My blog traffic has slowed dramatically and my posts have been few and far between recently, yet fear not! I haven’t deserted you dear readers.
This last week has been a whirlwind. It’s been full to the brim with questions, fears, anxieties, frustration and many more obstacles, that have been put in my way, in order to make completing even simple tasks, seem impossible.
My week has been a bit like this:
Monday I woke up with the overwhelming need to get Big Bro into a nursery. In the back of my mind, I knew that there was some kind of special funding he would be entitled to but I wasn’t sure, so emailed the Children’s Centre. I basically said words to the effect of “Help! I don’t know how this process works, please, pleaaaase help me.”
The same day, I had a lovely email and the offer of a home visit from the Early Years Worker for the coming Thursday. Yay!
Tuesday me and Big Bro were up insanely early, so that we could keep an appointment with his surgeon. The result was me being told he may end up being slightly incontinent. There was much head bashing and protesting too much. We don’t know how things will pan out really until he’s potty trained. If it turns out he can’t control bowel movements, then it’s back to the drawing board.
Wednesday we flumped.
Thursday Early Years Worker came over. She approved us for 2gether funding (nursery funding for 2-3 year olds) until Big Bro qualifies for normal funding in January. I then called around the walking distance nurseries to arrange an appointment to look around. EVERYWHERE WAS FULL! apart from one of the nicest ones. There were a few places left, so I snapped up an appointment for today.
Today I got over my stupidly bad anxiety about walking long distances and took Big Bro to look around the nursery. It was so nice that I was like, “Where do I sign him up!!” The lovely manager took my phone number and said she’d call me back this afternoon to see if she could find us a space. We then dawdled (and I half dragged Big Bro, through a massive tantrum) home.
This afternoon said manager called me back and confirmed Big Bros places! Huzzah! I am no longer a bad mummy who puts things off to the last minute. I now feel like I’ve joined the ranks of organised nursery going mothers and fathers and this makes me feel good.
I’m sure I’ll blog in much greater detail when the “oh-my-life-I-overcame-so-many-social-anxiety-problems-in-just-a-few-days” adrenalin wares off. I just wanted you all to know that sometimes, I have a bit of a life going on – something I didn’t even realise!
I’m now going to have a nice hot bath. What has your week been like?
Believe it or not, I don’t have many friends. Most of the people I know, either live at the other end of the country or solely exist to me on-line in some form or another. Looking back through my life, I’ve also never been a very social creature – seeking solitude more often than not and being comfortable in doing so.
After an appointment this morning with two charming ladies, where we were discussing Group Therapy for my social anxiety, the thought struck me.
Is it okay to be anti-social?
We live in a world, where it’s important for us to be seen to be connecting in some way, with our fellow human beings. We’re bombarded by ideas of “The Big Society“, and that “We’re All In This Together”. We’re encouraged to have some kind of community spirit, to get involved with things going on locally, to socialise with our neighbours and do all of the things that “normal” people do.
Why is it that if you’re not a huge fan of these things, you’re classed as “not normal”?
Why is it okay for those of us who are happy with our own company, who don’t want to spend our free time pissing our money up the wall, who enjoy the quieter and more personal pursuits of life, to be labelled as “loners”, “freaks” and many other worse things? Why is being uncomfortable and unhappy in a social situation a bad thing? Must we all live our lives at the centre of attention, in order to feel accepted?
I can understand to some extent if it intrudes on your ability to lead a happy life. I know how hard this can be, from personal experience. What I do object to though, is that wanting to keep yourself to yourself, is still seen as abnormal.
Am I naive in thinking that in this day and age, we should be respecting each individual, for the person that they are and not dictating what we think they should be?
What are your thoughts on this? As always, I love to hear from both sides of the argument.
If you’ve been following me for a little while, you’ll remember I opted to receive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as a way of trying to combat my Social Anxiety. Today was my second appointment and it’s left me feeling pretty perplexed about the whole thing. Before I start, as a reminder, I’m practising a guided self-help form of CBT. What this means is that my therapist will show me the tools I need to use, in order for me to go off and start to fix myself bit-by-bit. This is not full on, one-on-one therapist lead CBT. Does that make sense? I hope so.
Anyway, after shooing away the usual doubts of “Is this really worth it? Should I really go? Maybe I’ll just cancel and deal with this on my own”, I jumped in the taxi and got myself off to the doctors. I use a taxi otherwise I’d get halfway there, think twice about it, turn around and leg it back home.
