The only way to overcome anxiety is through exposure

[Passaggressfedup]

I recently overcome a massive anxiety of mine. I feel so liberated and proud. It has made me think of the other significant anxiety triggers I experienced in life and concluded that all have been overcome through regular, controlled exposure over time.

I read so many thread about children or young people experiencing anxiety, where the parent has opted to take the child away from the situation thinking it is what's best for them.

I appreciate that there was some specific instances where removal is the for the best, but aren't we, as a society, making things worse by not helping our children to face their fear so that they can not only gradually get over that particular fear, but also learn to build that sense of resilience, pride and positivity that comes with it?

I think we also need to look at the reasons behind why MH problems are increasing? Especially in younger people. Is it down to the breakdown of society, social media, are more people allowing anxiety to take hold rather than powering through. I’m not saying any of those are correct just that anxiety and mental health issues are spiralling and I think the powers that be need to know why that is so it can be corrected! When we have an obesity epidemic or smoking related illnesses increase there are public health campaigns, who remembers the HIV ones of the 80’s.

Well done for overcoming these challenges.

Your title is likely to get some people's backs up. It's clear you see controlled exposure as just one way. If you'd titled your post how you overcame anxiety the response from some who've jumped the gun may have been different.

You are wrong.
Sometimes controlled exposure can work.
Other times increasing stress levels can leads to worsening anxiety or depression.
It is as simple as that.

The lack of treatment at an early stage is a massive issue. When children and young people attempt suicide, self harm or experience rape and abuse and get nothing you know the system is broken.

Lots of posters seem determined to misinterpret the OP. She was clear in her OP that she wasn’t talking about every situation and that she was talking about controlled exposure over time.
She is not being unreasonable.

I suspect you won't return to this thread
I'm here, reading posts. I just won't engage with posts attacking me and defending myself.

But why did you feel the need to start a thread? I don't get it
Because like many, I ask myself questions about our society and where we are going. I am particularly concerned about the rise in anxiety, especially anxiety that relates to every day activities that would normally be considered part of normal life. It made me wonder what has changed and what can be done to reduce this phenomenon that is clearly not helping society in many ways.

As I reflected on what was a significant phobia that triggered huge anxiety and affected my life, it made me think about how I myself overcome it. I posted with an opinion, interested in what others think of the issue.

Sadly it triggered some posters taking it as a personal attack when it wasn't at all. Some people always turn general discussions about them and their individual circumstances and then responding with all kind of unpleasantness.

There has also been an assumption that I have no professional experience of the matter. I won't bother to discredit this as I'm not prepared to give personal information on a public forum and it would be pointless anyway.

I agree with you OP, and I speak as someone who has been diagnosed as suffering with anxiety. So many people think being nervous about every day activities is the same as anxiety, similar to people thinking being sad is the same as depression. People need to accept being nervous is a natural emotion and they should work through it rather than avoid. Nobody is being taught resilience nowadays.

You also seem to have triggered posters who are being deliberately obtuse.

Being anxious to the extent you self harm and try to kill yourself isn’t natural or something you can just work through.

Check your ignorance.

Also, things like fear of the dentist or spiders etc are called Specific Phobias. Overcoming a specific phobia is completely different to overcoming panic disorder/ social phobias/ GAD etc.
There is a whole branch of medicine that treats these things. For anyone that hasn’t heard of it, it’s called Psychiatry/ Clinical Psychology. And unless you’re qualified to make statements about how different treatments work, you’re talking out of your arse.

She absolutely is and ignorant to boot as the professionals on here have highlighted.

I don’t think you can point to a single ‘reason’.

We all encounter anxious feeling every day, that is normal. Most of the time it doesn’t escalate to pathological levels because we have enough resilience to overcome the feeling. Resilience isn’t ‘inner grit’, it’s things like a friends and family who we know have our back, feeling safe and like we belong in our community, financial security, job security, housing security, time to unwind and have fun each day, sufficient sleep. Secure attachments for children (with adults who don’t look at screens instead of at them), and school environments that are calm and safe and where they know all the adults there (rather than chaotic and unpredictable surrounded by strangers).

For sooo many reasons in today’s society (which I could get political
about, but I won’t), people are lacking the factors in their lives that will help them to be resilient, and have been for decades. Persistent anxiety (and other MH conditions) can and do get a grip on them and they find it very hard to break free with all the additional stresses that are on them.

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
This was quite a long post to show a misinterpretation of what I wrote and already justified why it is so.

Some posters don't understand what triggers are in the context of exposure. In your example, ww1 is the trauma. It's the event that started the anxiety.

It's not the direct trigger for current anxiety events since Mr Jones is not on the battlefield. The triggers are what is brain is linking current events with the trauma although they are not the same. So loud noises maybe, or sight of a tiny bit of blood, or sound of planes. All three are normal every day events that are not normally dangerous as such.

Controlled exposure is to these triggers so that the brain stops associating them with the trauma but instead see them for what they are, normal events that might warrant caution but not full on panic.

I agree with you OP. Anxiety is a symptom and not a diagnosis and yet it is regularly bandied around as though it was a diagnosis in itself these days.

An SSRI and CBT are the evidence based treatments for many anxiety disorders and work best in combination. These are available from your GP and self referral to NHS TT. If they don’t work’ it is often because people are not following through on the graded exposure or behavioural experiments.
PTSD is a different matter and requires different treatment but social phobia, agoraphobia and GAD respond to the above treatment an are most of the people who ‘have anxiety’ You don’t need endless long term dependency promoting therapy either you just need to learn CBT strategies and put them into practice. Even computerised or book based CBT has been shown to work in clinical trials.

