 We're live, it is Monday, it's Recovery Monday, which means it's Recovery Monday number 73. I cannot believe we've done this 72 times before. Seems amazing to me. Doesn't seem like it's been that long, but it has. So welcome everybody, let's put the chat overlay up. Today we're gonna talk about one of the lessons that we learned in recovery, which is basically, is this really that urgent? So I have the chat overlay up so you guys can talk to each other. Let everybody just let me know that you can hear me. First one in, hello Bethany, how's it going? Hey, I see Barbara already, I see Jose, I see Rebecca, I see Jason, remember romper room? You guys don't remember romper room. You have to be as old as I am to remember romper room and that was the whole thing. I see this one, I see that one anyway. There's a whole magic mirror thing. I'm regressing to my childhood here. But anyway, let's talk about one of the lessons that you learn in recovery is sort of how to assess threat and urgency. And that is one of the things that I'm definitely gonna talk about in the book. When I finish the book, Lessons from the Panic Zone, which will be, I don't know when, probably in another year or two, at least, that is one of the lessons that recovery taught me. Like I have a much better sense of threat assessment and what is urgent and what is not. We're gonna talk about that today. So anyway, let me close this. Let me remind you guys, if you're coming from the Facebook group, I will only see Facebook user as your name. That's just the way Restream does it. Don't take it personally. But so if you wanna make a comment or ask a question, just maybe mention your name. Ms. Barbara, okay, I remember Romper Room, yes. And I did not know this. This sort of shattered things for me, but as I get older, I recognize that Romper Room happened in a bunch of different markets, at least in the Northeast. And it was a different teacher, depending on where you are. Like in New York, we had one teacher, but Philadelphia had another and Boston probably had a different one. Washington had a different one. I was shattered when I heard that. Anyway, so yeah, that was Romper Room. Anyway, hey, Hortensis here, very cool. Finally made it to a live 2 a.m. here. Alrighty then, 12 hour difference. I'm not sure where in the world you are at a 12 hour difference, but it's a lot, I'm guessing you're down under. Australia, New Zealand somewhere, I'm guessing. Captain Kangaroo, love it. Julie also knows Romper Room. All right, don't feel so bad. People are actually remembering Romper Room and sharing the memory with me. Thanks guys, I appreciate that. So I guess let's get into it. This isn't gonna be a long one. I know I've said this many times before. Hello, Singapore, there you go, 12 hours make sense. Hey, Marion, how you doing? Hello, Moira from Montreal, welcome. So I always say it's not gonna be a long one and we might have hanging out for an hour, but that's okay. So let's talk about this particular lesson. When you go through the, first of all, let me make a acknowledgement here. When you're going through the recovery process, ain't nothing feel like a lesson. Like none of the recovery process feels like a lesson. Nothing feels like there's a silver lining. Nothing feels like there's a purpose. It is really hard to see that there will be lessons that you'll take with you down the road. When you're in the thick of it, you are never gonna see this as like, boy, I'm so glad I'm going through this. So I do not want this to come off as somehow like, hey, there's wisdom and anxiety and there's a silver lining and you should be grateful for this. You are not gonna be grateful for a damn thing while you are struggling, I certainly wasn't. And no one should tell you that you should somehow connect to the wisdom of your anxiety and the lessons it's gonna teach you and be grateful for having this experience. In retrospect, I can look back on it and say that I am grateful for having had that experience, but while I was going through it, not so much. So make sure that you keep that in mind. I'm not trying to tell you that you should somehow be grateful for the experience that you're having right now. That experience sucks. You hate it, you don't wanna be having it and I hear you on that. But as we go through the process, we do learn some lessons. And when we come at the other side and remember there's never like a moment where you recognize, oh, look, I just recovered, I'm all done, that's a gradual process. One day you might look back and think, oh, look at that, I did learn some lessons. Excuse me, and one of the lessons that I learned in this process was better threat assessment and a better sense of what is urgent, what requires immediate attention, what requires like emergency action, what requires evasive action and what doesn't. Like I am way, way, way better at that than I was even before I developed anxiety disorders. So I was also much younger in those days. So there's also the wisdom of just sort of being, of living and gaining experience and that sort of stuff. But when you are in a situation where everything feels like an emergency, everything feels urgent, everything feels like it needs your attention, everything just feels so important and like you must pay attention to it and you must address it and you must fix it and you must take action. When everything feels that way, it's hard to differentiate, it's hard to prioritize in life. Like everything that pops into your mind might feel urgent, every sensation, every thought, you're hyper sensitized, you're always scanning, you're always looking, you're always evaluating your state of being and it all feels really important all the time. I mean, is this sounding familiar for you guys? But as you go through the process and you begin to implement some of the things that we talked about all the time and you learn to drop that resistance and you learn to implement concepts like surrender and tolerance and acceptance. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But when you start to do those things and you learn through experience that your sense of urgency has been thrown off, like none of it was ever, I can honestly say that even in my scariest moments I can look back now and say that seemed like the most important moment in the history of like mankind in the universe. But in retrospect, I could look back and say, oh, I was wrong about that. It really wasn't because nothing happened. Like I always got through it. So when you have those repeated experiences that say I can face a panic attack and get through it or I can face being home alone and get through it. I can overcome my agoraphobia. I can leave questions unanswered, problems unsolved, people unpleased, hello, Gad, are you here, are you listening? I can do all of these things and still learn to navigate through the discomfort that that delicits in me. And I can see that what seemed super important really never was and I was always gonna be okay. Boy, does it change things? Now I think I can assert that probably not just the process of anxiety recovery, but other major events that people might go through in life. You hear people say all the time, maybe somebody walked away from having a plane crash or a bad car crash that you would think, oh man, I don't know how you walked out of that. And they do and they have a different perspective on life. This is kind of one of those