Panic Anxiety Education
Management Services

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What is so great about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy?(page 3 of 9)

With CBT we do need to accept our panic attacks and our anxiety. People go through various levels of acceptance, "This is not me, I am not like this"...."What if the doctor has made a mistake?"...."What if the test results got mixed up with someone elses?"...."What if the CAT Scan, MRI was faulty," etc., etc. We all need to reach the point where we know intellectually and emotionally that we are having panic attacks and/or anxiety and ....this is how we are supposed to feel when we have a panic attack and/or anxiety! We also need to accept that our panic attacks and our anxiety are not going to hurt us.

The way we think keeps the fight-and-flight response turned on. These thoughts are telling our bodies that we are in 'danger'. The body doesn't know and can't tell the difference between our panic/anxiety disorder thinking, "What if," etc., and the thought "Ahhhh here comes a Mac truck at 100 miles per hour with no brakes and it is heading straight for me!!" The body is doing what it needs to do to help us in a dangerous situation. It turns on the fight-and-flight response to enable us either to run from the danger or stay and fight it. Turn off the anxiety (danger) thinking and you turn off the fight-and-flight response.

We may not be thinking about our anxiety/panic, but when we become aware of our thinking we see the 'internal conversations' we have in our head. Something may or may not have happened, but we go over the situation in our mind in fifty different ways with fifty different outcomes...usually all negative and usually all 'threatening' to us in one way or another. We buy into the guilt trips, to the extent we worry and feel guilty about almost anything. We are forever mentally abusing ourselves. "Stupid, weak, useless, dumb, hopeless, failure, etc." We are always worrying about what people think.

Through the skills of CBT, the more we become aware of our thinking, the more we can see how our thinking is turning on the fight-and-flight response. When we can see this, we can A. see how it is all being created; B. see why there is nothing to fear; and, C. see we have a choice in what we think about. We become aware that if we keep on thinking the way we do, we will end up in panic/anxiety 'city'. So we can make a choice. We either keep on with our way of thinking or we chose to retrain our thoughts. This isn't easy, but it is worth the effort!!!

For those of us who dissociate and then panic or become anxious about it, we need to become aware of how we are dissociating and we need to become aware of how we react to the dissociation by the way we think. We can break the dissociated state, see how it happened, see why there is nothing to fear and see we have a choice in what we think about as outlined above.

We do receive comments from people saying that CBT has only partially worked. Other people ask how can simply 'swapping' their thoughts over to more 'realistic' ones really help when they can't believe the 'realistic' ones. Their panic and anxiety is still just as strong and how do they know their fears won't come true. Some people comment that writing it all down only makes them worse, not to mention the time it all takes to do so. And all of this can be true for some people. All of the above was also true for Bronwyn during her recovery.

Bronwyn used a different type of Cognitive technique. It is a Mindfulness technique which is based upon meditation. Bronwyn used meditation and mindfulness to recover and she has now been teaching this to other people with an Anxiety Disorder since 1985 and through PAEMS since 1996. We use meditation and mindfulness to teach people how:

to relax.
to learn the skill of becoming aware.
to learn to bring this awareness into every day life and to see the sometimes very subtle relationship between our thoughts and our anxiety/panic. This enables people to begin to lose their fear of their experience because they see how it is all being created.
to learn to not get involved with the anxiety/panic thoughts by letting them go.
to learn how to let the panic and anxiety happen.
as a graded exposure technique for those of us who dissociate.

The bottom line in the medication vs CBT debate is: we all need to do what we feel is right for us as individuals. This means some of us will use CBT as a way through to recovery, some of us will use a Mindfulness CBT technique, other people will use medication. There is no 'right' or 'wrong' way. It is individual and it is individual choice.

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