Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Worry and anxiety › Facing it a step at a time
Otherwise a good problem solving session quietly becomes a plan for avoiding more skilfully. The test is simple. Does this option keep me in the place I am learning to manage, or does it get me out of it? Sitting somewhere quieter with one friend is coping. Eating in the corridor is not, however sensible it sounds while you are planning it.
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.
where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:5). The ease is placed inside the difficulty rather than at a safe distance from it.
الشرح
فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرًا
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Extinction research shows the old fear association is not erased but competed with by new learning, and that this new learning is tied to the setting it was built in, which is why it has to be built in several contexts before it holds. That is the argument for staying in the real place rather than working around its edges. It comes mainly from laboratory and animal work, so it is a mechanism rather than a measured effect in any canteen.
Craske MG, Hermans D, Vervliet B. (2018). State-of-the-art and future directions for extinction as a translational model for fear and anxiety.. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The fear only updates in the place where it lives.
Ask which step they are willing to try, and then go with their answer. A smaller step they chose themselves tends to get attempted, and a bigger one you chose for them often does not.
Start with the body. Slow breathing, muscles let go one at a time, a piece of music, a familiar object in a pocket. Small levers, and they turn fear from something happening to you into something you are doing something about.
Years of avoiding people leave real gaps, not only fear. How to start small talk, how to join a group already talking, how to get out of a conversation. Those can be taught, and being taught them is not an insult.