experiences to me. And I think having had the repeated experience of being wrong in terms of judging urgency and threat and learning wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. My sense of threat detection, threat management and urgency has really gotten very sort of razor sharp. And to be completely honest with you, when it feels like you're dying all the time or it feels like you're going crazy all the time, it feels like you're having your psychotic break all the time, it literally feels like your personality is disintegrating and you are somehow slipping away. That was DPR for me. But when you get through those things and discover that those were not actually threats in the end, what I'm talking about is the idea that somebody who maybe aggravates me during the day is not in any way an urgent thing. That is in no way urgent. That's not an emergency. Being stressed out over maybe money or school or assignments that I have going on or projects or whatever, bad drivers, the weather, like so many of those things that people wind up getting stressed and worked up about and all of those things, they just don't feel like things to me anymore. And maybe because when you've been through what felt like such extreme circumstances where everything felt so threatening and so dangerous and so urgent, it really puts things in perspective. So I very, very, very rarely get ruffled about anything. Now I've always, even before I've told stories like this, even before I developed anxiety disorders and depression, like I tended to not get ruffled, but now there's a purpose to it. Back then I was probably just not emotionally smart enough to get ruffled, to be completely honest with you when I was 18 years old and 20 years old. But now I would say I am and I won't say I never ever get ruffled, but if I get ruffled, it's a pretty big deal. Like it is something that probably really is important. It is urgent. It does require my immediate attention. It is somewhat impactful. It will have some sort of outcome that I need to pay attention to. But most other things do not ruffle me at all. So even when I'm stressed and under the gun, I can feel that sense of stress, but none of it feels urgent. None of it feels dangerous. I don't have to solve it. I don't have to fix it. Like I don't have to fix my emotions. All of those things. And I think people who go through this process and come at the other side will often sort of corroborate that. If anybody's in the room who feels like they are further down the road, maybe closer to recovery than not recovery, than not recovered. If you want to, in the comments, share your experience with this, I'm sure everybody would love to hear it. It just seems like when everything was a threat, now nothing is a threat. And I know that if you are in the thick of it right now, it might seem like that sounds patently absurd and completely impossible, but I promise it's not. Cause there were times when I would have thought that a statement like this would be patently absurd too, but now it's not. It doesn't seem absurd to me at all because I have the benefit of the experience that I went through. And people who go through this process tend to find down the road, they look back and say, oh wow, I'm using that thing that I learned or that thing that I used to have to practice all the time in my recovery from OCD is staying with me now. That thing that I used to have to practice in my recovery from agoraphobia is helping me now. So it's a very common. And again, I can't say this clearly enough. It doesn't mean that while you're in the middle of it, you're gonna see lessons. You won't see them until only after. But, and so you're not gonna be like, oh, this is really awesome. I'm learning so many valuable life lessons. You're not gonna say that until after the fact. That's the thing. So, like I said, I didn't have a whole lot to say about this, but I wanted to give you something that maybe you can hang on to, maybe you can look forward to. And when the whole world seems like everything is a huge trigger, trigger is probably a word we can use today for sure. In the end, when you feel like everything is a trigger for you, everything, because you're always looking for them, sooner or later you get to the point where nothing is a trigger for you. And by trigger, I mean triggering a state of disordered anxiety where I'm terrified of how I feel or I'm terrified of what I think or you're looking finding threats where none exists. You might become uncomfortable, you might become afraid, you might become stressed, all of those things. They just don't have the same meaning that they have while you're in the thick of it, right? So, that's kind of what I have to say about this lesson. It's not a huge, huge topic, but I think it's really important topic because as we go down the road and as I work on that book, again, that's down the road a ways, but these are the things that I learned in recovery that stay with me now and these are the things that I hear recovered people echo back at me, like, oh yeah, you're right. I noticed that too. Like I'm much more, much, much, much less likely to get freaked out or really ruffled or thrown off my game. And it means that to a certain extent, some of those things become, I'm gonna use a ridiculous word, it's a funny word. They become superpowers and we overuse that, that's cliche in mental health circles, but people who work with me, people who work for me for many years now, I get that sort of feedback, like man, the building could be on fire and you would just shrug your shoulders and like calmly get everybody out of the building. Like, yeah, that's kind of the benefit of having lived through always being on fire, if you will. So, that's probably the best way I can describe that. So, let's go into the comments a little bit. Let's see what everybody's up to, everybody's doing. I said to be a shorter one today. It's not a big, long topic. I can't belabor the point. I don't wanna just talk about how I feel. I wanna really hear how you guys are feeling. So, let's see what's going on here. Hortense, I see everybody. I saw all the romper room stuff. I think romper room was probably not a UK thing, not a British thing, I think. You probably right, Carol. You guys have all kinds of stuff that we never had here, but I think romper room, romper room was probably a Northeastern US thing years ago. Let's see here. Man, I feel like a wombat. So, I never know. I honestly don't know who that is. Man, I feel like a wombat, but I know that you're gonna be here and change your screen name every week or so, and they're always really spot on. So, I love that. I find anxiety makes, say I'll put this up on the screen. We'll start to show comments here. Which usually takes me a while to do, but we're ahead of the schedule today. I find anxiety makes real and semi-urgent important issues seem massively urgent. Yeah, that is 100% accurate. The things that now don't seem urgent at all to me seemed very urgent back then. And honestly, things that are a little bit urgent, yeah, they're important. I probably have to take care of that today. Would have been absolutely overwhelming. So, I often use the words magnify and distort when we talk about distorted anxiety. When you're in that distorted anxiety state, things tend to get magnified, they get twisted, they get distorted. I'm talking to you, health anxiety, what the rest of us