Avoidance is the worst thing you can do for anxiety as it powerfully maintains it. Over time it will then generalise to other similar situations and get worse. Avoidance feels like the right thing in the moment because confronting anxiety is very painful and difficult but if you aspire to be free of it that’s what is needed.

I am not in any way saying that it is easy at all because it isn’t it’s very very hard and some people are much more predisposed to anxiety than others because of biology and life experiences but the vast majority of people can be helped with an SSRI and CBT and avoidance is very definitely the wrong way to go.

So there is only one type of anxiety? Only those who need some type of intervention can have an opinion?

Plenty of us have said we faced it and managed to mask. To this day I find myself almost copying or thinking what would my friend say and do in this situation? I’d be described as loud and wanting to be the centre of attention. Annoying at times I’m sure! Im happy with that. I’d hate to be viewed as quiet, anxious and worst of all, wouldn’t say boo to a goose!

I am particularly concerned about the rise in anxiety, especially anxiety that relates to every day activities that would normally be considered part of normal life.

Phobias, generalised anxiety disorder and situational worry are all different things. As such, they’re diagnosed differently.

Clinically significant anxiety isn’t just “normal worry about everyday life”. It’s when the intensity, duration & impact on functioning go beyond what’s proportionate and starts affecting a person’s daily living.

So if there’s a rise in diagnosed anxiety disorders, that’s not the same as people being medically labelled for ordinary worries.

It is not believable you have professional knowledge of these facts and are still maintaining your position. In fact, if you were coming at this from a professional angle, why does your OP reference your personal experience, which would surely be far less significant than your repeated professional experiences.

Ok, so engaging:

firstly your title says that the “only” way to overcome anxiety is through exposure.

this is not correct there are several therapeutic modalities for anxiety only one of which is exposure.

others have already been mentioned on the thread - CBT, EMDR etc.

secondly anxiety is a symptom of many many health conditions mental or otherwise - eg autism (not a MH issue it’s classed as a developmental condition) or ptsd (moved out of anxiety disorders and into trauma based disorders.

to make your statement even appropriately correct it could be more along the lines of:

exposure therapy is one of a number of treatments for anxiety disorders where no other developmental or mental health disorder is present.

but that’s not nearly so rage bait is it?

CBT and SSRIs absolutely doesn’t work for all with social, GAD etc and often not for those with autism have you even bothered to read the thread.

Avoidance and planning, limiting anxieties is very much preferable for many like my dd.

You have completely misunderstood that poster’s point (or just not read it, in your rush to argue with her).

She was saying that occasionally feeling a bit nervous is part of normal life, and should be worked through, and that clinical anxiety is a very different thing.

How can you be any sort of professional in this field when you haven’t recognised (much less acknowledged or suggested approaches that might help me) that my response to you on this thread is part of my trauma response? That you’ve made my anxiety spike so high by ansking me what my triggers are that I have engaged in maladaptive coping mechanisms?

I think the majority of people who suffer from anxiety will not kill themselves. That's an extreme reaction to anxiety. However self harm as an solution to get out of situations that are triggering is an option that often works.

The Psychology behind anxiety and how an anxious person manipulates the people around them is fascinating as this thred shows.

My son is very likely autistic (under neurology and neuropsychology. Documented on paperwork by professionals but awaiting final diagnosis, I say this because I know how sceptical Mumsnet is of parents stating this) yet very intelligent. He has a low tolerance for anxiety so we need to be very careful because if he has a meltdown the setback is HUGE! So there's a whole art to knowing when to push and when to step back.

You can expose yourself slowly to an anxiety trigger because you have an awareness of your own feelings but it's much trickier to push another person. Imagine if say your trigger was spiders and you yourself could slowly be in the room with 1, then approach 1, then months later you could pick one up. But I stead you're a child and your protests are dismissed and at the point where you'd be able to manage being in the same room with a spider your adult just plonked one on your hand and held your hand so you had to hold it. Do you think that would effectively improve things?

So my son had to stop swimming and football lessons because despite our best efforts he'd end up curled in a ball screaming on the floor. Even trying his hardest, even though he loved the activity itself. So we pulled back. We kept him home, we didn't do any drop off activities from age 6, then we started going to an ASN activity where I could stay but they had coaches, he got comfortable with them. Then he asked to try another sport which didn't have an ASN option so we signed up. I went with him. He sat at the side for the first session. The second session he talked to the coaches, now he jumps out of the car and runs in, we go get coffee then pick him up. But that's taken almost 3 years. And the stopping altogether was part of getting to this point.

People who judge parents muddling through their kids atypical responses really annoy me because sometimes it looks like I'm just letting my son get his own way but I'm following strategies set up by a multi professional medical team over the course of several years.

My 4 yr old daughter is extremely compliant, loves a drop off and faces all fears head on with bugger all input needed. If I only had her I'd judge the parent parenting my son oo maybe

This!

I’ve tried. Multiple times.

im also autistic with adhd and it’s interesting that much of the trauma therapy is less efficacious in people with those sort of developmental presentations.

Then her thread should have been titled:

The only way to overcome feeling nervous as part of normal life is through exposure.

Sadly it triggered some posters taking it as a personal attack when it wasn't at all.

You said:

I guess many parents don't have the skills to help their children

The question is whether parents actually want to learn how to help their kids or do they indeed believe it's not their responsibility?

On a thread with a lot of parents explaining how they are trying to help their DC.