Don't Panic!

This morning I had my first appointment for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I was so nervous about it that I left home without doing my usual last minute check to make sure I had everything. Big mistake.

The session itself was fine. As it was our first meeting, the whole hour was taken up with investigating why I had been referred, what I felt were the major issues I wanted to address and coming up with a statement of where I am now and where I would like to be.

It was only when I left that I realised my head was pounding from the effort of trying to put my feelings into words. It was a real struggle to answer some of the questions. There are some things about my current irrationality that I just don't understand (and I hated being put on the spot).

I decided to go home and have a cup of tea to calm myself down before heading to work, but found that I had left my door-keys at home. This set off an anxiety attack of exactly the type I had just tried to explain: my face went all hot, tears were flooding down my face and my breathing became very shallow & rapid. I sat on a bench in the churchyard near the Health Centre and just gave in to it. I couldn't do anything else. At least there was nobody else around to witness it.

Here's the bit where I become proud of myself:

I stopped.

I wiped my eyes clear of the tears, took a deep breath and thought about how I could make things right. I couldn't have done that two months ago. I am ready for this now.

So I am really hopeful that the CBT will help me to shorten (or ideally bypass completely) the bit where I panic and give in. I can be rational. I can fix things that go wrong. I just need to get to a place where I really believe this.