would think is a 0.01% chance of a health problem. You see as a 45% chance of a health problem. So, yeah, everything gets completely utterly magnified, distorted and twisted. It sucks, it's no fun. So let's see here, good comment, by the way. DPDR is the freaking worst. Well, I mean, DPDR, listen, I'm gonna post about DPDR later on this week for sure. DPDR, I think that's, I don't know what day I'm gonna post about that, but it's in the queue already. And yeah, DPDR was probably one of the scariest symptoms for me. A lot of people would say that, DPDR is the worst. But you have to remember that DPDR as scary and as uncomfortable as it might be, and it was for me, for sure, I can corroborate that, is still just a symptom. And I hate to say that because it sounds like I'm minimizing your experience, but I had to really get my brain around that and say, oh, I'm trying to fight this is not really helping me at all. I'm gonna have to accept that this is here now, and instead of fighting it, what can I do with that? But yeah, it is very upsetting. It's a very upsetting feeling, for sure. There's no doubt about that. Hey, Judy, good to see you. Thanks for waving. Do I think I have made anxiety a friend? That's a really good question, Carol. I love this question. Do I think I have made anxiety a friend? I'm not sure that I would call it a friend. That might be going overboard, but I can tell you that like any anxiety that I sort of have in my life these days, and most recovered people would say that, these are non-anxious people. And when we use the phrase non-anxious people, we mean non-disordered anxiety. Like all human beings experience some form of anxiety from some time to time. And I don't think I would say my anxiety is a friend. I would say that it's healthy in that I can see it for what it is. It tells me that I'm really stressed. It tells me I have a lot on my plate. It tells me that I'm upset about something. Like that's sort of what anxiety does in a non-disordered state. So I will call it a friend. I'll just call it a normal like state of being that I can sort of use. I still don't like it. Nobody likes to feel anxious regardless of the reason. But yeah, I just have a different, more normal relationship with it now. But friend, yeah, might be a little much. I'm not sure I'd go down that road. Eric, what's up brother? Let's see here. It's been a long time I've watched you listen to. It's a good thing. I've learned how to accept and deal with my anxiety. Now it's at the end of the world. Like I thought it was four years. Love it. Let's put Eric up on the screen. Big round of applause as I look over the giant comment from Eric. Eric hasn't been around in a while. And that's good. It's kind of good that I haven't seen you because that means you're out living your life. And this is amazing. The fact, I love how you acknowledged that for years you thought this was the end of the world and that has changed now. I know you've put in a lot of hard work on this. So you get the credit for that. Congratulations, really good. Really good. Love to hear it. Thanks for stopping in. Rebecca says, not a friend. I would agree, not a friend. Just I don't see it as dangerous. This is pretty accurate. This is a pretty reasonable way to say it. I wouldn't say that anxiety is a friend. That's why sometimes I hate those posts. Like you see posts and you see people talking about the wisdom of anxiety. What is it telling you? What is it telling you? Well, they're really talking to non-disordered people. So somebody who says, you know, wow, I'm really, I'm so anxious these days but they don't have panic disorder. They don't have agoraphobia. They don't have OCD. They don't have health anxiety. They don't have any of those things. They're just, you know, kind of usually oblivious to how they feel and they discover, I'm really anxious lately. Like, I don't know what's bothering me. That is when that advice, like, well, what is it telling you? That might apply then. It's just misguided advice for us. And it's not, there's no wisdom in it. So this is good too. Let's pop this up here. Found it helpful to watch the feeling of urgency wax and wane, right? If something was truly urgent it would not wax and wane. This is really good. Now this is one of those cognitive tools we can use to combat the distortions, right? The emotional reasoning, the distortions, the black and white thinking. We talk about those things all the time. When you discover that like, oh, wait a minute, I got distracted for 15 minutes and it happens to everybody. You will argue with me but at your worst when you will say I panic 24 hours a day you do not panic 24 hours a day and I know that you have minutes here and there when you do get distracted. Oh, I forgot to tell my screen at the blank yet. Whoops. I know you have times during the day when you get distracted for a minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes and suddenly it goes away until you're not distracted anymore than it's right back in your face. And truly urgent things do not operate on your attention schedule, right? They just don't. So if the building is on fire the building is on fire whether you're paying attention or not that is a huge clue. And when you start to notice this you can start to use it because it informs new action. Like recognizing that is awesome but the recognition by itself doesn't change all that much. You have to use that and say, oh, wait a minute I have to accept this and we're talking acceptance in a second. I have to surrender to this. I have to tolerate this. I have to willfully tolerate this. I'd stop fighting this. And I feel like I can do that. All right, I'll take the chance to do that because I remember when I got distracted and suddenly it went away for 10 minutes. It wasn't so important. What does that tell me? Love that. That's a great comment. Very useful. Okay, this is good too. I'm sorry I can't see your name because of the restream thing clearly in the Facebook group. Yes, when I was back in the thick of it I did feel that way. I get setbacks but I don't see everything as a threat anymore. So I would challenge that a little bit. Like I get setbacks but I don't see everything as a threat anymore. It's hard to say you're in a setback and also say that you don't see threats anymore. I believe the second part you don't see everything as a threat anymore which tells me that there is progress there that is not erased. So be careful about that word setback. I feel things again. They bother me. They scare me. I don't wanna feel them. And I'm maybe making choices to go back to old ways of dealing with those things instead of sticking with the new ways. That's okay. Everybody does that. But the second part of this statement is so telling because it shines a huge light on the things you have learned and how you have changed. Build on that. It's really important. Excellent, excellent. Let's see. The problem is that my body is freezing when I know I am safe and I have zero anxiety. It's like sleep paralysis. Okay, so that's just part of the, that is part of the fight, flight and freeze response. We do talk about all three of those things. We just talk about fight or flight. Now it's more common to talk about fight, flight, freeze because it is a valid response. I mean, it is part of it. But you have to, this is that thing where you start to statement with what the problem is. So that usually