1. So, opposite action is a DBT concept wherein, even (or especially) if all one's emotions are screaming that one does a behavior that isn't helpful, one does the opposite behavior.
2. I realize that if you are reading this and have never worked a recovery program with behavioral elements, it may sound like I'm in a cult or something. For those of you who have known me since 1995 or so, you know this therapy has helped me greatly before, and now it's helping me rebuild again after what happened last year.
3. For some reason my immediate grief response was extreme social anxiety, bordering on agoraphobia. In general, the action-urge for anxiety is to avoid the thing that makes me anxious.
4. [Note that avoiding was a useful and protective device at a certain point in human evolution. Is that a saber toothed tiger waiting for me in the brush? I'd better hide until it passes by.]
5. People make me anxious. Thus, 99.875% of them I would rather avoid.
6. But then I'd never leave my house. Which is sort of what happened in April when I had that relapse bit.
7. Needless to say, never leaving the house would end up with me bitter, angry, ever more phobic, and possibly dead before my time b/c isolation leads to the Circling Thoughts.
[....]
8. Exposure therapy is a thing they do for OCD and phobias. For example, if a person is deathly afraid of dogs, she might start out looking at pictures or videos of dogs, then move to, I dunno, five minutes of a dog on a leash in the same room with her... And end up where she can pet the dog or have it lick her hand and such.
9. The idea is that the patient participates in increasing levels of exposure. She sits with the frightening experience until her fear comes down. Allegedly, her brain can't maintain a fear response with the volume cranked to 11 for an extended period of time. When her brain processes the fact that nothing bad is happening as she looks at the video of the dog, the anxiety will "naturally" start to abate.
10. Although I've had OCD all my life, I had never done an exposure before starting my second round of DBT in 2012. Honestly, I was a cognitive-behavioral therapy hater for a long time because of one bad experience when I was a teenager.
11. I don't want to overdramatize, but every time I go outside, it's basically an exposure.
12. When contemplating the recent (about two weeks ago now) ending of intensive outpatient treatment, I wrote in my therapy journal my continuing recovery just seems like a lot of self punishment, with much alone time and extensive amounts of exposures. Basically, at my worst, I don't want to be with others, nor do I want to be with myself.
13. My prediction has panned out, sort of. But I haven't launched myself into the downward spiral of fear that indicates I am at my worst. I'm managing to mitigate the alone time pretty successfully, but it's challenging. The exposures continue to feel like sandpaper scraping a fresh wound.
[....]
14. When I interact with most people, I just don't feel like I'm behaving humanly... I'm frantically searching for what a human says, how a human moves in the space of the world. And when I get it right, my internal response is somewhere between whew that was close and I've Accomplished Something.
15. When I (feel like I) get it wrong, my breath stops and my head starts spinning. And I want to be home immediately.
16. Home is usually far away. But not as far away as it was when we lived on the south side.
17. Although it is painful, I can see the ways in which my anxiety is coming down. I'm more spontaneous. More talkative. More gracious to others and also (er, sometimes) to myself.
18. I even went to the coffee shop to write yesterday. That was impossible... basically up until the time it was possible. I didn't know if it was gonna work, but Mike suggested starting out with prompts and exercises instead of a blank screen / sheet of paper and that was super-helpful.
19. The thing I have to fight against, or as my DBT therapist would say gently push away, is my rabid desire to be better than I actually am, even though recovery is a process, and rationally I know that.
20. Going to the coffee shop and writing was a HUGE deal. But there were many small unglamorous accomplishments that led up to it.... perhaps I'm writing this entry to myself as well as to you. It's very hard for me to acknowledge the small steps that lead up to the bigger ones. I mock myself, like, whoa, big deal: I went to the supermarket. When it really is a big deal dammit.
That is all.
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