“I Made It as Unpleasant as I Could and Then I Waited”
As she settles into her chair to begin our second session, Mary has that look—a look she’s no doubt seen on the faces of her students when they are confident in their performance on an exam or waiting eagerly to share a piece of writing. It’s a look of pride in the work. It’s a feeling of self-satisfaction in the face of a particularly formidable challenge. Already certain of the answer, I ask Mary if she had a chance to practice her skills the night before.
“I did,” she says with a smile. “I went to a parking garage in Scottsdale. It’s three stories. Unfortunately for the practice, it was sunset and there was a fair amount of light coming through.”
Did you catch that? Mary says “unfortunately for the practice” there was still light coming into the parking garage. That statement reflects an excellent attitude. When the parking garage has light, her practice is “unfortunately” easier. Mary’s not looking for easy; she’s looking for difficult, because difficult is going to move her closer to her positive goals. She’s giving herself greater control by wanting to practice the difficult. Yes, she’s uncomfortable, and she’s anxious. That’s good, because her governing stance is “I’m going toward what scares me.”
This is what you should strive for. When you do an experiment, when you decide to practice one of these new skills, take ownership of that event. Don’t do it because you should. Do it because you want to do the hard stuff so you can get stronger.
She continues. “But still, the ceiling was quite low, and it’s a garage I avoid normally. I really didn’t feel quite as panicky as I usually do, so I went into the middle—”
I interrupted her because I was curious why this typically difficult garage wasn’t giving her so much trouble last night. Was it the available sunlight?
“No, the session yesterday really did help. I had already thought about my plan quite a bit before I went there. I just kept running the logic through my mind of how and why I was going to do the practice.”
This is what courage sounds like. Yes, we can call this a practice session, because Mary intended to check out the value of some newly acquired skills. But this was also a courageous experiment because she had no personal experience to tell her that that plan was going to work, and she was stepping into an environment she has long perceived as life-threatening. In yesterday’s session, Mary explained in no uncertain terms that parking garages were dangerous, you could suffocate in them, and they could collapse at any moment and take your life.
Those judgments have not disappeared. But she courageously quiets the voice that generates those opinions and pushes it to the back of her mind. Then she pulls up to the front of her mind a brand-new point of view and makes it her dominant voice. Why take such a risk? Because the logic of that strategy makes sense to her, and she can see how it will help her advance toward her positive goals.
Instead of permitting her fear to control the conversation in her head, she focuses on the purpose of this experiment. She’s not passively complying with my instructions. She’s not saying, “I know I need to do this practice, but I really don’t want to . . . but he tells me I should.” Instead, she takes ownership in the protocol. It’s hers now. She talks to herself in a voice of leadership, and she states the actions she’s going to take. In essence, she tells herself, “Here are the reasons why I’m going to do this. And here’s what I’m going to do.” She doesn’t tell herself just once. She maintains her momentum by mentally reviewing both the reasoning and the plan again and again. Mary is serving as an excellent role model for you right now. She’s showing you how to orient your mind prior to a practice.
But how is that logic helping her moment-by-moment?
“I knew what I was going to tell myself once I got in there: ‘It’s not going to collapse, there’s plenty of air. And, yes, the ceilings are low, and you’re not going to like it, but it’s going to be fine.’ It was such a nice summer night, so I thought maybe the garage would be full, with people wanting to be in town. That kind of waiting has been a problem for me. If I’m on the ramp, and I’m waiting to get out, and I’m stuck there as people are trying to exit the garage . . . I don’t like that at all. But I said to myself, ‘So what if it’s crowded and you have to wait? It’ll be fine. It’s not going to be pleasant, but there is enough air, and I’m not going to suffocate.’”
Mary has already accomplished a central task in dealing with an anxiety disorder. She has pushed the content away, and this gives her a tremendous advantage. She will never learn to tolerate the possibility of suffocating in the garage. And it’s impossible for her to tolerate a high likelihood of the ceiling collapsing on her. By correcting her misunderstanding about those fears, she can now attend to coping with her discomfort. What did she tell herself? “You’re not going to like it. It’s not going to be pleasant.” She knows it won’t be easy, but tolerating discomfort is within her reach. Tolerating imminent death is not.