So two things shook my resolve before we even started. The first was that no-one told her I was there, which resulted in me waiting, anxiously, for a further half an hour and secondly on entering the room, she announced that she didn’t have a lot of time. Great! I overcame several of my own mind-games in an attempt to get me there and found out instead of the usual 45 minutes I would have got, this time was cut down to about 10 minutes. I get that she was probably enormously busy, but it was irritating and only deepened my sense of “Why am I doing this?”.
The session itself was confusing. I have a table on a piece of paper with 4 headings. In heading one, I need to write down a situation so for example “The Beef wanted me to go out for a walk”. In heading 2 I then have to identify a feeling that occurred as a result of the situation and then rate it between 0-100%, let’s say “I felt flustered, anxious and apprehensive – 95%“.In heading 3 I add the thought that I get, when thinking of the situation and feeling and rate how much I believe it, like, “If I go out walking, I will get hot and sweaty and think that people looking at me, will think that I look fat, horrible and ugly – 100%“.
Bare with me dear reader, it gets a bit more complicated from now on.
Now on a separate sheet of paper, I have a table with the headings “My thought” (call it heading 4) and “My % belief” (heading 5). Under “My thought”, I would write “When I go out walking, people will think negative things and laugh at me”. Under “My % Belief”, I would write “100%”, because right now, that’s how much I believe that thought. Now under these statements, in the first column is the heading “Evidence for” and in the second column, “Evidence against”. In the “Evidence for” heading, I need to write down the evidence I have for why I think that “When I go out walking, people will think negative things and laugh at me”. My evidence for this would be, “Last week I went to the shop and got dirty looks from a group of teenagers”, or “On my way to the doctors, the taxi driver didn’t say a word to me” and you carry on listing the evidence for. (In any normal situation this wouldn’t be a concern to anyone, just a bit awkward. With the way I think, it MUST be something wrong me ME that causes this.) You now move on to Evidence against. What have you done recently that would go against that thought you had? Something like,“I walked to the mail box and got a lovely smile from an elderly gentleman”, or “I took my toddler to the supermarket, and was told how well-behaved he was”. These are examples of where what I thought would happen, didn’t happen.
Phew we’re getting there.
Right. We’ve done 1 – Situation, 2 – Feeling %, 3 – Thought % on the first sheet. On the other sheet we did 4 – Thought and 5 – My Belief % and the subsequent for and against instances. We now go back to the first sheet for 6 – Revised Thought and how much I believe in it %.
What a Revised thought is (as it was explained to me), is a thought that I can come up with, that’s a bit more positive than my original one, and one that I can believe. So in my case, instead of “When I go out, people will think negative things, and laugh at me”, I will change it to“When I go out, people might notice me, but won’t think much about me”, then I rate it by how much I can believe it, lets say 45%. I could probably come up with a better thought to go on, but hopefully you get the idea. I create a new thought that I can believe in enough, to put into practice.
Then comes the last heading 7 – Feeling, how bad was it? %. I write down how I feel before I go and test my new thought. So I might put something similar to heading 2′s ‘feeling’, purely because this is my first time trying this method. The idea however is that the more I test out my “new thought” (heading 6), the more I will believe it, which will change how I feel about it and hopefully change my thinking enough that when I go in to the same (1)situation, over time I will no longer (2)feel or (3)think as I used to.
In essence, instead of:
The Beef wants me to go out for a walk. I feel about %95 flustered, anxious and apprehensive, because when I go out, people will 100% think negative things and laugh at me for being hot and sweaty.
a change in the thought process, should help me get to:
The Beef wants me to go out for a walk, I feel a little flustered, anxious and apprehensive, HOWEVER, when I go out, people might notice me, but won’t think much about me and I believe this 100%.
I sincerely hope this has made sense to any of you who have had a go at following. I’ve been trying to understand it as I go along, because I didn’t have a clue what the woman was talking about at the time. Explaining it to you though, has helped to explain it to me. I’d also like to add that the examples of thoughts and feelings I’ve used, are indeed my own. This is how I think and behave, which is why getting to grips with this therapy is so important.
Have you gone through a similar experience? If so, please, comment and help me to make some sense of it all. All comments are welcome, even if it’s just to say how impossible it was to follow any of the above.
