I'm sure there are folks out there who have started such a plan themselves and then found all the planning they'd done with their logical minds is knocked for six by the reality of how hard desensitisation/exposure therapy hits when you first start. It's a bit like putting the brakes on a juggernaut with a payload heavier than the juggernaut itself. All those heavy duty emotional responses just carry right on through you regardless of you having a plan or not.
So I'm going to start off here with the blunt basic foundation of a plan today and I'm going to do the '10 steps' type thing tomorrow; which is perfectly possible once you've got through the shock period at the start of beginning 'the plan' (for me the shock period lasted three months before I was ready for a fully working 'plan' - I had one big payload to reverse into). Here we go.
Firstly - It's YOUR plan
The first thing to know about your de-sensitisation plan is it's YOUR's. It's not my plan or anyone else's. Although the overall pattern of recovery is the same for everyone who applies the approach of 'going towards' for long enough there is no 'right or wrong way'. When you get into the day to day work involved your desensitisation plan has to fit in with your day to day needs, your personality type and your current and future belief systems.
Every single person is unique and so the path and the plan you develop and follow will be unique. Having said that - it's a bit like travelling on a train - the train's the same train for everyone on it, but the experience of being on the train is an individual thing.
I've read the work of quite a few experts who have produced a lot of very good de-sensitisation plans, but the truth is that the path to de-sensitisation is a crazy paving path through thorny bushes, rather than a straight path that's easy to follow. At first it can be really messy, depending on what your external life is like and the emotional complexity of your condition - people can have a single phobia or a whole collection of disorders going on (like I used to have).
Secondly - It's a 'Surrender Plan' rather than a 'Take Control Plan'
You're doing this plan because you've come to a realisation you don't directly control the process you're going through. One of the most difficult periods is the time before you start the plan - and then it gets even worse when you begin! Let's be honest here - we don't want to do an exposure therapy plan or a de-sensitisation plan (both the same thing) - if we did we wouldn't need a plan at all, would we? We're doing it because we have to, we're desperate because nothing else has worked.
We wanted the 'quick fix' plan (such as seeing a hypnotherapist) - and even that was an inconvenience - that didn't work. So having done the 'Avoidance and Damage Limitation Plan' and having tried the ''Try Every Expensive Expert Other than the Exposure Therapy/De-sensitisation Plan' (and then maybe followed up with the 'I Mistrust Everybody and React Bitterly When Someone Reminds Me about the Exposure Therapy Plan') we finally find ourselves at the 'I Give Up' plan.
When you put it all together it's just a 'Surrender Plan', really, isn't it?
When I first developed the map for my personal exposure therapy journey there was only one sentence going on before it began: 'oh sh*t; that's it; I've had enough; I'm going in - even if it kills me'. I always knew what I had to do, I just didn't want to do it. After downloading yet another 'international expert tells you in an e-book how to heal at a cost of £70' I read one sentence that stood out for me: 'if you have tried all the techniques I've offered here and they've been of no use to you then you could always try the exposure therapy approach - exposure therapy is 100% effective, but it hurts'. I was hurting already - what did I have to lose?
So it's really only when you've started the plan that you start to understand just how unrealistic the first plan is and you start to draw up a real plan that's suited more to you. Here are my recommendations once you're at this stage:
- Get Your Mindset Right
- Get Your Support Network in Place
- Get On With It
- Get Systematic.
Get Your Mindset Right
Here's the mindset I recommend as the 'plan' begins:
- Become More Selfish
- Prepare to Learn
- Release the Ego
- Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out
Become More Selfish
Selfish people don't generally like the word 'selfish' because it implies ignoring the rights of others - but when I explain to them it means giving yourself time, taking your emotions seriously and doing what now suits you rather than everybody else they'll say 'oh yes, but doesn't everybody do that anyway? That's not selfishness - that's just common sense'.
If you don't take proper care of yourself you can't take care of anyone else, period. Give yourself time; make yourself 'worth it'; stop trying to please everybody else. Make your healing a definite priority. I remember the time when, in order to put my healing plan into effect, I deliberately started to think 'I need to be more selfish and say no more often otherwise I'll never heal'. I'd always been about other people - and it had made me ill.
Before you put your healing plan into action you'll need to make sure you are at the centre of it if you want it to work.