Just so we’re clear, she also has to cope with a sense of insecurity. She doesn’t know how well this plan is going to help her in the garage. And even though she has downgraded the degree of real threat to her, she will still have a sense of doubt, at least in her unconscious. That’s what’s generating her anxiety. The exact work she needs to be doing is to learn to tolerate distress and intimidation in her threatening environments. What is the strategy she’s going to use? As you are about to hear, she will seek them out. She wants to generate those feelings, and she will look for opportunities to sit with them. She has a chance to learn from this experiment because she doesn’t have to fight with her content.
That’s why I emphatically encourage you to do whatever work necessary to make it not about your content. When you accomplish that, you will have reduced your tasks down to two: feeling uncertain and feeling uncomfortable. Those aren’t easy tasks, but both are within your reach.
I had a few of my own worries after we ended that first session, because I didn’t talk to Mary about the ways people tend to protect themselves from their insecurities or discomfort by using what I call safety crutches (as discussed in Chapter 3). Struggling with claustrophobia, Mary can make her practice easier by going to a place within the garage where there is more light, or by rolling down the car windows to get fresh air, or by turning on the radio to distract herself from her fearful thoughts.
But no, not Mary. Once she arrived at the five-story garage, she drove up to the third floor. She assumed that would be sufficient: a low ceiling, with two floors below, two floors above. But it was just before sunset, and all that light passing into garage was making her task easier. Was she relieved? Nope. She immediately maneuvered her car to the darkest place she could find on that floor, parking diagonal to a corner, facing two cinderblock walls. I asked her why she picked the darkest place. “Well, because I was trying to get that panicky feeling going so I could just stay with it for a few minutes.”
Did you hear that? She was looking for an opportunity to get panicky so she could practice a new way of responding to it. Excellent! Is this how you think when you approach one of your threatening situations? If you’re like most people, you don’t. Mary is your model. Go get your anxiety. Go get it! Look for the feeling of doubt. Go find it! Seek out doubt and distress. What Mary doesn’t realize yet is that simply accessing that disposition of “looking for an opportunity” will strengthen her.
“I turned the radio off, and I left the windows up, which I never do. Then there was still quite a bit of light coming through the open sides of the garage, so I went like this [she forms blinders around her eyes with her hands] and just concentrated on that really low, concrete ceiling.”
Listen to what she says next: “My heart was starting to beat faster. But I just tried to make it as unpleasant as I could so I could sit with that for a little bit. And I waited.”
What?! Are you hearing this? She’s feeling her physical anxiety rising, which in the past would signal to her that danger is present. This is the most difficult time of her practice. The car is stuffy with the windows rolled up, there’s nothing to distract her, the darkness is making her uncomfortable, and so is focusing her attention on that low concrete ceiling. How does she cope? Does she tell herself that this has been enough practice and it’s time to go? Does she roll down her window a little to get a bit of fresh air?
Nope. She’s not even waiting for discomfort to show up. She’s making it show up. At this moment, she’s no longer the victim of Anxiety; she is now the dominant one. She tries to increase that distress so that she can linger with it. A part of her is absolutely scared of the dangers right now. But she has another role available to her. She wants that voice to stay in control, and so she talks to her fearful side in a reassuring voice. “I just kept saying, ‘The ceiling is low, but it’s not going to collapse. I’m a few minutes from the entrance, and there’s plenty of air in here, and it’s not going to run out. Even if the cars were all exiting, it still wouldn’t run out of air. There’s enough permeability to the building.’ And I said to myself, ‘Any moment that you want to, you can roll the window down and you can walk out of here. But you don’t need to. Stick it out; this is fine.’”
Mary wanted helpful practice, not easy practice. When she noticed she wasn’t anxious enough, she tried something more difficult. That’s the point of view I want you to take on: looking for opportunities to purposely, voluntarily choose to step toward what frightens you.
