Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part Two

In yesterday's post I discussed how a 'systematic desensitisation/exposure therapy' plan is really a 'surrender plan' and went on to say when you first start it can come as such a shock to the system the idea of it being a 'plan' can seem ridiculous because of how overwhelming it is.

I also discussed the need to establish a support network (and you should see these people on a regular cyclical basis for their input and help to be effective).

In this post (and it's another biggie) I'm going to cover the following points:

1. Focus on How You Want to Feel


2. Practice Every Day


3. Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop a Subjective Viewpoint


4. Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers


5. Establish a Weekly Cycle


6. Focus on One Reaction at a Time


7. Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points


8. Judge Progress by What You Can Do


9. Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts


10. Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are.

1  Focus on How You Want to Feel

The first step of any successful system is the identification of a desirable outcome.  Imagine yourself free both of the emotional problem and of the restrictions it places on you - what would you do?  How would that freedom affect your relationships with others - and with yourself? Visualise a place where you want to be emotionally peaceful.  A state where you can be completely content; not be festering on 'how do I deal with my emotional problem?'  This kind of thing is achievable.

What if your desired outcome is not realistic? What if when you get 'there' it's not exactly how you envisioned it?  It does not matter.  When starting towards any goal in life, unless it's a very short-lived one such as 'putting the butter in the fridge' (and sometimes even that doesn't happen if you trip on the kitchen carpet)  we have to accept that final-destination type goals are variable - we never really achieve exactly what we envisioned.  What we do achieve, however, is the journey towards 'different' and 'better'.  As long as we stay on the journey we will keep re-visiting our desirable outcomes and things will gradually improve.

If you have multiple emotional problems you will eventually find yourself having a greater amount of 'emotional free time' to play with and it is realistic to set a goal of having a greater percentage of time free from emotional issues.  If you have a single emotional problem you could start your desensitisation plan on a Friday and be completely problem-free by Monday; but this is unusual - in most cases it will take several weeks and sometimes months.

Although you may not achieve an idealistic new 'you' all the time it will be a much happier you than who you are at the start of the process (instead of being happy 100% of the time you may have to settle for being happy 90% of the time; sigh).

2  Practice Every Day

You have to be careful when you practice, however.  'Opening up' an emotional response fully can leave you feeling exhausted and your focus of attention, especially if you're exposing yourself to an obsession, can be skewed for the rest of the day.  When is your best time of the week for spending 'intense' time?  Try to save the most intense work for those times.  Most days you need to be just 'skimming the edges' of the response.  This will teach your unconscious mind slowly that the response itself is not so dangerous - and it will prepare you to bring the intense work to easier fruition.

Additionally it is around the 'staying with the feeling but not fully going in' that you may get insights into what the response relates to.  If you have had a response for a long time it's easy for the information about the 'issue' to which the response relates to be lost.  For example, if you had a frightening experience in an enclosed space but forgotten the detail you may be confused when having a strong response to a new place that reminds you of it.  By skirting around and exploring the feeling at a lesser intensity you can raise the memory and this gives you a bigger picture to work with.  This helps.

By the time 'intense work time' arrives you will be itching to get in there and accept that the intense emotional response is linked to a viewpoint you accept. Let us say your reason for panicking in enclosed spaces is because you imagined suffocating in such a place but you've told yourself to stop being silly and refused to feel and release the panic.  Would it be silly to panic if you were suffocating and had a strong fear response - no, in fact it might save your life.  So we gradually figure out what the issue is (if we're not sure) and bring that and the response together.

Try not to work on your emotions when walking on busy streets or driving or operating machinery (if you can help it - sometimes the work just follows us around whether we want to switch it off or not).  Keep aware of any situation in which you could be injured or killed due to  not paying attention to the outside world.   I came close to being hit by cars twice because my attention just wasn't on what was going on around me.

Desensitisation work is very distracting.  It dominates your focus of attention and wipes your short-term memory.  You can end up doing such things as not paying for goods when leaving a shop because you can't remember if you paid at checkout or not (I didn't do this but I did upset a newsagent once when he wanted my money and I'd put it back in my pocket because I thought I'd paid him already).  These things happen.