indicates to me, well, I hear what you're saying, Drew and I hear what all you guys are saying. I hear what all the helpers are saying. But the problem is, so here's my counter argument. I freeze. So what happens is you're afraid and you go into a slight freeze mode. That can happen to people. But once you notice that it is happening to you, you do have some agency there. This is hotly debated. I'm not telling you, you can change that response instantaneously overnight and do things completely different. But once you recognize it, there comes a moment where you can get out of that and start to make a change. I'm not saying instantly. Sometimes you have to wait a little bit before you sort of get out of that state. But as soon as you're aware of it, that's when you're, that's the moment where you can make a different choice and start to make a different choice and start to move in a different direction. So be careful about framing it as an objection. The problem is, see, the reason why this doesn't apply to me is I freeze. Well, many people freeze and it's okay to freeze. Like that's a normal part of the response for so many people. Just when you recognize it, then it's like, okay, what can I do a little bit differently here? Now I recognize them and freeze. What do I do? So, let's see. Ooh, love this too. GBG is always in the house with some good stuff. Jason, I found that my other emotions are more clearly defined. Anger, excitement, et cetera, are more rewarding now. Dude, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this comment because especially anger, like you're talking about anger is more rewarding, which sounds ridiculous to a lot of people, but there's truth in that. Your emotional experiences are more natural and more organic and they are rewarding because they may teach us lessons. They may change our relationship with the people in our life. They may inform healthy changes in different actions and they do become more rewarding. And I tell this story very often, one of the signals for me where I said, oh, I'm a recovered person. And again, I didn't wake up on morning and say, hey, I'm recovered, I recovered last night, but I remember very clearly having a moment where I was so angry. I had had an argument and I was super angry and about two minutes into it, I discovered, oh, wow, I'm only angry. This is just anger. Like it didn't automatically become pounding heart and dissociation and feeling off balance. I was only angry. That was a great moment. So this is cool too, you get to navigate through emotions more. When you're in that disordered state, that hypervigilant, hyper-sentitized, afraid state all the time where everything is urgent and everything is a threat, even in many instances, your emotions become threats because if I feel big emotions, I'll be overwhelmed and then it will become fear and we got a problem. Great comment. Thanks, Jason, I appreciate it. Let's see here. So Becky says, Abessie, I'm sorry, not Becky. I was doing so well and now I'm back in the thick of it, hoping to start CBT therapy too. And just remember what I mentioned before about the word setback, right? Back in the thick of it, again, tends to mean I've made, I've reverted, right? So this is, I don't think it's coming up next week. It's not this week, maybe next week. In the next few weeks, Josh and I on Disordered, that podcast is at Disordered.fm. Go check it out. We did an episode on this. Setbacks and what I have learned to call reversion. Because when you look at patterns of a very large number of people over years and years now that describe the, that describe the state of setback or square one, there are certain themes that come into play. Exhaustion is one of them for sure. Lack of belief is one of them. Reversion is by far in my eyes, anecdotal. I maybe one day I'll quantify this, but is one of the common themes. I reverted back to old ways. I felt something that scared me so much. I went back to my old ways and then I call that a setback because now I'm hiding and I'm retreating and I'm avoiding and I'm modifying my life again. So your progress can't be erased, but it's good that you're starting therapy. That would be a good thing. It's always helpful. I'm a fan. Let's see here. Suffering from health anxiety from 2017. I wanna recover. Where should I start? Welcome, by the way. First time I've seen your name, I believe. And welcome from India. You are here from a long way away. We're glad that you're here. So if you go to my website, TheAnxiousTruth.com and just search for health anxiety, you'll see a couple of podcast episodes on that, one of which was with a Norwegian psychologist who treats very well known for treating what we used to call hypercondriasis or health anxiety, which is now kind of classed in there with OCD because it's a stubborn belief and it tends to drive compulsions. But yeah, and I also did another one on my own specifically addressing health anxiety as a uncertainty intolerance thing, not a health thing. It's not about your health, it's just about your inability to tolerate uncertainty. So you should check those two out. That's a good start. Can't go out at night because I feel the universe. Okay, well, I get that, but so reframe this. I choose to not go out at night because it feels very scary to me because my mind is getting sticky and I'm having thoughts about existentialism, existential issues and existence, not existentialism. I'm having thoughts that are existential in nature and they freak me out because they're big things that don't have an answer and they scare me. Like see how objective that is and it's really much more accurate. I choose to not go out at night because it triggers the sticky thoughts that feel very important and dangerous to me and I don't like them because I can't find answers to them. That's a lot more kind to yourself than I don't go out at night, right? So I mean, I get it, you don't go out at night. That's might be factual, but reframe that and actually see what's really going on because it gives yourself a little bit more of a chance other than making an absolute statement. I fear the universe. Oh, I can't go out, I fear the universe. Okay, well, I get it. Many people have those fears. I'm never trying to minimize these things by the way. My goal when I answered questions that way is not to minimize your suffering or minimize your experience. My goal is to take the thing that you think is really urgent and give you this back. Like I want to give you a confident reassuring shrug of my shoulders that says, yeah, okay, a lot of people have that feeling and let's talk about it this way instead. It's okay, you're safe. I'm always just trying to let you know in my casual response that I know you're safe even though it feels like you're not. So let's see here. This is kind of funny, I've actually heard this. I dig this comment because I've heard people say this before. I had one person who really argued hard with me. Oh, geez, a few years back that this was actually the case. But they were more specific. I like how you say my anxious circuits are burnt out. I had somebody tell me that my issue was not that I was not recovered. I actually have adrenal burnout. That's no joke. And that was the hill that they wanted to die on. They could not accept that recovery was actually possible. I'm selling a pipe dream. I'm misleading people. And what I'm declaring as a non-disorder state of