For Mary, it immediately paid big dividends. She summed up her practice with this comment: “As I drove out, I felt more empowered. I felt really happy.”
She got more than good feelings. Through this powerful experience she adopted a new strategy that made sense to her, and she acquired a new point of view that will lead her toward her positive goals. Feelings like happiness are quite pleasurable, but they are short-lived. A workable strategy, based on a simple logical system, that makes sense and helps you feel empowered . . . that can last a lifetime.
And listen to the next reward she got. After sharing her story of the previous night’s practice, Mary continues by saying, “On the way here this morning, I was thinking of other situations that were really, really scary to me.” She tells her story of feeling trapped on the streets of Boston and then another occasion of feeling trapped while driving through a tunnel in a national park. “I started imagining myself in those situations. And I thought, ‘Well, I guess it would be just like the parking garage.’ I would say, ‘You’re going to get out of here. This tunnel’s not going to collapse. There is enough air. And even if you take a wrong turn, you’ll eventually take a right turn, and you’ll get out.’”
Twelve hours prior she declared she was so traumatized by her last trip to Boston that she would never return there. Now she is envisioning how she could handle any of those tunnels. She can see herself taking back territory in her life! I’m feeling so happy for her.
But I’m not going to let Mary rest on her laurels. She has a flight coming up in five hours, and I want her to be ready for her fear of suffocation and restriction to crop up. As the session continues, she experiments with putting two pillowcases over her head. By doing so she provokes and then tolerates the fearful discomfort that comes with the sense of suffocation. But I still want to work directly on her fear of restriction. So I ask her if she would be willing to again put a pillowcase over her head and then allow me to bind it around her neck with packing tape. That seemed kind of creepy to her, but . . . Hey, wait, I’ll just take you into that scene.
Mary understands the function of this experiment is to help her better prepare for the moments when she starts feeling trapped on a plane, in a tunnel, or in any other enclosed space. But she says she’s feeling a little creeped-out by the thought of someone binding her up in such a fashion. After only a brief hesitation, though, she agrees. “Okay. Let’s do it. [pause.] But obviously you’re going to take it off when I tell you, right?”
I say that I will, of course, but I request a little negotiation. “Before asking me to take it off, would you allow yourself to sit for little bit with that urge to have it come off?” Mary needs to learn this skill of noticing the urge but not acting on it. And you need to learn it. That’s why I wrote Chapter 9, on developing your Observer. You need to catch the flicker before the flame. You need to catch the urge before the action. You can’t win this competition if you act on every impulse to escape. You must learn to step back and hear that message to run. And then you
need to practice standing there anyway. You have to take the heat.
She agrees to my request. “And when you notice that urge,” I ask, “what do you want to say to yourself?”
“I’d like to say, ‘I can handle this. Just hang with this for a while.’”
That’s a great message. She wants to reassure herself and then encourage herself to stay with her fearful sensations instead of acting on the urgent demand (“Get me out of here!”) from her frightened side.
She puts the pillowcase down over her head and then permits me to bind it loosely around her neck with the packing tape.
Then her numbers begin to climb. Sixty. Then seventy. Up goes her heart rate. Now seventy-five. Really pounding now. Eighty-five.
This is the highest anxiety she’s experienced in the two days we’ve worked together. She sits forward in her chair. I ask her how changing her posture serves her. “I’m in action mode,” she says. Her body is ready to run. “It’s going really high. Can you take it off?” I remove the tape and then the pillowcase.
Mary: Ooh. It was really restrictive in there. I kept saying “It’s okay,” but then the anxiety just got too high. My feelings overran my thoughts.
Reid: It’s your body’s instinctual response to the sense that you’re trapped. It’s anticipating your being unable to escape, and it’s working impeccably for you. What you just experienced is completely understandable and normal. Right?
Mary: Right.
Reid: We’re going to do it again, if it’s okay with you.
Mary: Okay.
