 Is it okay to use helpers or safety people when you're doing your exposures or meeting your anxiety challenges? This is episode 220 of The Anxious Truth and we're going to answer that question today. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and recovery. So if this is the first time you're here and you just found your way to the podcast, welcome. I hope you find the material helpful. If you are a returning listener or if you are on YouTube, welcome back. Always glad that you're here. This is episode 220 of The Anxious Truth. I am Drew Lyncelotta, creator and host of this fine podcast. Today we are going to answer a very often asked question in the community and that is, is it okay for me to use safe people or helpers when I do my exposures? So we'll answer that question. 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That is never required but always appreciated and no matter how you support this work, whether it's financially or just by tuning in every week, I appreciate you. Thank you very much. So here we are in episode 220. I'm going to tackle this question. Is it okay for me to use safe people or helpers when I do my exposures or meet my anxiety challenges? Can I use safe people to help me get through? So we can answer that. It gets asked all the time. It's a very common question. It's not a problematic question at all. It's something that everybody goes through. Most people go through, I should say. So a couple of things to clarify before we get into the meat and potatoes of the answer and that is, first of all, not everybody in the community has safe people. Some people, when they get in a state of high anxiety or they panic or they're really kind of in that high stress situation, they don't want to be around people. So some of our friends just like to be alone and so therefore they don't have safe people. That happens. But the more common occurrence in the community, not that one is right or wrong, it's okay either way, but the more common occurrence in our community is that people do develop safe people or safety people. So a quick definition. What is a safety person or a safe person? A safe person is a person in your life and usually it's somebody close to you, like a partner, a close family member, a close friend, something like that, but it doesn't have to be. It could be almost anybody who you place in a position where you think that they are rescuing you, protecting you or saving you from the things that you fear. And the most common manifestation of that is people who because of their anxiety, excuse me, and of course of being afraid of how they feel and what they think, excuse me, will have a ton of restrictions and avoidance in their life. I can't go too far from home. I can't stay home alone. I can't go to parties. I can't go to social situations. I don't do this. I don't these eat those foods or that foods. I don't watch these kind of movies because they trigger me and then I might get anxious or panic or I have intrusive thoughts. And to get around those restrictions because it's really hard to live life completely restricted, we assign certain people those special roles of safety person. So I can or will do those things that I otherwise refuse to do as long as my safe person or safe people, you might have more than one is with me because somehow in my mind, I think that this person helps me get through. They either they calm me down. They make it not so bad. They make it go away. They stop it from happening or if heaven forbid, it really isn't anxiety this time. And it's that thing that I fear that's never true. This person is like the safety valve. Like that person can call for emergency help or bring me to a hospital or whatever it is. So a safe person is a person that you have decided has some sort of special role where they can shield you from anxiety, panic, discomfort and fear. They can make it go away if it happens or they can save you if you literally need saving or rescuing, which I'd like to remind you you never have needed. So that's what a safe person is. And many people in our community do develop relationships with close loved ones or friends, or although it could be anybody where those people become safe people. And then I get asked, is it okay for me to do my exposures or to meet my challenges with the help of my safe person or safe people? And the answer to that is it depends. It depends. So if you at the beginning, if you're in the very beginning of the recovery journey, let's say that you're kind of new to this podcast or maybe you're just reading the anxious truth from my recovery guide. And these are new concepts to you. You've been trying to soothe and calm and ground and control and manage and avoid triggers and none of that is working. And you're running out of ideas. And so you kind of went up here and you discover this guy's crazy. Like he wants me to do scary things. He wants me to intentionally trigger myself. Like these are hard concepts, right? I get it. These are hard concepts to get on board with. And so there may be some resistance. And often there is and that's okay. I totally understand that. But over time, maybe you start to understand, well, I think I'm going to have to try this or this is starting to make sense. I get it. I think I do have to do these things. Yet you are so afraid and you have been avoiding for a very long time that it is unthinkable for you to begin to actually do scary things, right? Maybe take a few tentative steps forward and then you get scared and you run. And you start to think that I know what I want to do these things. This sounds right. I think I want to do this, but I just can't seem to do it. In that situation, if you want to use a helper or safety person to help you get the ball rolling, that would be completely fine. Totally fine. Here we are six minutes into the episode and Drew is telling you that it's okay to use a safe person. Like, oh my God, hell may be freezing over. And we can laugh about that a little bit. But that's true. Like in the very beginning, if you have hit, you're trying to overcome that inertia and do the unthinkable that you cannot even imagine that you're capable of doing. If it's a choice between not moving forward and moving forward with the help of a helper