anxiety was adrenal burnout. My adrenal glands have been burnt out and I should be supporting my adrenal glands so I could panic again. That was an interesting conversation. It's amazing how you find people get the different takes on that. So I appreciate that comment, I really do. My closet is a romper room. My wife hates my rompers. Let's see here. What do we got here? Brandy, I'm at a plateau with my recovery. A little frustrating. That can get frustrating. And everybody kind of goes through that from time to time. Anybody else feel like they're a little bit stuck? Like they've hit a point and they haven't had a hard time going past it. Very, very, very common experience, Brandy. So you're not alone in that for sure. Sometimes it gets really tough because the plateau can often be what we hit when we have gone from sort of rock bottom and we are so much better that we can kind of get through day to day life, right? So the most common things, at least in the West that we might talk about in a Western life would be, I was housebound and now I can do the school pickup. I could take the kids to school. I can get to their events. We go out to dinner now and then I went to my family birthday party. I can stay home alone a little bit. I'm not panicking like I used to. And so you attain a level of functionality where it's like, oh, okay, I can sort of do life now. And then it can be really tempting to sort of settle into that because sometimes you don't have to go beyond that. If you can live 80% of life and sort of engineer your way through it, sometimes it's hard to find the reason to push past that. So very, very common. Sometimes you really have to make a conscious decision to say, oh, well, my plateau is that those things are still scary. So I really have to work. I've got to work on those things now. I've got to work on those things. And I'm supposed to be scared. So the things that you haven't gotten to yet that still feel like major challenges for you are supposed to feel like challenges. You're supposed to be scared. So don't let that dissuade you. It doesn't mean that you're at some sort of plateau that you'll never break. Good comment, though. Once we experienced trauma, does it stay with us forever? And how does, okay. So this is a tough one. This is like its own, you know what, I'll put it up real quickly. This is a question about trauma, which is the thing that I am always so reluctant to address. I try to acknowledge it because that is a real thing in the world. That my take here on this is not my personal take on this. Does it stay with us forever? And how did we ever reach full recovery? In most of the, listen, I'm gonna choose my words very carefully here because I don't wanna validate anybody and I do not wanna get into a big debate over this. But if you look at trauma recovery methods, and actually I'm no expert, but I am literally neck deep in it right now, that's what I'm involved with in my schooling is that stuff. We're talking about trauma counseling and theories of trauma recovery. And I will tell you this, not a single one of the major empirically validated, well-respected trauma recovery modalities, and I'm not talking about what you see on social media, I'm talking about things, treatment methods that people actually research and use in the real world. None of them stops with I was traumatized and then it stops there. They all continue on to a next step where now you have to do something not about that because you can't change the past, but with that. So yes, if you look at that, taking my personal belief out of that, you are not doomed. Can you erase what happened to you in the past? No, we can never erase what happened to us, but we cannot simply stop by saying, I've been traumatized and you must never possibly suggest that I can go past that. So yeah, I do believe that we have the opportunity to go past it. It involves some things. The major three tenants tend to be like reconstructing the story and sort of reconstructing the narrative then, you got to be able to tell a story, you got to be able to kind of look at the narrative that surrounds it, and then you have to be able to sort of adapt and return to the world with that in tow, like how am I gonna bring that with me? That's very oversimplified, but it's also, it's a big answer, right? But there is a lot of work in that that says, yeah, we kind of do move past it. We can, it is possible. It often just doesn't seem palatable to people because if you have been traumatized at various levels and only you get to decide that, I don't get to decide whether or not you've been traumatized or not, but it might take varying degrees of time before you are sort of willing to accept that you can move forward and or ready to move past the storytelling and rehashing part, which is a vital part. You do have to do that, but then at some point you can move past that. I hope that helps. I'm not trying to minimize it. This in no way is am I a trauma expert, but the more I learned about it, the more I feel hopeful, even for people who do feel that they have been traumatized. There is hope. It really is. A funky aspect of hypervigilance is a really good way to put that. I think that was the thing where everything feels like it's urgent. Yes, if you are constantly hypervigilances, I'm always checking. I'm always checking. I'm compulsively checking to see what's going on in my body? What's going in my mind? What are my thoughts? What's happening around me? Are any of my triggers on the horizon? Is it gonna be too hot today? Is it gonna be too cold today? Is it gonna snow today? Are we gonna be alone today? Hypervigilance will really put you in a place where everything does feel like an emergency. So that's pretty good. A comment, Ashley. DPDR stands for Depersonalization and Derealization. Those are those really weird feelings when it feels like either you're not real or you're outside of yourself or everything around you is sort of not real. Very common anxiety symptom. Very common. I can't answer every single specific question. Where are we? 31 minutes and it is 2.30. You do a little bit longer. Why does needing to be near or of an exit seem so important? Is that an urgent thing? Okay, I'll answer this real quick. Why does needing to be near the exit door of every place seem so important? Is that an urgency thing? Well, it's not the door. A door isn't urgent. What's urgent to you is your need to escape, right? So you are in a situation, again, I don't know you personally so I can answer in general terms here. And this is a story of you here again and again and again. By show of hands, who needs to sit by the door or at the end of the aisle, you're gonna see a bunch of people in the room will say that they do too. But it's not the door that's urgent. It's the fact that you think that if you get too anxious, if I panic, if I get too anxious, my thoughts get too scary or my symptoms get too scary, I need to be saved. I need to escape from that. Therefore I need to be by a door. The sense of urgency is I can't handle this level of anxiety or this level of distress. So I need to get away from it and be saved. That's what that is. Hopefully that helps. DPDR would be a good band name. Who would get that? I bet you a lot of people will get it. You don't want to, I think I've probably said this before, I don't know if I've ever said it on a Monday live. One of the most interesting things I