So try and pick a safe place to practice and don't intend to 'open up' completely if you've got some other complex responsibility to meet.  If you've got the day to yourself though, go for it.

3  Study Your Emotional Responses and Develop an Objective Viewpoint

A subjective viewpoint is that of the person affected by the emotional response - this is the viewpoint of a person believing they are being 'done to' and, I hate to say it, it is the viewpoint of a 'victim'.

An objective viewpoint is that of the person sitting on the outside of the emotional response who is able to study it; test it; re-draw it and play with it and figure out how to bring the response under control and then stop it.  This is the viewpoint of a laboratory scientist who treats the subjective viewpoint as a test subject.

Transitioning from the subjective view to the objective view is very, very difficult and takes time.  A Counsellor can assist in making the transition as they sit on the outside of the experience and unconsciously coach you in how to sit in their place while they also sit in your's.  A Counsellor is very unlikely to tell you this is what's happening - it just happens.  You get used to the idea of 'sitting outside the experience and looking in'.

Why do you need to develop the objective viewpoint?  Because it's the decision-maker when it comes to the argument between two other viewpoints that are involved.  When you have an anxiety disorder of any kind and you decide to remove it you've got a war going on inside of you between these two additional viewpoints.

The third viewpoint we're dealing with is that of the trapped emotional response fighting for release - this is the emotional energy contained in the anxiety disorder. In a fictional story this viewpoint would be called the 'Protagonistic Viewpoint'

The fourth viewpoint is the resistance to the release - driven by the parts of you that don't want to go through the releasing experience.  When you want to keep the disorder trapped the disorder is the bad guy and the commitment to keeping the response trapped is the good guy - but when you start to desensitise the argument for and against release is reversed.  The anti-release viewpoint, in a fictional story, would be called the 'Antagonistic Viewpoint'.

The Objective Viewpoint, the part of you that sits outside the experience looking in, decides which of the two viewpoints wins the fight.

4  Work Towards Linking Responses To Triggers

During my healing I would constantly surprise myself as I came to realise the issues behind my responses.  At first all I could see were the emotions themselves and I was 'sailing blind'.  But as I repeatedly went into the emotional responses I started to see the 'issues' appear and I'd think 'well, I agree with me thinking that - I can understand it'.  Once I got to this point I was ready to 'unitise'.  It can be difficult to release an emotional response when you don't know what triggered it.

However, I've also released a trapped response without knowing the trigger, particularly when the response, such as panic attacks, was based around the fear of another response!  It's not so easy to remove these responses because you can't clearly see the cause - it's a bit like being afraid of murky fog - you can't clearly identify things.  Nevertheless, the trapped response will evaporate if you keep going.

5  Establish a Weekly Cycle

It's a good idea to build the healing cycle around your appointments with your counsellor - this way you work towards providing the counsellor/doctor/psychiatrist with a progress report.  You can see your counsellor once a week and then as your healing progresses move the appointments further apart.  Each week you should aim to move a little bit further forward - but remember that just being on the journey is enough most weeks.

6  Focus on One Response at a Time

Your intention should be to move towards the 'maximum intensity point' within the emotional response and regard yourself as working in small emotional release cycles.  What happens, whether you plan for it or not, is that by just moving repeatedly into the most intense part of the response you force the emotional release cycle to complete.

Trapped emotional responses form 'layers' in our bodies and when you complete an emotional cycle you remove the top layer and move onto the one below - until one day they're all gone!

I have been reading recently that you should create a scale where level 1 is the mildest fear response and level 10 is the most intense and you should try and keep yourself at 'level 3' or there's a risk of re-inforcing the emotional response .  This may work well with phobias - but it's not quite so simple with obsessions.  I have also recently seen a report by a respected doctor that states desensitisation does not work on obsessions. Sorry but this is utter rubbish.  Desensitisation and exposure therapy work on all emotional responses as long as you're willing to do the work necessary, it's that simple.