Prepare to Learn
Your de-sensitisation plan is probably the most intensely stressful learning curve you will ever go through; so you may as well adopt the attitude of a learner.
Nature will become your teacher as you start opening up to the natural process of 'feeling'. There's this horrible period when you start to learn you have no direct control over the process - it comes built into all living creatures.
Your only choice is whether or not you go through it, and allow the process to work through you. Train yourself to observe what nature shows you. You will learn, for example, how to switch off your judgemental logical mind in order to allow your emotional body and your pattern creating mind to meet each other with less interference so they can achieve the goal of emotional release.
Release the Ego
There's nothing wrong with the ego - it's the mechanism that protects our hard-earned thinking and intuitive processes - but in the case of an anxiety disorder it is currently defending beliefs that are hurting you in the long term while allegedly protecting you in the short term
The unconscious mind of a person suffering from an anxiety disorder, to be blunt, is full of crap. Mine was - and to an extent still is, but I actively seek it out and destroy it. We all have a little tub of belief-crap lurking inside of us but some have more than others and a lack of self-awareness is the cause of it - many people get so full of it they spew it out over other people without even realising they're doing it. I try not to do this myself.
All the hidden belief-crap in our unconscious is emotionally supported - when you challenge these beliefs by 'going-into-to-come-out-of' they come up into conscious awareness and fight their corner. These pain-laden beliefs will affect your body by mimicking a dangerous situation; for example they can alter your stomach acid balance; change your heart rate; cause nightmares; give you muscular aches and spasms and prevent sleep; threaten you with images of 'cancer' and raise your blood pressure - and your ego will for a time have trouble accepting this powerful fighting viewpoint is a pack of unconscious lies you somehow created and must now face and endure through the healing process.
You see, it's not just a matter of forming a new plan and being allowed to just get on with it - what you're doing initially is fighting several old plans that were working really hard for you until you turned up with your silly new plan and they want to show you just how wrong it is.
You will learn what blind faith really means at this point and it dawns that the grey blobby thing in your head isn't the most important part of the healing journey- your body is.
Go in; stay in; stay in some more; come out
No matter how complex or logical or carefully planned the plan is - if you're not approaching your trapped emotional responses the plan's lost before it begins. By repeatedly approaching your unwanted responses and going into them for as long as you can you learn the full extent of the experience you are working with.
You experience your emotions at their most intense and you start to learn the limits of those responses - and you find you can endure that limit repeatedly for long periods of time - and still remain alive. After a time the beliefs that said 'cancer' stop. The beliefs that said 'it will kill me' are replaced by 'this is different from what I've done before and something's starting to happen'.
You learn about how your emotions affect your thinking (generally they close logical thinking down) and how your thinking affects your emotions - and how different parts of your brain influence other parts. But unless you approach and go into your emotions, unless you move towards the triggers that cause you to react, you will never learn these things and you won't change and remove your anxiety disorder.
No matter how higgledy-piggledy and detailed the logical plan is, the main plan of simply repeatedly going into your emotional responses is THE plan that underlies the more logical plan that you get to write down. I often suspect quite a few of these 10-point-plans are written after the plan has already been carried out and our logical brains want to stamp a 'just look how clever I am with my plan' picture over it. I'm being a bit harsh here maybe - but at first the plan is a brute force thing.
Get Your Support Network in Place
Oh dear, it's time to take a risk - the risk of telling people you see as 'professionals' - people you fear are going to lock you up and throw away the key or declare you mentally ill (all anxiety disorders are at times put under the heading of 'mental illness' but emotionally driven illness is very different to mental illness). But don't worry, the professionals have seen an awful lot more of this kind of thing than you have. The kind of people we're talking about here are:
- Doctors
- Counsellors/Therapists
- Psychiatrists
- Others
Doctors
In my experience there are some doctors who understand this stuff better than others - but there's no way of finding out which doctors are best for you until you start talking to them. Go to your doctors and start talking. Talk about your condition and your plan. My doctors told me to take it easy and wanted me to start on Prozac and see a psychiatrist. They helped me deal with the physical side affects of my exposure therapy plan; they reassured me when I started to worry about different things. You need a doctor as part of your support network.
