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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Facing it a step at a time
Most ladders come apart for dull reasons. The bottom rung was somebody else's idea of easy. The wording came out of a manual. Nobody said you were allowed to stop. Or the practice was so spread out that every attempt started from cold. If you are drawing one up, check it against those six before you climb anything.
Facing a fear in steps works, and it works best with someone guiding the ladder. Read this as an explanation of how it works, and take the steps themselves to a therapist.
you will progress from stage to stage (Quran 84:19). Growth is described as staged, which is the shape a ladder is trying to copy.
الانشقاق
لَتَرۡكَبُنَّ طَبَقًا عَن طَبَقࣲ
you will progress from stage to stage
Qur’an 84:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across seventy five studies of treatment for childhood anxiety, how much exposure a programme contained was more strongly related to symptom improvement than the anxiety management components were. Amount and frequency matter, which is the argument for practice that is regular rather than occasional. These were treatment studies in children, so what the pooled figures cannot tell you is how much any one person's ladder needs.
Whiteside SPH, Sim LA, Morrow AS, Farah WH, Hilliker DR, Murad MH, Wang Z. (2020). A Meta-analysis to Guide the Enhancement of CBT for Childhood Anxiety: Exposure Over Anxiety Management.. Clinical child and family psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Each of those six takes away one of the usual reasons people stop partway up.
Let the person facing it choose the first step, and let them choose an easy one. A rung somebody picked gets climbed. A rung assigned to them gets argued about.
No step happens without the person agreeing to it. Not ordered, not dragged, not talked round in a bright voice. Agreement is a condition of the thing working, not a courtesy.
When something frightens you the mind offers one option: do not go. Force out two or three more before judging any of them, daft ones included. Choosing needs something to choose between.