ever heard about DPDR by the way, when I posted about it on TikTok, this was my claim to fame on TikTok. It's my one TikTok video. I actually have a couple of videos that have gone over a million views, but it's my one TikTok video that has like 4.5 million views now or whatever. My entire TikTok audience is basically because of that video. I'm under no illusions. And I posted about DPDR. I was amazed when a video gets 4.5 million views, there are a lot of comments. So if you go look in the comments section of that video, I can't anymore, can't keep up with them. I was amazed at the number of people who said, oh, I like that feeling. I was like, whoa, I did not expect to hear that. Most people are saying, yes, it's very scary. I hate it, but there was a fair number of people that said, you know, like I actually like the feeling. Interesting, right? Let's see here. I'm gonna scroll a little bit. Wombat has revealed his identity. Oh, I still don't know. The mystery is still deep for me. I know who says things like that. Very funny. It's scary, but mostly very, very uncomfortable. Sure, it is incredibly uncomfortable, the whole DPDR thing. No doubt, no doubt. You will get no argument from me. Let's see. I'm completely focused. We're trying to focus on specifically with travel, any advice we're in the world to start. All aspects of travel sends me spiraling. Well, I'll put this up real quickly. Ashley, I would say, first of all, that's challenged the word spiral. If you go to my website, theanxiestruth.com and search for spiral, S-P-I-S, you used that right here. S-P-I-R-A-L-I-N-G, or spiral. You'll see an episode that I just did on the spiral and reframing what a spiral is as opposed to it's a spiral, it's a storm. So go check that out. And honestly, it's one of those things like, well, where do I start with travel anxiety? It's not travel anxiety. Where do I start when I'm afraid of how I feel and then I'm worried that I might be triggered? For you, the context is traveling. If I get in a car, I might be triggered and feel the things I hate to feel. If I get in a cruise, I might be triggered and so it's not travel. It's that travel is the thing that will trigger you into an internal experience bodily or psychologically that you fear. So start there. Don't worry about it being travel. It's like travel is just a way to trigger you and travel and driving in a car becomes a way to trigger you intentionally so you can practice. Hopefully that helps. I hate that you're always right. I don't want to be always right. I'm not trying to be always right. You guys make me laugh when you do that, when you say like get out of my head or how do you know what I'm thinking? And I enjoy those sort of lighthearted comments but I'm not here trying to always be right by the way. I'm just trying to help. And here's the deal. Just recognize that I'm not super brilliant. You're just afraid and I'm not. So I reason a little bit better than you do in the state that you're in right now. That's really important and that's why people helpers help us. That's why therapists can help us. That's why you need somebody outside of you and somebody who maybe is down the road, right? So I can come at it from a point of logic reason. I can reconnect you to reality as opposed to, because I'm not freaking out the way you are. So it just seems like I'm really smart but I'm just calm. How's that? Let's see. Ooh, this is huge. This is a win here. I decided not to depend on others to do exposures and it feels amazing. Good for you. That's a huge thumb up, big fist bump for me. That is a hard thing to do. So congrats on taking that step for sure. Quick caveat for anybody who's listening. If you need to use other people to start your exposures by all means, do that please. I'd rather you do them with safe people than not do them. But at some point you leave the safe people behind. Whenever you get to that, it is not a race. And then you get to this. It's a great comment. Congratulations, that's a big deal. Let's see here. So how far do I have to go? I'm gonna go about another five minutes or so. Let's see here. Judy says, I recovered but didn't get braver. This time I have to push further. Yes, and that's the dreaded acceptable bubble. If you want, you can pop on over to, again, just go to my website. You can search for all the podcast episodes or you go to my YouTube channel and search there too, Laura on YouTube. Search for acceptable bubble. And I did an episode years ago on the acceptable bubble. That's what happens when we do that thing where we recover enough. We just sort of recover enough. I get it. And if you have suffered for a long time, recovering enough is you're gonna wanna take a break. And in a way, go ahead. Like that's okay. You've earned it. Just that sometimes we get stuck there. And then when the bubble that we build is punctured cause life will break the bubble. There's no one gets to live in a bubble. Life will smash through your bubble at one point. And then it's like, oh no, everything broke. I'm not really recovered. So I get it. It's okay, Judy. You're not alone in that, I promise. Let's see here. It's best for you to find yourself not caring how you feel. Yes, put, I'm gonna put this up on the screen. So Wombat, you're killing it today. I appreciate that. Maybe I'll figure out who you are. I'm not gonna figure it out. I'm not gonna lie. I like the mystery. It's kind of cool. It's when you find yourself not caring. Oh, you would think I was smarter to turn off that software before but I didn't and it blanked my screen again. It's best when you find yourself not caring how you feel for a minute, then catch it. Yes, those are normal windows. Windows is a thing. I love it. Like, hey, I had a window where I felt pretty normal. This is a perfectly good comment. It's actually a really good comment. I'll modify the phrasing a little bit to say, it's normal when you find yourself not noticing how you feel. Because sometimes, and I do get, not care how you feel. I say all the time, I don't care how I feel but only because I have learned that I don't have to care. It's okay to care how you feel just that you start to have windows where you stop noticing how you feel. A little bit of a different phrasing and I'm not trying to invalidate your phrasing. If that works for you, that's fine. For everybody else, there's no switch that you can flip to not care how you feel. It's okay to care how you feel. You'll just learn that you don't have to care so much. Let's see here. Did I ever get the let down feeling? Let me read this real quick. Hey, Junior, how you doing? Did you ever feel the let down effect while recovering? Like sudden feelings of sadness or feeling down? My anxiety has gone down. Thoughts of being depressed started truiting but I'm accepting. Well, I think the question there is like, did I ever feel like, sure, I'm human. I feel all kinds of stuff. I get sad. I'm prone to feel depression. That's true because it's happened to me multiple times in my life and I can't deny that. I have to be realistic with you guys. If you've been depressed before, you are at greater risk of experiencing that again. I am for sure. I can tell when it's coming. But yes, I experience all kinds of things and I did in my recovery too. So just be careful about trying to find meaning in the fact that you feel sadness or feel a let down. Like all people experience those things, people who are in a sensitized state treating everything as possible threat are so sensitive to it that they start to have to find meaning in that. So just be careful about that. It's normal to feel all the different things. It's normal. Let's see here. Oh, Gina's doing good. Love it. Good job here. I was able to face things that terrified me the dentist and the doctor. Good job, Gina. That's hard work on your part and you're very welcome. I didn't do anything, but you're welcome. Let's see here. Oh, okay. I'm gonna put this up on the screen. Not because I'm happy that you had like extreme DPR, but then I got a bad toothache and DPR vanished. What does that say? Like let that sink in. That's actually a really good comment too. