Free Yourself from Anxiety (18 page)

We’ve already shown you how to create counter statements to your negative thoughts, and how to use Socratic arguments. There are a few other techniques that you can use, and you should choose the ones that appeal to you most:

Say to yourself ‘I don’t have to accept that thought.’

These are statements that you repeat to yourself regularly. The great original affirmation is ‘every day in every way I am growing better and better.’ It can feel pretty silly to look in the mirror and repeat this sort of thing, but all we can say is, it does work, so do it.

Instead of thinking in black and white terms (failure or success, stupid or competent, great or awful) learn to value the shades of grey in-between. For instance, to change all-or-nothing thinking, write down the two extremes and draw a line between them. Decide where you are on the line and tell yourself that where you are is okay.

This simply means looking at the advantages and disadvantages of something. Ask yourself ‘How does this negative thought help me? How
does it hurt me?’ If the hurt is greater than the help, then you can let the thought go. Remember, it’s only a thought.

Use your breathing and relaxation techniques to calm yourself when thoughts start to spiral.

When you are talking to yourself in new ways, or creating counters, challenges and affirmations, remember the following guidelines:

Now you’re going to put your new knowledge to the test in a live situation. We suggest you choose a goal from your exposure list that you have already begun to master and repeat it purely to test out your new thinking. If you have OCD, then read the example below.

Look down the checklist in Chapter 37 and choose three types of negative thinking that you are ready to work on. For each one, write a brief statement that will give you support. Here are some examples:

Underestimating your ability to cope:
I can cope even if I start to feel panicky.

Perfectionism:
It’s okay to make mistakes, I can learn from them.

Blaming yourself:
I can let go of feeling responsible.

It might help to write these down on a small card to carry with you, to remind yourself.

Now repeat your goal – because you have done it before your physical Anxiety will be lower, and you will be able to pay attention to your thoughts. Follow this procedure:

With practice you will become quicker at spotting the negative thoughts and interrupting them.

Ask yourself the question:
Do my rituals really make a difference or are they driven by my Anxiety?

Facing this possibility can feel very uncomfortable, after all you give over a large chunk of your life to OCD rituals, do you really want to find out that it was all pointless? Of course it wasn’t pointless, but you may have been missing the point – focusing on your obsessive thoughts instead of dealing with your Anxiety. If you can reach an understanding that the rituals do not, in fact, make a difference, then you can free up some energy for working on your Anxiety.

Let’s look at the situation objectively.

There are two ways of looking at your thoughts. On the one hand there may be a real danger that you are able to prevent by doing your rituals. On the other hand you may have the thoughts because you’re anxious, and the rituals don’t make any difference to what happens in the real world.

The next step is to test the theories in a live situation. Start by keeping a record of one day during which you do your rituals. Make a list of all the people that you feel you are protecting with the rituals, and make a list of any bad things that happen to them on that day. This record will provide you with a basis for comparison.

Next, choose a risk that you feel is real, but manageable. For example, someone with a cleaning ritual might choose to stop cleaning the living room while still cleaning the kitchen and bathroom on the basis that the greatest risk of infection lies in those two rooms. Write down in your notebook exactly what you intend to do, and what you expect the outcome to be for each of the two theories:

Test:
I won’t do my cleaning ritual in the living room for one day.

Theory A prediction:
Someone in the family will be ill, or have an accident (this would include a list of the people concerned, and a list of specific bad things that might happen).

Theory B prediction:
I will be anxious as I imagine all the danger.

While you are conducting a test like this you can expect to feel anxious, so you need to have coping techniques ready. Keep a record of your Anxiety throughout the test, so that you can trace how it peaks and then starts to die away. Also keep a record of any bad things that happen to the people on the list – there will always be some negative events in any family, so it’s important that you only include those things that were in your original prediction.

Compare the two sets of records. Were there really more of the specified bad things on the day of the test? Or was it just your Anxiety that was bad?

When you’ve finished the session, write it up in your notebook in the usual way. Give your Anxiety a score out of 10, and note whether monitoring your thoughts made any difference.

This will probably seem quite tedious at first, but after a while it will become second nature to monitor your negative thoughts and put a stop to them as soon as they start. If you persist, eventually they won’t even start.

Some people with Anxiety develop a tendency to worry at their thoughts. This is especially common in OCD, but people with panic, GAD and phobias can also find that they spend long periods of time locked into their thoughts, probably being very inactive, and not really connecting with their daily life.

If you recognise yourself in this, you’ll need to take particular care with your cognitive work. There is no need to spend hours monitoring your thoughts, arguing with yourself or haggling with yourself over just how much work you’re able to do.

When you are doing cognitive exercises, keep your mental responses short and to the point. The value comes from repeating them, just like with exposure work, but unlike exposure work it is better to keep your sessions short. At first your Anxiety may well send nagging thoughts (just like a child in a car repeating ‘are we nearly there yet?’ endlessly) but all you need to do is give your chosen response and keep on with your planned session.

Imagine you’re sitting on the grass on a lovely summer’s day. Without really thinking about it, you pick a dandelion flower and examine it. It’s not especially pretty, and it’s spoiling the look of the lawn, so you pull the leaves from the plant as well. Now the lawn looks better, but any gardener will tell you that a dandelion will recover even if you pull its leaves off, so you grab a trowel and dig down into the soil to get the root out. It’s long and tough but at last you get it out, and now you know that dandelion won’t be growing back in your lawn.

You can compare your anxious thought processes to the dandelion plant.

At the top are the automatic thoughts that pop into your head when you’re feeling anxious. ‘What if I pass out?’ ‘Supposing something bad happens and it’s my fault?’ ‘I have to get out of here!’ These thoughts are like the flower.

Next are the cognitive distortions that we’ve already looked at, everything from all-or-nothing thinking to wishful thinking. They are like the leaves of the plant.

All of these thought processes are fed by something deeper, the roots of the plant. They are known as core beliefs and they can be very difficult to dig up, just like a dandelion root, but the unhelpful ones are feeding your Anxiety and probably making it difficult for you to complete your recovery.

Core beliefs are formed in the earliest part of your life and they relate to three things:

So examples of core beliefs might be:

Unfortunately someone with Anxiety is most likely to have negative core beliefs, for instance:

Very often these beliefs are so deeply ingrained that we’re not aware of them, or if we are, they feel like universal truths. Core beliefs are formed very early in life. They can come from the people around you, or the culture you grow up in, or your life experiences. So if you are brought up by your parents to believe that ‘boys don’t cry’ or if in your culture ‘girls are second class citizens’ then you’ll find it hard to resist that conditioning. It’s the same with life experiences: if a parent dies or leaves you when you are young you may develop your own core belief that ‘people always abandon me’.

One way of identifying core beliefs is to look at your cognitive distortions and see what might be underlying and feeding them.