Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy for Panic Disorder
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I’d like to pick up on the
last installment in which I
discussed the analogy of “priming the pump”, as it were, with
respect to getting your recovery on track by taking small
actions that lead to your successful recovery.
It should come as
no surprise that by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,
you're
able to integrate new patterns of thinking that will take
hold and the whole process continues to
flow. This is
preceisely one of the reasons why Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy is good for panic disorder.
Often, though, at
some point in time you might feel like you’ve hit a brick wall,
with respect to your recovery and it really feels like the
things that were working, are no longer working, and that’s
what I’d like to talk about today.
So the question
becomes: What do you do when you fall off track or seem like
you’re getting
nowhere with your recovery?
You first need to
recognize that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is something that
you could do it any time, not just initially when you come down
with your panic attacks or when you’re feeling
anxious.
Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy is something you should
be using in this instance because, and this is really
the most important point, the reason you’re feeling bad is because of
your thoughts. What better way to help
with your thoughts than with Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy?
If you continue to
work on these thoughts and change your thinking then you can get
back on track.
What are some
examples of thoughts you might have when you feel that things are
insurmountable?
“There is no way out.”
“This just proves that none of
this works and I can’t feel better.”
These thoughts are
not necessarily obvious but are likely reflected in your
feelings.
One way these
emotions are reflected in your thoughts is by virtue of how the
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy model works.
As I’ve said many
times, you need to be a good detective with your thoughts because
the particular thoughts that are causing your anxiety are likely
not immediately obvious.
In other words, if
you feel emotional or sad, you examine the evidence: For example,
your thoughts might be: “Well I feel sad because I feel like I
failed?” But have you
really failed or have you simply experience a challenge in life
like everyone does? This is the notion of restructuring your
thoughts. This
alternative question “have you simply experienced a challenge in
life like everyone else does?” would be an example of an
alternative thought. A
thought can definitely be in the form of a question.
You have to look
at your own thoughts as an individual and generate alternative
thoughts that are more accurate.
One of the things
I did through my own self-discovery, is I discovered that often
when I would feel really bad, or when I had been doing everything I
could, I might become very anxious and on one level I would say to
myself “see I knew this wasn’t going to work again” but I bought
into the original thoughts that came with the initial onset of my
panic attacks. In the moment it’s hard to recognize that – you
can’t see the errors in your thinking.
You can’t solve a
problem that is caused by the same thinking that created
it.
This is so true
for anxiety and panic attack sufferers. You can’t use the same anxious
thoughts to feel better.
So what do you do
in this situation?
You need to be
more objective but Cognitive Behavioral Therapy allows you to step
aside as a third party. It’s very easy to give advice to
someone else and such advice that we really
believe. Yet the
same things we say to others we would not say to
ourselves. This
is what is known as a double standard. In other words, you’re
holding others to one set of standards but holding yourself
out to another set of standards.
I could quickly
name counselees examples proving it is not hopeless to a friend,
when he/she tells me it’s hopeless but I find it difficult to do
the same for myself.
We all share this tendency. As an anxiety and panic attack
sufferer you would not heed the same advice that you provided to a
friend. You would
ignore the evidence.
That’s why you need a structured, more objective way of looking at
the situation in which you can generate more accurate thoughts –
this of course is where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy comes in.
Under the
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy model, if you’re feeling bad then
there’s typically an error in your thinking. [Cognitive Behavioral
Therapy is not intended to stop a natural process (however
even in these see so situations Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy can help you to keep things in perspective and
bounce back again because it puts things into perspective).]
The difference
between hitting a brick wall and getting back on track is a matter
of actually deciding whether you go back and do Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy again and refocus or whether you slip back into
your own way of thinking.
You hold the wheel
in your hands to control your thoughts – and that’s what’s really
amazing here – but at the same time the most important point to
take from here is that you can do this every single day and you
should expect that there are naturally going to be barriers that we
all hit in our life where we need to refocus again and regroup and
come back but that’s how we become successful in our recovery.
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