Exposure therapy-use with caution

Exposure therapy never really worked for me. I mean, it makes sense that the more you do something, the better you should get at it, however, I always felt that there was something missing.

I would force myself to speak up, start conversations, smile at people, and mingle a bit more. This usually came in the form of determined bursts of energy, and was very short lived. The results were always the same. I usually felt less confident afterwards and would obsess about something I said, or didn’t say, or how someone may have perceived me.

Generally, I would feel much worse after the experience. At first, I thought that it was because I didn’t put forth the effort required, or that I gave up before anything positive might have developed. But, it seemed that no matter how hard I tried, or how long I hung in there, I just could not make any progress.

So there I was, simply throwing myself at the world – one attempt after another – not making even the slightest improvement. It’s hard to keep motivated in this situation because the results are not there – I was getting nothing in return. This self-inflicted torture served to do nothing more than to make me feel bad about myself.

Well, as it turns out, I was missing a few key ingredients. The biggest obstacle was a massive wall that I had built around myself over the years. This was my protection system, and I made sure it was there 24/7.

The second ingredient was how I interpreted the outside world. I had a handful of automatic thought processes that dealt with most situations. These thoughts seemed to rationalize things for me. However, I failed to see how destructive they would eventually become.

Now, instead of simply suffering through exposure and getting nothing in return, I would start by dismantling the wall I had built. Next, I would try to re-program my automatic thoughts and change my core beliefs.

It was a monumental task, but worth the effort, I thought.

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