or a safety person, move forward. Like use the safety person. That's okay. That is not a crime. It's okay to get started that way. I would never take away something that helps you move forward. I don't care what that something is. If it's a person that you term as a safe person or if it's cold water or ice packs or whatever it happens to be, if that helps you get started, there's nothing wrong with that at all. I would much rather see you get started that way than to not get started at all. It's completely fine. However, if you do get started that way, and this is where the answer starts to morph and go the other direction, understand that you are starting that way. I am using my safe person, my safety person, my helper to get me started. This is really scary for me. I'm not sure that I think I could do this on my own. So I will first use this person in the beginning to help me get the ball rolling because it's far better. Excuse me. It's far better than me just sitting on the sofa continuously. So I'll use this person to help me get started. But I know that at some point sooner rather than later, I'm going to have to leave the safe person behind and start to do these scary things alone. This is where we go to the second half of the answer. Oftentimes, when you query somebody who has built what I always like to call the acceptable bubble or is in the state of what they might call a relapse or a setback, you might find that one of the hallmarks or one of the leading indicators that a setback or a relapse can happen or that there is an acceptable bubble and they cannot seem to go beyond that is the presence of a safe person. Not so much the presence, but the use, the continued use of a safe person. So I'm not trying to call anybody out here because we all do the best we can and we can cheer for each other while we do that. But I cannot tell you the number of people that I am aware of today in this community that are making progress that they should and are should be and are proud of. And I would not take that away. I'm proud of them too. But when you dig a little bit, you see like, Oh, all the things that they're doing that they used to refuse to do that they've been doing now for three, four, five months, they're still only doing with somebody with them. I have two friends that helped me or it's always my partner or my sister or my mother or whatever. It doesn't matter who it is. It could be anybody. It doesn't matter who it is. And you discover that there's still a safe person in the mix. So look at me. I'm doing great, which you are, but I'm still doing great under a condition. And that condition is I have to have my safe person with me. So full unconditional recovery that is most durable and least susceptible to breakage relapse setback comes when we leave the safety devices, including human beings behind. That's hard. That's really hard. So we can use those things to get the ball rolling. But sooner or later, we have to leave them behind. Why do we have to do that? And why if we refuse to do that and we accept this sort of conditional recovery, why is it? Why do we remain susceptible to setback relapse, whatever it happens to be? Why is that recovery more fragile and a little less not less durable, less full? It's an incomplete recovery because we never actually learned the lesson that we are the ones that are always capable. Right. So maybe you start off by thinking, I am completely incapable of even getting off the sofa. And then with some work and with your safety people or your helpers, you learn that you're certainly capable of getting off the sofa. I know I can do that. I know I could take the kids to school. I know I can drive about a half hour from home. I know that I can work a three hour shift. But beyond that, nope, I still need my helpers. Right. So you've learned that you're capable of doing things you used to not think that you were capable of, but then you stop and you draw a line and say, but beyond this, I'm still incapable and I do actually need them. So if you allow that to stand and you decide that there are things that are too much where you need that person to be protective or shield or fixer or a rescuer, then you never fully learn that you have always been fully responsible for getting through all the crappy panic attacks and anxiety spikes. You always. The hard truth of this is that as much as they may love us, our safe people do nothing. In fact, if you sat down with your safe person or people tonight and had a quick conversation and said, can you tell me how you save me when I have a panic attack? Or can you tell me how you save me when I spiral out of control? That person would probably have a hard time explaining how they actually save you. And they might say, we don't. There's a really good chance that they may tell you, I don't save you. I just sit next to you. I hold your hand. I tell you, you're going to be okay. Like they would have a hard time finding a thing that they actually do because they don't actually do anything. They would be happy to if there was something to do. The people who love us would gladly save us if we needed saving, but they know we don't. So they just sort of sit with us. And that leads me to the difference between support and rescue. It's okay to want support. Like there's nothing wrong with that. We want our loved ones to cheer for us. We want them to comfort us. We want them to understand our struggle. I get all that. That's perfectly okay. But we start to run on the rocks. You know, we sort of run aground when we forget that there's a difference between wanting support and wanting to be rescued or protected. So we would hope that our loved ones would protect us against dangers in the world. We would hope. That's okay. But we are mistaken in our assessment of danger here. Like your own body is not a danger to you. Your thoughts are not dangers to you. So therefore you don't need your safe people to protect you against them or save you from them. And they never have because it's never been required and there's nothing they can do to do it anyway. So if we don't leave our safe people and our helpers behind, we never learn that lesson. We never fully embrace. And that is a cold reality. I get that because on an emotional level, it