keeping my nose...less dry. Fortunately, using a humidifier on low all the time seems to do the trick. I still don't understand a lot about the headaches (like why they responded to allergy medication) and I'm a little upset that I suffered for over a year before figuring it out, but at least for right now they're under control.

I started doing exposure therapy again at the end of this month after discovering that I'm going to have to go to the gynecologist's sometime soon to get a refill on my birth control. I also emailed my last psychologist to see if she could give me some tips on using exposure therapy that's tailored to fit acceptance and commitment therapy. And after a week of emailing back and forth to see if I could set up an appointment, she informed me that she doesn't specialize in acceptance and commitment therapy and I should find someone who does. Which was really disappointing, because it means that I will have to find a different therapist after all, should I decide that I want professional help. Anyways, back to the exposure therapy. I've mostly been doing imaginal exposures and, like, sentence exposures, but I'll probably move into doing real life exposures sometime this month.

Which brings me to things going on this month. I don't have much really scheduled to happen this month, though I do technically have a gynecologist appointment scheduled for the 30th. I may end up rescheduling it for sometime later, depending on how much progress I've made in exposure therapy by that time.

I obviously do have some other tasks that I need/want to do, though. As of this morning, I have begun tapering the buspar again. I'm hoping to get all of my doses at least down to 10mg (my afternoon and evening ones are currently at 15mg and as of today, my morning dose is at 10mg). I started working on a crochet project last month that I still haven't finished. Its the biggest thing I've ever made and I have no clue how its going to turn out, but I hope to finish it sometime early this month. I obviously need to continue doing exposure therapy. And I'd like to get to the bottom of the headaches that I keep getting. They picked up in frequency a few weeks ago and I don't know if they're from tension, sugar crash, out of date glasses prescription, or the weight of my hair. Or a combination of all of them. But they hurt a great deal and I get them every day, so I'd really like to figure out how to not have them.

And that's about it. I hope everyone is doing okay. I still haven't been doing too good when it comes to posting frequently, but I hope to change that soon (I know I keep saying it but I swear one of these days I'll actually follow through).

Love always,

Sam

(I just realized that a lot of this might be new information to my twitter followers, since I've been mostly on hiatus since the beginning of the month. Hi! I hope you enjoy the life update!) Ways to support me: Patreon Paypal