Counsellors/Therapists
Your doctor may refer you to a counsellor and a psychiatrist in addition to wanting to see you themselves. Person-Centred Counsellors will not give you directive advice - they are trained to support clients in finding their own solutions through a process of exploration and reflection - but they will support you with your plan and may help put you in touch with a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, if your doctor has not already done so (you will lose the Person-Centred Counsellor from your network at this point). A Person Centred Counsellor will support you indirectly through your de-sensitisation process; a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist will set you homework to do and help you develop a joint plan.
Just as with the doctors you may need to spend time finding the right counsellor, of whatever type, for you. I went through three counsellors - with several months in between each - before I found a counsellor I felt completely at home with. It might not have been that the counsellors were not 'right' for me but rather I was not ready for counselling - now even though my anxiety disorders are healed I still see my counsellor, albeit months apart, to work through any new material and stay emotionally happy. If you think seeing a counsellor is a bit strange just keep in mind that all counsellors are compelled to have systematic counselling themselves if they wish to work as counsellors. There's a lot of it around.
Psychiatrists
The job of a psychiatrist is to prescribe medication for emotional and mental disorders. When I first went to see my new psychiatrist for the first time I was expecting to receive a 'counselling' experience - it quickly became clear to me this isn't what psychiatrists do. After spending time writing all the details of our conversation down and reading my doctor's notes my psychiatrist told me I had a 'complex form of OCD'. He also told me I had severe depression - which came as a big surprise as I'm one of the most positive-minded thinkers I know (I realised later my being positive minded all the time was a form of denial).
He went on to describe a plan to gradually put me onto heavy doses of Prozac and then spoke about the time I would be weaned off the drug (or not) several years later. I told him about my de-sensitisation plan and I wanted to keep the Prozac at a low level so I could heal myself rather than rely on drugs.
He agreed to support me with this and within a year I had stopped taking the Prozac altogether and I had removed my obsessions and panic attacks.
I know it's difficult at first but every time you discuss and share information with these trusted professionals you see that they accept your condition easier than you do - the recognition that you have a problem and these folks take it seriously reinforces your confidence and the sense that 'you're worth it'.
The truth is they've seen so much of this thing you previously thought unique to you they regard it as common as the common cold and that's pretty common.
Others
Others are a different story - if you have kept your condition to yourself and now find yourself talking it out with friends it is possible you will lose some of those friends (were they really friends?). Additionally you may have lots of opinions thrown at you; most of them unhelpful - well meaning, but not in line with your plan. Things such as 'you need to exercise more' or 'you need a holiday'.
As you start sharing your experience you will be surprised to find other people you regarded as being super-calm people with no problems start opening up about their anxiety disorders - don't be fooled into automatically thinking this means a bond of camaraderie - you may find yourself being avoided by these people because your bravery may make them feel compelled to behave likewise and the discomfort this causes can lead to their avoiding you.
I'm not saying don't do this - I'm just saying be prepared to learn a whole lot about the human condition during this journey you're making.
It's not all doom and gloom though - you may find people who have been through the exposure therapy themselves and can identify and support you in person or on-line. There are quite a few such people about now (a lot more than when I was healing five years' ago).
Get On With It
Now you've got a support network (and you will need them, believe me) you can begin. You're going to get it wrong; you're going to get frustrated; you're going to feel incompetent but nevertheless you have to get on with it.
Give up on the idea of doing it alone; stop thinking you're unique and no-one else understands your predicament. Get out there and get help; share; lose friends if you have to by making the mistake of telling them about your condition. But get healed.
Get Systematic
Now you're talking my language. Systems are cyclical journeys and you must become cyclical. There's a lot of talk these days about 'straight lines being the shortest distance between two points' well, that works if you're lining up a lot of exposure therapy cycles - because you need sleep; you need food. There will be days of the week when you make more progress than others and you can plan to do more work on these days.
You also need to plan for rest and having some fun during the healing process. By getting systematic you:
- plan your environments
- manage your inputs
- go through the de-sensitisation process
- get feedback on the difference between before and after (counsellors are great for this)
- start all over again - working cyclically.
I'm going to post more about this tomorrow (along with the 10 point plan type thing).
Regards - Carl
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Thank you, Dr D! Much appreciated.
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