Phobias and Avoidance
You Want to Take Back Control. You Keep Landing in the Same Place.
You've tried. No one can say you ignored this. The exposure exercises, the conversation with your doctor, maybe medication, the breathing techniques someone swore by.
And something always comes up. Your heart goes before you've had a thought. Everything in you says get out.
You may recognize some of this:
You can explain exactly why the fear is out of proportion, and it changes nothing.
You look up new approaches and they seem far-fetched, or you try them and nothing holds.
You feel guilty when people accommodate you, because you're the only one who needs it.
The shame isn't really about the fear. It's about being an inconvenience.
You've started planning around it weeks ahead, which is its own kind of exhausting.
The avoidance has quietly spread. Things that used to be fine aren't anymore.
There's something you missed. A trip, a procedure, a job, someone's wedding.
You're tired and you've run out of ideas, so avoiding it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the only option left.
The gap between what you know and what your body does isn't a character problem. It's how fear gets stored. Understanding it was never going to be enough, because understanding happens somewhere else.
What We Do in Sessions
You already know your triggers. So we start somewhere else.
I use EMDR, and for some presentations, I use a protocol called DeTUR, which works with the dread that builds beforehand rather than only with the thing itself. We bring the trigger up in a controlled way, and over time your brain stops loading it with the same charge.
This isn't exposure in the sense of making you endure something until you get used to it. We're working with the stored response, which is why it usually doesn't require you to talk about it at length or white-knuckle your way through anything.
We measure intensity before and after, so you can see whether something is shifting rather than taking my word for it. There's no homework. The work happens in session.
I won't push you into something you're not ready for. We go at your pace, and if we need to slow down, we slow down.
A lot of my clients waited a long time before reaching out. Some had tried enough things that another attempt felt like more time spent on something that wouldn't work either. What you've already done isn't wasted. What's left is getting the charge out of your body, and that's a different kind of session.
I've worked with people who carried a fear for decades and were surprised by how it moved.
What Getting Better Looks Like
Your mind goes to the thing and the distress isn't there.
You stop building your schedule around it. You book the flight without the three weeks of dread first. You sit in the chair and it's ten unpleasant minutes instead of the event that organized your whole month.
You're present with the people you love, instead of managing something in the background. You get back a set of options you'd quietly written off.
You might notice a trace of the fear every now and then. What changes is that it doesn’t run the show anymore.
If any of this sounds like you, you don't have to keep managing it alone. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation.