Even though Mary had a normal response to a new sense of restriction, she and I both know that she needs to toughen herself up. On the airplane this afternoon, she is probably going to feel a sense of suffocation and restriction of movement. She’s not going to have the opportunity to get off the plane at that moment, nor does she need to. In a tunnel, we can expect she’s going to experience those same feelings again, too. If she doesn’t think she can handle those feelings, then she’s going to continue to get anxious when she flies, and she’s going to avoid those tunnels whenever possible. To reach her goals, she needs to ride out those momentary sensations of panic. If she can learn how to get past those temporary urges here today, she’ll take home a new skill that gives her the upper hand.
I want that same outcome for you. Don’t let impulses to escape dominate your actions and restrict your life. You must take back this territory. It’s hard, but it’s not complex.
Let’s get back to the session. Did you notice how quickly Mary’s anxiety spiraled upward? It’s ironic, but I think it’s true, that if Mary can take some of these big principles she’s learning and manifest them at a moment’s notice, she can take back her life. Therefore, Mary needs to handle these threatening events with a moment-by-moment strategy. We’re going to work on that now. First, I ask her what caused her anxiety to rise up to an eighty-five.
Mary: I felt like I was going to suffocate.
Reid: And how was the availability of air through that pillowcase? Did you think there was less air?
Mary: It felt very different than when it was a pillowcase without the tape. The space was quite a lot smaller.
I’m going to challenge two of her points of view. When she becomes increasingly anxious, she tells herself that she could now suffocate. And she believes that message. She thinks she could suffocate. She thinks she may be about to suffocate. That’s why she ended the practice. So, first, I challenge that belief with some new information.
Reid: Would you be willing to press this pillowcase up against your mouth and breathe through it just like this? [I demonstrate.] Find out what you experience when it’s completely pressed up against your mouth. [She puts her mouth directly on the pillowcase and takes a few breaths, in and out, seemingly without difficulty.] What do you notice? How restrictive is the airflow? How’s your ability to get air?
Mary: Oh, I guess I can get air.
Reid: [in mock surprise] Oh, really? Isn’t that interesting! [Now more curious] So, is there something you can tell yourself when we do this again, if you choose to do it again? What would you say?
Mary: “There’s enough air. This is fine. Be quiet.”
There it is. Mary willingly takes the information I just gave her and converts it into a new tactic. “In these circumstances (safe but closed-in places), when I suddenly start thinking I might suffocate, I can call that stance into question. I can reassure myself.” Then she translates that tactic into a message she can give herself at the moment of threat. This executive voice can talk to the part of her who is threatened, the part of her who yells inside her mind, “Take this off! You’re suffocating!” Her goal is to reassure her frightened side in such a way that it stops governing her actions.
To correct her understanding about suffocation is helpful. And it’s necessary for her to find a reassuring voice to manage her panicky feelings. But these changes are not enough. The second viewpoint I need to challenge is her belief about how much she is able to tolerate. This is a critical task, not just for Mary but for you and everyone else who struggles with anxious worries. You can expect that there will be times in which “I can’t do this” is the dominant voice. You have to take a leap of faith by acting as though you can handle a task that in the moment you don’t believe you can handle. In case I haven’t gotten through to you yet, let me say it a different way. To get stronger, you gotta do stuff you don’t think you can do, and you gotta do that stuff while you simultaneously doubt you can do it. You’re not going to do it by getting rid of the voice of doubt. You’re going to do it by adding a voice that says, “Stay.”
For any of us to grow, we must learn to tolerate more than we think we can tolerate. We need to defy our limited beliefs about what our capabilities are. When we choose to engage in challenging activities and follow them through to their conclusions, we expand our sense of our capacity. We will feel intimidated beforehand. Our insecurities will show up while we’re smack in the middle of these activities. And sometimes they’ll show up afterward, telling us how that was too much and that we shouldn’t try to do it again. We’re not going to extinguish those doubts. They come with the territory, and we need to take them with us on our adventures. Just try not to put them in the driver’s seat.
To get stronger, you gotta do stuff
you don’t think you can do, and you gotta do
that stuff while you simultaneously
doubt you can do it.
