The only way to overcome anxiety is through exposure

Anxiety can be pervasive with multiple triggers, from social to sensory and cognitive. Children absolutely can have a physiological fight, flight or feeeze response - particularly during autistic shutdown/ burnout. I don't think you know what you're talking about if you don't understand this. Those things you've listed? My reply would be 'all of the above'. Here's my list of her triggers, let's see what you suggest:

• Cooking smells (dinner hall) and other smells
• Unexpected loud noises (assembly, dinner hall, classroom)
• Group dynamics (all)
• Fear of pain
• Fear of being sick, or around others who are sick
• Loud, overbearing teachers
• Being too hot and unable to control it
• Being too cold and unable to control it
• Having personal space invaded/ unexpected touch
• Fear of blood
• Vegetables that are not broccoli or peas
• Mess and clutter
• Germs
• Slow verbal processing speed and comprehension
• Fear of making mistakes
• Test pressure/ perfectionistic tendencies

Now, she's held it together for long periods and fallen apart for long periods. But when you look at this list and apply it to a primary school environment, it's not hard to see why she's fallen apart, why it takes so long for her to recover and why repeated episodes cannot be avoided - no matter how much you 'control' exposure (you can't in a school environment).

Gradual reintroduction to school will happen. So too will more episodes of burnout. People talk about 'resilience' - ND people are actually some of the most resilient people you'll meet precisely because they're repeatedly exposed to the things that cause them the most difficulty. But at great cost.

I had a severe phobia and it was quite easy to avoid. In the end I had hypnotherapy done by someone with a background in neuroscience. He explained the fear response and gave me a few exercises to do to try and retrain the brain. Then I had the exposure and I was exhilarated not afraid.

So exposure is good but you need support which for me was hypnotherapy. I think EDMR has a similar approach to hypnotherapy and this is used for people who experienced trauma. I knew someone who was in the place a terrorist attack happened and you can imagine he was traumatised. EDMR helped him enormously.

I think a lot of people have anxiety about something but you wouldn't know because they hide it well or exposure is easily avoided. Also some anxieties are socially acceptable and some are not. I have a friend who won't walk home late at night in London and it doesn't bother me much. For whatever reason that's not my anxiety but society accepts my friend's anxiety as reasonable.

I’ll remember that when I’m talking to my therapist about my rape

And to agree with a pp the title of the thread is

The only way to overcome anxiety is through exposure

and that is frankly bullshit. Unless you want to expose people like me to our trauma events over and over?

This is absolutely true.

Its basically the heart of CBT.

Apologies I didn’t see that comment.

Haven’t rtft, but the key with exposure is ‘less is more’. Over-exposure makes the anxiety worse.

Start with the smallest baby step. Continue the expose until the fear subsides. repeat that step until there is no anxiety. Then take the next step.

Eg if a child is afraid of water you don’t chuck them in a pool and say “see! water’s fine!” The child is going to be in panic mode the whole time and the horrible experience will make the anxiety worse.

You would start with the lowest level of anxiety the child has, eg being by a river. So you would take the child to a calm river with some sweets and a story and have a picnic. stay there long enough for the child’s low level anxiety response to subside. go there regularly, until the anxiety no longer appears. When that happens, it’s time to move up to the next step (eg picnic by a rushing river). If the anxiety doesn’t subside, you started with something to hard and need to go back a level. For some people just talking about the thing they fear is enough of a first step.

“life is full of discomfort and we have to learn to accept it”

I’ll have to remember to use this in my sessions next week, when I’m telling people to grow a pair and get on with it!

What are you using as your measure of what you can survive here?

You could try going for a walk in the countryside. At least that's what the locum doctor told me when I tried to renew my prescription. Apparently fresh air cures autism and the associated anxiety. (Thankfully the next dr wasn't so ignorant)

Well you are presuming, because your title says "the only way..."

People are not personally attacking you; they're "attacking" (or rather, criticising) your opinion. I get the narrative around "I'm just stating my opinion, we can all agree to disagree" but the reality is that actually, some opinions are worth less than others.

I’d actually like to thank the op for this thread because it led me down the following thoughts….

Mr Jones please!

Dr Stevens waited for his ten o clock. It was a new patient, Mr Jones. Even though it was the first time he’d seen him he was pretty confident that the new psychological methods he’d learnt in his training would solve the old man’s problems.

so, Mr Jones, what seems to be the problem?

well, Dr Stevens, my GP says that you are trained in the new way of treating anxiety - graduate exposure therapy?

Dr Stevens grinned. It was a new therapy and most of this referred got the name wrong. But at least the referrals were pouring in.

“yes, Mr Jones, I am. So the aim of gradual exposure theory is that we can help cure you of your anxiety by you working through a slope of exposure - so talking about the thing you are anxious about, to looking at pictures, then as you progress going to places where it might be found and you may as one of our advanced patients even be able to be in the same room!”

that’s wonderful doctor, my life has been very difficult with all the anxieties. I hope that this therapy will finally work”.

the atmosphere in the plush consultation room changed then, as Dr Stevens looked at the referral letter from the GP.

ah he said. There may be some… logistical obstacles.

