I don't even know if this is the right place to put this.
Even though my mood has been quite bad the last few days I've not SIed very much; it's probably been about a week since my last SI but summer's coming up and already things are getting harder.
I have a really bad phobia (among many others) of wasps (Spheksophobia) and it gets to the point where I end up cooking in my bedroom through the entire summer because I'm too scared to go outside or even open my bedroom door in case one comes in. My family all love hot weather and being outdoors, as do my friends, so I feel really lonely.
Sometimes, I manage to gather the courage to go outside for a few minutes but the second I see something flying I end up running inside and getting so angry with myself that I get really upset and a majority of the time I SI; it has gotten so bad on occasion that I've tried more.
It's May and I'm already caught in this loop so I guess, really, all I'm asking for is some advice on how to handle this/what I can do. I'm so certain that this year it's going to end up disrupting my work and with my mood being very low as it is I'm worried.
Please, if you have any advice on coping with this I would appreciate it so much.
Hypnotherapy can help, and I think (if you can bear it) exposure therapy, slowly, starting with pictures and sounds can also help. Whilst doing exposure therapy, write down what you feel, that could shed some light as to what thoughts an image throws up.
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Um Fallen Rain overcame her Phobia incredibly with...some sort of hierarchy therapy...thing. I have a memory of something with a really bad memory. I will point her this way and she can explain better than I can.
I was indeed going to suggest hypnotherapy.
I have a very bad phobia of spiders (not the usual "ew it's a spider.." i can stop breathing/pass out or have an asthma attack through seeing one) so i have all the sympathy in the world for you. Especially with summer coming up there's lots of insects around, so it can become quite distressing im sure.
Like another person as said..hypnotherapy may work. You should look into local places that do it or speak to your GP about it. I'm sure it's worth a try.
take care
xx
Ok, what my psychologist and mh team did with me was basically a mixture of CBT and Exposure Therapy. You write out a list of things you can't do and can do related to your phobia/etc and order them in the list of what's the easiest and what's the hardest. You might think there's nothing you can do related to wasps, that's ok. What you can start with is having other people do things and watching them, or like writing the word wasp, or drawing one. It really helps if you have someone helping you with it. Like I did it whilst I was in hospital because I became quite unsafe at first in reaction to the anxiety. It does make you anxious initially, but the point is to manage that anxiety with techniques like breathing exercises, relaxation, distraction.
So step one would be to write a hierarchy.
Then the first step would be to do the easiest thing on the hierarchy (it might be something you can even do easily like write wasp).
Before doing the exercise rate your anxiety, do this before, during and after.
Then do step one on the hierarchy and do it until your anxiety subsides to a certain level. You're meant to do it until you're anxiety is down to normal level, but they gave up doing this with me when it took over three hours. So do it for as logn as you can, without doing any reassurance or other 'reassurance / compulsive' behaviours.
You should aim to do the task three times a day, and once you have your anxiety down to a normal level for you move onto the next task. And also it helps to give yourself rewards, aims and goals.
Don't worry if it gets worse at first, that happened with me and they said it was actually a good sign because it shows you're illness is responding in some way (illness/phobia/whatever you want to call it).
