A reasonable philosophy of recovery
A reasonable philosophy of recovery is one that assumes that you’ll get re-sensitized. You’ll get anxious again and you’ll avoid again. You’ll have another intrusive thought and you’ll do something to neutralize it. You’ll have a low mood and have trouble maintaining participation in the activities you value. The resilience of your recovery is marked by how quickly you return to relating effectively to your internal experience, rather than by the absence of thoughts, feelings, or sensations.
In order to get to a place where you can quickly return to relating effectively to your internal experience, you have to master the basics.
Mastering the basics of relating to yourself well is not a four-to-eight week course but rather a process that lasts a lifetime. You may know yourself and predict and respond to your triggers well for some time. You will move on to a new life stage. New forms of pain and challenge will arise in your life. The most certain thing about life is that it is uncertain. It is always changing and you can’t always predict the ways in which it will change.
Observe what triggers your suffering
Mastering the basics starts with regularly observing yourself. In the presence of fear about what you might find, turn toward your thoughts, feelings, and sensations through journaling, self-monitoring, tracking through an app, meditation, psychotherapy, or talking with loved ones. Notice what internal experiences you have and what triggers them. Which internal experiences cause you suffering? Which internal experiences do you welcome?
Seek out your triggers on purpose
When you feel anxious, passively observing what you experience will lack the force you need to relate to it well. Anxiety typically pummels people who experience it. It feels like being hit by a wave and sucked under, not like a breeze that you just notice and embrace. Once you know what your triggers are, you have to get on the offense and seek them out. If you’re getting beat up by anxiety, you’ll want a strategy that teaches you how to fight back.
Anxiety tells you that you have to avoid whatever threats it throws at you. You have to be strategic. You see the anxiety. You label the anxiety. You do the opposite of what anxiety tell you to do.
Perhaps you’ve heard this message and you’ve tried. Regularly observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations and being willing to experience them on purpose is a real challenge when you have an emotional disorder. In fact, if you could regularly observe yourself without judgment and with willingness, your suffering from your anxiety disorder would be greatly reduced. That is, you’d still experience some pain from getting sensitized and then experiencing thought-action fusion. (Remember that thought-action fusion occurs when a thought arrives in your mind with a whoosh of sensations that makes the thought feel like a message, a threat, or a directive. If you try to problem solve that thought, the thought will become more frequent and cause you more suffering.) You’d still get stuck sometimes. But, if you regularly had a willing attitude during that stuckness, you’d get unstuck faster and experience less suffering.
Treat resistance with curiosity and compassion
When you are able to regularly observe your internal world, look for what you are resisting. What are you bracing against, avoiding, or suppressing? Do you experience thoughts that you think you shouldn’t have? Do you experience feelings that overwhelm you or sensations that scare you? What are you afraid will occur if you seek out and allow all of these experiences? What if you were to invite them in and even seek out opportunities for more of them?
You’ll probably feel resistance as you observe. Good! You’re doing it right. Observation itself can feel uncomfortable, because that which you have been trying to avoid is now what you are trying to go towards.