Personally when I wanted to heal from my obsessions I wanted to heal as quickly as possible - I just could not be bothered with all that scales malarkey.  I was a Level 8 no matter what and it was Level 12 that finally sorted it out for me.  But yes - focus on one emotional layer at a time.

7  Create Distraction and 'Switch-off' Points

I'm a bit of a workaholic - I like a list of 'things I did today' at the end of every day and one of my arguments against doing the emotional work was that it was not 'productive'.  By combining the emotional work with some tedious and mentally undemanding task such as wallpaper stripping or ironing (mind that hot iron - ooch) I could do both the 'self-indulgent' emotional work and also find myself with a stripped wall or the ironing done at the end of it.

I could not do complex intellectual work and the emotional work at the same time - I could not even write my experiences down during the emotional work because if you're doing the emotional work right the logical mind, the intellectual, judgemental and interfering left neo-cortex, is hijacked and shut down.

Another distraction I combined with the intense emotional work was pleasant relaxing music; it took the edge off the pain -  my favourite was the Theta Meditation System music from Dr Jeffrey Thompson (there's a link below) - but I bought a whole stack of other relaxing music to use too.

You should reward yourself at regular intervals (especially after completing a period of desensitisation).  This all creates a more pleasant after- affect.  'Yeah, it was unpleasant, but look, I got the wall stripped'.

8  Judge Progress by What You Can Do

One of the problems with judging how well you're doing on the basis of how you feel when it comes to emotional desensitisation is it's all relative to how you feel right now.  You could have got rid of thirty unwanted emotional responses but if you're stuck in the middle of response thirty one and you look to how you feel as an indicator of how you're progressing you'll come up with 'I feel terrible!  It's not working!'.

This is yet another great role a counsellor can serve - acting as an external 'milestone marker' - someone who reminds you of your progress; of what you were struggling with when you first met and what you can do now as opposed to way back then when you first started.

Base progress on what you can do - on the places no longer off limits to you emotionally - rather than how you feel.

9  Accept the Strangeness of Your Thoughts

Trapped feelings look for, and produce, strange thought patterns in order to try and gain escape from the body.  Once those feelings have left the body through the correct thought pattern that created them in the first place (the 'triggering issue') all those strange thought patterns that kept catching your attention disappear.  This is how it works.  Accept the strange thoughts as a part of the healing process and don't give them too much time and weight.

10  Hunt All Negative Feelings Down Like the Dirty Dogs They Are

At some point your anxiety disorder will start to disappear.  Your panic attacks will stop; your phobias will be gone; your obsessions will be distant memories.  The question you have to ask now is: what caused them?  Anxiety disorders can be caused by sudden shocking events - but I suspect it's more usual for them to appear after an anxious foundation has first been laid down for quite some time.

To maintain emotional happiness you have to be watchful for any future negative emotional responses - and hunt them down; feel and release them; at the earliest opportunity.  If you don't do this you risk a relapse into your anxiety disorder.  I've written a previous post called, I think, 'Get the Vacuum Cleaner Out' - when you get a hint of a negative emotional response find it and go into it as soon as possible.  Having this approach will keep you free of further anxiety problems.

If you don't remove negative feelings in this way, as a habit, the dirty dogs will start nipping at your heels again and they don't go away.  But then you already knew that.

That's the end of this post.  Please note that because it's a generalised view of the desensitisation process there may be some parts of it that need to be adapted slightly for different conditions.

All comments; criticisms and discussion points are gratefully received and if you would like to put a post on the blog in response to this post please email me at carl@managemesystems.com and I'll gladly post it (as long as it's relevant and above board etc) with a link back to your site.

I'm thinking about taking the whole week's posts on desensitisation and producing a free pdf download and an mp3 too - would that be of any use?

Regards - Carl

Your Systematic De-Sensitisation Plan Part One

When I first started to write this post I did a '10 steps to desensitisation' type thing with carefully planned steps from easiest to hardest response and then I thought 'that's not really how it happens, is it? - not at first'.  You can't make a plan around something before you know what it is you're planning with, can you?  It's like planning to cook a meal in a stranger's kitchen when you've never seen the kitchen you'll be working in - it's not going to happen exactly the way you think.

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