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Let's see here. Grab it into your freeze. Just wish David freeze long enough for me to pet them on my walks. That's true. I'm caught in a morning anxiety. How do I help myself? I'm caught in, oh, five, five freeze, morning nausea. Okay, how do I help myself? In any situation, I generally don't go to like, well, here's what you do for DPR. Here's what you do for nausea. Generally speaking, the principle is always that we stop looking at the thing we feel as special and dangerous, but I'm nauseous. How do I deal with that? It's in the morning. I'm morning nausea, so I need instructions on that. The principles are always the same regardless of what you feel. You are capable of operating even though you feel nauseous in the morning. Not perfectly, not optimally. It's not what you want to feel like, but you have to start from the premise that like, if I just retreat from this and hope that it changes and like fret over it and cross my fingers and ask for tips to make it go away, it's not gonna go away and I don't accomplish anything. But if I recognize that I can do it differently and all I do is get up, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, comb my hair. I take these things all the time, right? Start with a morning routine. That's as simple and basic as you have to make it. It doesn't matter. Super simple is totally fine. But if you get up, brush your teeth, comb your hair, get dressed, drink a glass of water, I understand you might not want to eat because you're feeling nauseous, that's okay. But instead of laying in bed or hiding or like scrolling anxiety things to try and find out about your nausea, do something different to start to show yourself that you can function, albeit it may be a diminished state while you're anxious. That would be the place to start. But you have to be okay with the idea that like this isn't the worst thing in the world. It's not fun, but it's not crushing you. That's the way you start. Okay, I love this. Thank you for sharing this on the freeze thing. I just do anything different. It might be just moving an inch or doing a little dance move. Weird, but it works. It's not weird. That's not weird at all. It's a really great, great, great comment and thank you so much for it. I appreciate it. What you can do with the freeze response. Like when you notice it, I can do something. This is so great. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. I cannot tell you how to appreciate it. Let's talk about this real quick. I have forgotten how to accept. I'm gonna have to tell you about this if you're following along, you know. On Friday, Kim Quinlan and I, you guys know Kimberly Quinlan. I'm guessing if you know me, you probably know her. We're doing a workshop on acceptance, right? So this is the most difficult concept for people to get in recovery, acceptance. I have forgotten how to accept. Essentially means I am resisting again. I forgot how to not resist. I've decided that it's better to resist again. You didn't forget how to accept. You just decided it was better to fight it again. It feels better. It feels smarter. It feels like the better move in this moment when I'm triggered and afraid to fight again. I might know that it's not the good long-term move but I'm picking it now because it feels like I have to. So acceptance, generally speaking in my world and Kim has a lot of great stuff. We've been working on the program that's happening on Friday. I'll put it up on the screen in a second. It really talks about all the myths around acceptance, what it is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to look like, what it doesn't look like, how to use it. Like we've got it, it's still a hard topic to get. We've got about two hours or so including probably some Q and A time on that particular topic because it is confusing and frustrating for so many people. How on God's green earth am I supposed to accept this thing that I fear and hate so damn much? I get it. So I'll put it up, you know what? I'll put it up now. I'll put it up now, shameless plug. So if you want to check out the Acceptance Explains workshop, that's me and Kim Quinlan. I'll leave it up on the screen. That's going down on Friday but even if you can't make Friday the replay will always be available for you guys to check it out. So let's go back to the chat real quick. I'm sorry. Restream changed the whole thing here. So I've tried to focus on what is the bottom line of emotion instead of saying I'm anxious? What is this feeling underneath anxiety? Let me put that up real quick. So much for my acceptance explain, right? This is a tricky one. I can't give you specific advice. I don't know your specific situation. For people that are in a disordered state trying to dig underneath the anxiety to find out well, what is this saying? What does it mean? Why am I anxious? Sometimes feels like you're spinning your tires and you might recognize this. I can't seem to find out why I'm anxious. One of the defining characteristics of a disordered state of anxiety is that you're just anxious about being anxious. So being anxious doesn't always mean that there's some underlying emotion that triggered it. Oh, I'm really upset or I'm really scared or I'm really angry. Like there isn't necessarily, you can simply be anxious about being anxious. That's very, very common. It is one of the defining states of the problem that we're always addressing together. So I'm not saying that you should never ever do this, but notice that is a pitfall, especially if you're digging and digging and trying to figure out and solve the anxiety by trying to uncover the trigger underneath it and you can't find it. That's a clue that says you're anxious about being anxious. So that's very, very common. So keep that in mind. Oh, I love it, successfully completed therapy. That's a big deal too. Like that's a reason to celebrate. It's always a really happy day for a therapist when somebody doesn't need you anymore, right? It's happy to, I'm not a therapist yet, but those days will be happy for me. And one of the happy days in the things that I do now are days when somebody doesn't have to listen anymore, right? If you don't have to follow me or listen to the podcast anymore, it's a happy day. And that's great. You deserve a huge, like congratulations on that, good job. So let's see. I'm gonna scroll down to the end here because I'm running out of time. Let's see. Let's scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, I love it. Gina, big ups to your hubby for buying you that. Your anxiety is lying to you. He's right. It doesn't know you're, it's lying though. So I love that shirt. It's a good reframe. It's