Ladies and gentlemen, this is the part of the show where I ask for your help. And I mean genuine help. To begin with I need you to read this post, if you haven’t already. If you have, move on to the next instruction.
My lovely (and stuttering) psychologist is ringing me tomorrow to find out how I’m getting on with FearFighter – for the past week or so I’ve had to keep a phobia diary e.g. what triggers them off, how I react etc. Now I’ll admit, I’ve not done it but hear me out. I don’t need to keep a diary; I’ve been living with these thoughts in my head for 3 years now and I know what triggers them off. We’re talking dark spaces, noises, walking alone etc. So I logged back in to FearFighter today and wrote all these things down. I also had to describe my biggest, well, “problem” if you like which is thoughts about death and people dying. And then it got confusing.
Basically I have to come up with SMART objectives which will help me overcome said “problem” and make me all better. If you are unaware what SMART objectives are, which are drummed into me because of university, they are Specific, Manageable, Achieveable, Relevant, and Timely. I have to write down how to overcome my thoughts – harder than it looks!! It gave examples but none of them related to me specifically i.e. Barbara can’t ride on public transport because she feels like people are staring at her. So, her objective would be to ride on a bus for one hour 3 days a week – I dunno where Barbara gets her money for all this bus travel or where she is supposed to be going, but it’s what she has to do. It was a nice example, but it didn’t help me.
Tell me this. What can my objective be to erase thoughts about death? Do I need to spend one hour 3 days a week in a morgue? Do I need to go to a funeral home? No clue.
SPECIFIC: Everyday I think about death in some form or another – how my friends will die, how I will die, what my best friend looks like in her coffin, when my parents will die… you get the picture, right?
MANAGEABLE, ACHIEVEABLE, RELEVANT, TIMELY: ?!?!?!
Again, how do I set a SMART objective when my problem is my thoughts? Apparently it’s not good enough to say, “Just forget about them, and tell yourself you’re being silly” – I was going to write that, but it’s not allowed because it’s just not possible. Brain transplant maybe? A time machine wouldn’t go amiss either. So ladies and gentlemen, I ask for your help – shoot some SMART objectives at me before my psychologist rings me tomorrow and asks what the hell I’ve been doing these past 2 weeks!
[courtesy of weheartit]
Early this afternoon I had my first psychologist appointment to discuss everything in this post. I’d already had a bad experience with this guy because he was rather rude to me on the phone when I tried to re-arrange my appointment – I expected him to be a grumpy old man, unwilling to help. So 1pm came and as I walked into the waiting room, a man in his early 20s spotted me and called me into his room – this can’t be him surely? But it was. And he was a nervous wreck after listening to me rant on the phone to him the other day – part of me felt bad, part of me felt he was useless. He was stuttering, shaking, and kept forgetting what he was saying… who needed the therapy, me or him?
He discussed the important points first i.e. confidentiality, who he was etc. and then simply said, “And now I’ll hand over to you.” Well, he couldn’t shut me up. The poor guy was trying to write everything down that I was saying and often had to repeat what I said just to clarify that he had written it down correctly. Once I’d finished talking, fortunately his writing hand was still intact, he asked me to describe a recent situation where I’d had intrusive thoughts. Take yesterday for example; I was getting the train home and was convinced that one of the other passengers had a bomb in his backpack, and was going to blow us all up. Cue me keeping a steady eye on him for the entire journey and checking where all the exits were. When I was telling him this story, I was expecting him to laugh or pull a “you-is-ca-razy!” face but he just nodded and listened intently. At the end the conversation went something like this…
HIM: So tell me, did he have a bomb?
ME: Oh, no actually he didn’t! Erm…
HIM: And when you think there is a dead person behind you, have you ever seen one?
ME: No…
HIM: So what do you think I’m trying to say?
ME: That I should… erm… stop worrying about it?
HIM: That’d be good 
In that whole two minutes of dialogue, I got it. I got what he was trying to tell me. These people who I think are going to blow the train up have never done it. They’ve not even thought about it because they’re just on their way home like everyone else. Nobody else on the train is thinking about it, and nobody would know even if he did have a bomb, so why worry about it? Why put the burden on myself to suspect bombers, when nobody else is? And to think like that is a huge step forward – I’m thinking realistically, rather than illogically. It feels great! 
I now have an online programme of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to complete which is all about fighting fears and phobias which in my case is looking under beds, crossing roads safely but efficiently, walking alone without thinking about dead people… y’know, the usual. 
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