Before yesterday, whenever her anxiety started to spiral upward or when she heard those impulsive messages of danger, Mary had the urge to escape, and if she could escape at that moment, she did. She needs to
be able to tolerate strong anxiety and tolerate those intense impulses to avoid, and yet not avoid. She can handle those thoughts and feelings by engaging an executive voice that reassures her about safety and about her abilities. But when she suddenly gets highly threatened, she needs to give herself commands that can override the insistent message of “run.”
Now we’re going to try on her plan to cope with these feelings of suffocation and restriction and her urge to run: “There’s enough air. This is fine. Be quiet.” Mary puts the pillowcase back over her head, and her anxiety starts to shoot up quickly. I ask her to take the pillowcase off and to give herself a little time to regroup. After a brief half-minute she puts it back on.
Reid: Talk to me. What’s your number?
Mary: It’s sixty-five. I’m really having to tell myself that I can do this right now.
Reid: Okay. You’re in control, so you let me know if you want me to do the next step and when.
Mary: [moments later] Yeah, do the next step.
Reid: [I place the packing tape around the pillowcase at her neck.] Okay, what’s your number at this moment?
Mary: I’m managing to keep it at about a sixty, sixty-five.
Reid: By doing what?
Mary: By breathing and by telling myself I can breathe.
Now something interesting happens. Within thirty seconds, Mary sits back in her chair, a sign of settling in to the experience. She’s not leaning forward in “action mode” anymore. I ask her what allows her to sit back.
“Well, I want to get better.”
Oh, my. I think she’s got it!
She sits back in her chair and takes the heat because she wants something valuable for her future, and she wants it right at this moment. She has two competing agendas in the same moment. She elevates one (“I want to get better”), and by default the other one is diminished (“I’ve got to get out of here!”). Gaining her positive future is more important than escaping her current discomfort.
This is the lesson I want you to absorb. The way you can learn to take the heat in the moment—the unavoidable chance of something going wrong, or getting embarrassed, or losing something you value, or panicking—is to want something, right then, you think you might gain by staying in the moment. After she tells me that, here is her very next sentence.
Mary: It’s funny. Just now I was thinking about sitting on an airplane, and I thought that this feeling is very much the way I feel when I’m on the airplane and the door is closing. And, yeah, I can breathe. It’s not something I like, but I can breathe. And I can switch that little air on if I need to.
Whoa! How about that? Less than ten minutes ago, she panicked with suffocation fears after I put the packing tape around her neck, and we had to stop the practice. Three minutes ago she pulled the pillowcase over her head and that immediately sent her into high anxiety. Now she’s pulled that same pillowcase over her head, and I’ve taped it down around her neck. Same event but totally different response. She’s not gritting her teeth, trying to bear up. She’s not counting the seconds until she can escape. She isn’t a victim of claustrophobia at this moment. Not only is she sitting back in her chair, but while she’s simultaneously feeling moderately distressed, breathing, and telling herself she can breathe, she now has enough freedom in her mind that she can drift forward to a future flight where she reassures and comforts herself in the moment when she’s coping with a closed-in feeling. Remarkable!
Mary: And I had my eyes closed before, because I didn’t want to see how close the sheet was. But now I’ve opened them.
Reid: Did that do something to the numbers?
Mary: Yeah, it actually did. It made them probably go up five or seven notches.
Look how quickly she is learning about what she can tolerate. She’s at the highest level of anxiety she’s been able to sustain in any of the practices these two days. And then she voluntarily, purposely opens her eyes. Why? In order to give herself more work to do. Can you see how committed Mary is to taking back her life?
I let her linger there another half a minute or so. I remove the tape so she can lift the pillowcase off of her head. She takes a deep, full breath, straightening misplaced strands of hair with a brush of her hand, and the very next thing she says is, “Wow. I never thought I’d get that far today.”
Not surprisingly, Mary had great success on her flight that same day. I e-mailed her again about a year later, and she told me that she was managing tunnels and parking garages well. She’d had only one panic attack on a flight in the past twelve months. When she became apprehensive in one long, unexpected tunnel, “I remembered those horrible things you put me through,” she said, “and I got through those!”