seems to devalue these relationships. It doesn't at all. Even when you learn that your romantic partner has never saved you and never can doesn't mean that they're any less than in your life. They still love you. They're still support there. They're still caring and understanding and encouragement, hopefully, but they just stop being a rescuer in that situation. When you learn that and fully embrace that, which we can only do when we leave those people behind and take them out of this process, I wouldn't say leave them behind because it sounds like I'm telling you to cut them out of your life. I'm not saying that. Just take them out of the process of being a rescue you rescuer for you. Then they get back to just being your friends or your siblings or your parents or your partners or whoever your friends and they stop being rescuers. And then you realize, I can do this all on my own. Guess what? I always have. And so right now, there was a time when I would have told you, yeah, I'm doing 90% of my life, but I don't know. I got to drive into New York City. I haven't done that in a long time. I should have somebody with me. I would have been wrong, but I would have told you that and I would have wanted to bring somebody with me. Only when I did it without people being with me that I learned, I didn't need that. And I knew it already at that point. But if I had caved and said, Nope, I'm going to have to bring somebody with me. I would have never learned that. Never. So when you ask me, how can you just sit still and just let panic happen and not care? That's how that's how I'm 100% completely sure and confident of the fact that I can handle whatever my body and mind throws at me. I always can. There's nothing that my body and mind can do to me that I will not be able to handle. You know how I know that because I did it alone. And if I had refused to do it alone, I would never have learned that I would never have reached that conclusion. So there would always be that lurking too muchness on the horizon that could come and get me anytime. And life is challenging. Life will throw stuff at us. There will be challenges. There will be stress. There will be sadness and loss and heartache and anger and disappointment and big tumultuous events. All of those things, all of those things, life is a challenging thing. You have we have to learn that we can handle whatever happens. We may want help and support with life's challenges, but we do not need to be rescued from ourselves. It is so important to accept that to be true and then go and learn that lesson to the best of your ability by ultimately doing these things on your own. That sounds harsh, but that is truth. That is truth. And the difference between the person who says I'm completely recovered and could not be less interested if I whether I have a panic attack or not, which we are out here. I'm one of them. I've been talking to you behind this microphone now for eight years. I am one of them. There are many of us. That's one of the key ways that we got here to this place that you think is unimaginable. So just a quick wrap up. It's okay to have support. Support is fine, but do not confuse support with rescuing because you do not need to be rescued from yourself. If you want to use a safe person or a helper to help you get started or to get through a real big sticking point because you have some inertia, you can't overcome. That's never a problem. Just go into it knowing that this is temporary. I'm going to have to leave them behind and that sooner or later, you can no longer use safety people and helpers in your exposures or when you have to do something challenging, you got to learn to meet the challenges yourself. There's your answer. Is it okay to use safe people and helpers during exposures and during challenging times depends how far along are you in the process and what are you trying to accomplish and what do you want to learn? What does having a safe person teach you? What does leaving the safe person behind teach you that second one there? There's some secret sauce there, so aim for that. All right, so not too bad. 17 minutes, answered the question, filled in some details, added more stuff you maybe didn't need me to say. I don't know. Hopefully, I've helped you understand what a safe person is, how we get to the point, we rely on them. The roles they can play and maybe shouldn't play in our lives. I'm going to have to say it again before I wrap up. I'm never minimizing the role of those people. The people we love and the people who love us, they are important. I'm not minimizing your relationship with your partner. I'm not minimizing your relationship with your siblings or your parents or your friends. We just don't want to cement them into roles as rescuers. I did not need my family or my friends to rescue me from me, that I had to learn that. But guess what? Even though I know that and I don't need them, they're still my family and my friends and I still love them and they're still just as important as they always have been. So there you go. That is Episode 220 in the books. A common question, hopefully answered to your satisfaction. Hopefully, hope I did a good job with that. You know the episode is over because music. That song is called Afterglow and it's written by my friend Ben Drake. It was partially inspired by this podcast. If you want to know more about Ben and his music, you can find him at bendrickmusic.com. I always send you over there. If you are listening to this podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, any platform that lets you leave a rating or a review, maybe take a second and give me a five star rating if you dig the podcast. If you really dig it, take an extra minute or two and write a quick review because that really helps other people find the podcast. That's why I do this, try and help as many people as I can. And of course, if you're watching on YouTube or listening on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, hit the notification button so you know when I upload, leave a comment, like the video, share it with a friend. Those things all help me out. I will be back next week. I do not know what I will be talking about, but I will be here and remember, as always, this is the way.