”ohh”

Dr Stevens sighed. Exposure therapy was indeed a great new advance in medicine. The problem was…
the problem was….

”you see Mr Jones, I see you have shell shock, from your time in the Army. We can arrange for graduated exposure to the First World War battlefields for you - in fact we have a great programme here in London at a very reasonable cost. The difficulty is arranging a land war in Europe. There’s also a problem with those patients who have anxiety from the Second World War - we’re trying to negotiate with the European governments to arrange a land war in Europe - and they are being remarkably helpful I must say … but the French want to re-enact world war 1 and the Germans prefer to re-enact world war 2. So you may have to wait for your exposure therapy until agreement is reached on which land war in Europe will take place.

i don’t supppse you’d consider Russian warfare on the eastern front as a substitute for the Somme?

no?

oh well I am very sorry Mr Jones.

good luck with the rest of your life.

One of my triggers is a man on the other side of a door.

I have already said I am?

Yanbu. Its through repeat exposure that we learn to recognise that the perceived threat is not as severe as we thought, that we can survive it, because we did.

We have become very bad at dealing with discomfort. Life is full of discomfort and we have to learn to accept it.

I’m a trauma informed therapist and use different approaches depending on the presenting issue.
For OCD, ERP (exposure response prevention) is often mentioned as the gold standard, graded exposure from the least feared to most feared. It works well for OCD rituals and phobia. It works less well for EBSA and generalised anxiety, where a more psychotherapeutic approach is a better fit. Not often provided via NHS sadly, who offer CBT due to financial constraints.
It’s not a one size fits all solution. Would make my work a lot easier if it was! I know of many ND teenagers who were gradually encouraged back into school time and time again and some eventually reintegrated back with support from school. For some, school just wasn’t the right fit at all. The school system and environment works in a counter intuitive way to the ND brain. At work, I see how employers will make tangible accommodations for their ND workforce with hybrid working, use of headphones, separate spaces, respect of sensory needs etc. Ironically, they’re much better at this than schools, where arguably it’s far more important to get it right first time.
If only “man the fuck up and get on with it” worked.
So yes, graded exposure for OCD, or for a phobia of spiders/buttons= great. It doesn’t always work that easily for other anxieties.

the thread title is a wild and unhelpful generalisation and as is obvious from other posters' contributions it is not remotely that simple in many cases.

No one is suggesting that. It's terrible what has happened to you.

As a previous poster said it's normal daily activities that result in excessive anxiety that would require exposure. Such as the example given of walking to post a letter. Not repeating the traumatic event.

Then you don’t have anxiety as a medical condition, you have normal every day worries.

A bit simplistic, I think, given that for many people anxiety is a symptom not a condition in isolation. It may be possible to treat anxiety arising in a specific situation with supported exposure (assuming such support can be accessed) but unless treatment identifies and addresses the underlying cause of the anxiety, then it's likely to pop up in a different place. So the classroom feels safe now, but going to the shop doesn't.
Unfortunately unless the cause is obvious, it can take a long time to identify and may need all sorts of interventions from hormone tests to therapy. Unfortunately these interventions are rarely readily available and if a person is relient and what the NHS can offer, the advice to 'get help to cure your anxiety' is far easier to type out that it is to implement.
In some areas unless you are at the point of being a danger to yourself or others or can afford to self fund, there is no help. So people end up self managing anxiety as best they can, which is often simply avoiding triggers.

A trigger may seem minor to you but that doesn’t mean it is to the person suffering!

People are blurring the line between being clinically diagnosed with anxiety and just feeling everyday worries about certain situations/places.

The latter is perfectly normal and can definitely be dealt with by “just face it”. The first is not going to be as there is no specific trigger to expose yourself to.

Frustratingly @Passaggressfedup seems to know this as they’ve avoided answering the question about what they’d expose someone to, but continues on with the idea that people either want to help themselves or they don’t.

And absolutely each to their own this is just my way of getting through any anxiety I have. I once ended up in A&E with a panic attack, I didn’t realise it was that at the time and thought I was having an asthma attack. I promised myself I would never allow myself to be in that position again! So have a variety of coping methods to stop myself getting that anxious ever again!

Your anxiety has a very defined trauma reason. I think the OP was more about generalised anxiety with very minor reasons. And please don’t take my comments above as in anyway something that I would say to you with your past.
I hope you’re getting counselling/ professional support?

For some people, sure.

I have had debilitating social anxiety since I was a child. I always forced through it, backing out was never an option. I have been incredibly resilient, faced my fears, threw myself out of my comfort zone. However, it never ever got any easier. Now I am in the middle of a mental breakdown because I just couldn't fake it anymore. I'm autistic, I don't know if that has something to do with it.