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" Grooves "
Each level of anxiety can be measured on a scale and that scale can equally represent the depth of the groove it leaves. You can visit a place anxiety free and it leaves no trace. Just that one glare and that marks remains for a time to come. You cannot wipe it away. No amount of revisits will make it fade. Only time can remove it.
I can see one incident is going to throw me each time I visit a place anxiety was high.i can't change that. What is important is to tread carefully now so as not to add more grooves.
2 comments:
It strikes me, reading your recent posts compared to say a couple of years ago, that you are getting on top of your agoraphobia and getting much further afield. There was a time you couldn't leave the house, get to the end of the road or take the kids to school. Maybe having a dog has forced you to get out, even if you don't feel like it, and having something dependant on you has helped your courage to go further. So I definitely think you have made so much progress and should be proud of that. Your last two posts have referred a lot to your breathing going haywire and therein lies the key. When a panic attack comes on, focussing on breathing in a positive way (controlling it) rather than a negative way (thinking of how you cannot breathe) would help. Counting to 4 as you breathe in, holding it for 4 and then breathing out to 8 counts is a sure way of slowing things down and calming you. Keep doing that for several minutes and it should help the attack to pass. From a scientific point of view you are counting longer to get rid of the carbon dioxide. Also concentrating on the counting will distract you from concentrating on the sheer panic.
Thanks Addy. I agree it's easy to forget how restricted life was before. Certainly that progress is not lost and has given me confidence I lacked originally. The doubt that was there before is no longer there. It will just take time.
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