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
Ways to support me:
No comments:
Post a Comment