a good reminder. And it's good to remind you that like, oh, this is a lie. I can act anyway, even though it says not to. It doesn't know that it's lying. Keep that in mind. The only way to get past that is for you to show it that it's wrong. So keep that in mind. But I love it. Great, great, great. Love it. Let's see here. I'm not sure where this one came, but it's hard to find validation about, oh yeah, okay. So I see that there's a question about DPDR, but Bethany's response to that is excellent. I need to know all the different variations of DPDR. You kind of know, kind of know. Let's see here. If I'm not panicking or feel normal, I think there's something wrong. There's nothing wrong with you, Brandi. If I notice how I'm not panicking or feel, or I feel normal or something wrong. Anxious about not being anxious. That's a incredibly common, incredibly common thing. I've actually, Josh, I believe he didn't have a name for it. I think it has officially, it has a name Panicogenic Relaxation, I believe it's called. I have to look that up. But that's really common. People, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's two things. Either you are and recognize this, it's okay. You've been conditioned for so long to be like this, right? You're in mirror cap mode. You're always looking. You're hyper-vigilant. You're always scanning, you're always checking. I don't feel anything, but I still have to keep looking because it might come and get me. That's one thing that's very common. The other thing that's incredibly common to be completely honest with you, where people say they don't like the feeling of not being anxious is sometimes it feels empty. So I don't know if anybody can relate to that. Like it feels empty and that's a foreign, I don't like that feeling of not feeling and I will interpret not feeling or being neutral as danger. When it's not like the default state for most human beings most of the time is neutral, not feeling, not being aware of how they feel. So the best you could do in that situation is when you start to have times when you're not anxious. That's great, right? That's ultimately everybody's goal in the end. It means you're doing the work and it's working, but just let that discomfort be too. No, I have to be anxious about not being anxious. I'm gonna have to let that ride. Hell no, I love feeling not anxious. Yeah, but you would think that you would want to, right? And we all want to, but it is a relatively common experience to get to that point where suddenly you have times when you're not completely consumed with anxiety and that still feeling or that calm or neutral feeling can freak people out. Yeah, it feels suspicious, Katya says, and other people will say it feel, I've heard people worry that that's bipolar. Like, is it amazing how anxious minds can come up with all kinds of things? Like, oh, I feel empty and that must be down so that must be the down part of bipolar. Am I bipolar? And I've heard people say that too. It's okay, it's okay to not like the feeling, just work through it like everything else. Let's see. Let's see. I'll throw this up real quick and then I'm gonna go. Yep, I only got two more minutes. What are your thoughts on relaxation techniques? Isn't it better to just allow anxiety to go down on its own? Okay, so this is where things get a little bit confusing because people sometimes hear people like me talk about relaxation techniques and say, well, shouldn't you not do that? You should just sit with it and do nothing. You're not required to sit and do nothing. Nothing is an actual act, believe it or not. And the beauty of relaxation techniques is when you practice them, when you are not anxious, they can help you move through. They are part of the sitting with it and doing nothing. So what I mean by that is if you look at progressive muscle relaxation, which is that thing where you tend some muscle in your release and you go through your body that way, you learn to see what tension feels like and then you learn what release of the tension feels like. So when my body is, when my brain is screaming, danger, danger, danger, danger, and in response, I can let go of the tension in my body and rag doll it because I practiced that technique. That is an excellent do nothing response. Relaxation is the best form of nothing that I could think of, but you got to do it to do the nothing. Does that make sense? I know it sounds kind of like triple speak here, like guru speak, but no, like if you are, if your body is amped up and twisted, there's no reason to let it stay that way. You can let go of that feeling because that is sending a green light signal back down to chain to the lower downstairs part of your brain. Like, so we can use that as part of the, it's okay signal, but it's not a saving thing. We don't relax so that it goes away. We relax to let it play out on its own. Hopefully that helps. Let's see. Mm-mm, mm-mm. Ken bullies, your best answer to me was you trigger yourself true. Let's see. Oh, Carol, I love it. I love to hear that. I know this has been a struggle for you. Very good. Very, very good. Oh, hey, Maria, how are you? Good to see you. Feel suspicious. All right, guys, I think I'm kind of at a time. Yep, 251. I got a boogie. Thanks for hanging out. I appreciate it. It's always a good time. Let me put that thing up on the screen again so that you guys can see it. If, in fact, where is it? Captions, here we go. I'll put it up on the screen. So this is the workshop that I'm doing with Kim on Friday the 28th. You can go check it out if you want. It's at that URL, the anxious-truth.com slash acceptance. Only because I know if you're struggling with acceptance and you are frustrated and it is leading you to say, I'm doing it wrong. I can't get it. What's wrong with me? You just might want to check that out, all right? None of the stuff that costs money is ever required, but sometimes we have to do things that are a little bit more intensive, labor intensive, take time to prepare. There's components to it that we can't just do for nothing. And this is one of the things. We try to make them as affordable as possible, but you're getting me and Kim together in a room for two hours. We get to actually talk to us. If you only buy the replay or you watch the replay, you won't get the Q and A, but you'll hear the questions. And if you do the workshop with us live, you won't be on camera. You won't have your mic on. No one will see your name is completely anonymous. Anyway, this will stay up on my YouTube channel. So if you ever want to come back and watch these, go to my YouTube and subscribe to that and check out the recovery Monday playlist. All of these stay there. You can look for them on the Facebook group if you can find them. Sometimes I can't even find my own damn videos or my Facebook page, but really YouTube is the better way to go. Thanks for hanging out. Thank you so much for like supporting each other like you always do. And we'll be back again, not next Monday, but the Monday after, because we do them every two weeks. What do we got this week? We got an anxious truth episode on Wednesday. That one's, I'll tell you what that's about. Sneak preview is don't rely on my experience because my experience isn't yours. So relying the principles of recovery on Friday, we have a disordered episode out, just like the workshop and that's it. Thanks for hanging out guys. See you next time.