Is this a strange way to do therapy?

I just found out in therapy today that when I’m anxious I shouldn’t be seeking reassurance for it either by a person or animal or anything. And I also shouldn’t be using a distraction to help me cope with it. My therapist says these are negative ways to cope with my anxiety and will just make it worse and she wants me to stop doing these things because it’s harmful. I have never in my life heard of this. It doesn’t make much sense to me. It seems kind of backwards. Does anyone know what she means by it? I mean I like her I guess I just don’t get her style of therapy. Getting reassured for my anxietys is very helpful to me.

Did she suggest what to do instead that would be more helpful? Depending on the anxiety my T does sometimes offer support other times he asks where the feeling is coming from and what is it trying to tell me. Other common anxiety themes are you are focusing too much on the future and need to stay present to the current moment, feeling good enough about yourself and confronting shame.

Do you have OCD?

My therapist said something similar. He says seeking reassurance is only a temporary solution and he's right because when I search for reassurance and achieve it, it helps for a short time and my mind is back to searching for more reassurance. He wants me to practice mindfulness as a way to help me recognize these feelings and learn to "give up the struggle"

My ex-Pdoc told me that medicating anxiety usually makes it worse. And when you medicate severe anxiety, it can lead to PTSD (like when veterans return from war) . She said the best way to deal with anxiety is to go through it, experience it, learn to cope with it. So I can see how a professional might say that avoidance would not help. HOWEVER, she also said that sometimes you can use medication when dealing with a minor stressor like moving. Something that you know will be difficult, but won't cause lasting effects. And I'm sure my ex-Pdoc would say that one way of coping is distraction. Like in DBT they teach you to take mini vacations. So you're still going through it, but you allow yourself to take little breaks. You don't have to just suffer, but don't avoid it either.

That's just what I was taught.

Distraction and avoidance are absolutely the worst things for my anxiety. They change nothing and create more anxiety by the virtue of not dealing with things and engaging in useless "coping". Reassurance, for me, can be nice though in the form of positive, encouraging comments. External reality checks that what I fear is unlikely or that I distort it in my head. Not reassurance that distractions and avoidance are okay though.

What anxiety are we talking about here? There are two different kinds. One where you have anxiety about something happening or bad things happening in the future and anxiety from implicit memories that have no worries about something happening. That is what I have. It is extreme and if I do not distract I will resort to binge purging or self harm. There is no going through it to get over it. I was also told that kind of anxiety is an emotional flashback.

I have anxiety about silly bad things happening. Like ending up in a bad neighborhood when we’re on a road trip or needing to use a public restroom which I am scared to do. Not things like remembering stuff that happened in my past. I’ve never been diagnosed with OCD but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had some form of it. She made me read over some paper called Thinking about Thinking and it had all kinds of stuff like should statements, labeling, personalization and blame, and all or nothing thinking. She says I don’t have any of that. But that I do tend to jump to conclusions and catastrophrize things. It seems to be just straight general anxiety disorder. Maybe this is just a new way to do therapy that I’m not aware of. She’s a lot younger than my other therapists were. Maybe she just likes to do newer things.

I have a lot of anxiety as a result of over 20 years of physical, mental, and sexual abuse. It impacts everything I think and do. I have spent my entire life trying to stop and/or block out feelings. I am the queen of avoidance and distraction.

My T says all the time that I need to avoid avoiding; it does not help. I need to stop trying to distract myself from my emotional misery. He says (and we had an entire session on this again today) that avoiding and distracting is only a temporary fix. He continuously asks me, how has avoiding been working for you so far? You have spent your entire life stuffing down feelings, you can do that better than anyone. If it worked as a long term fix, you would be the happiest person on earth by now.

T says that the only way to feel better long term is to build up my tolerance to the unpleasant emotions. He says I need to continue to practice mindfulness and work on using my DBT skills in order to help me feel the bad feelings and learn to tolerate them. The more I practice feeling the emotions, the less they will hurt me. Yes, it is miserable right now but the more I sit with my anxiety and bad feelings the easier it will get long term.

I know it sucks and I hate to agree with him. Believe me I HATE sitting with feelings. I HATE believing anything he says. He always tells me it is a free country and I can do whatever I want, but evidence shows that his theory works and history shows that my current way of dealing with things has not worked. I is slowly dragging me kicking and screaming to his side. I will not admit it to him though. I did admit today that I did feel better when I was practicing mindfulness every morning for 10 minutes before work.

So, I guess I reluctantly see the logic in what your T is saying. I would however ask them what they suggest you do instead of looking for reassurance and distracting I "unhealthy" ways. It doesn't do any good to tell you those things unless they are going to give you the skills to improve things.

I don't think this is a new way of doing therapy. My T has been practicing for about 20 years. He will not let me just talk and vent about my day or week. He always insists that we be productive and work on improving my life using proven techniques.

Therapy is so strange and unnatural to begin with that I can't imagine what I would consider to be more strange in terms of what those people do at clients. Sometimes I think they just sit around and come up with crap to see if clients will buy it.

Wtf though does distracting even mean? I mean the way I distract myself is by watching TV for an hour to unwind after a stressful anxiety provoking day at work. And when the show is over I feel a lot better. I literally do not get this at all. I need to discuss this with her further. I wonder if she just doesn’t fully know who I am yet after just 3 sessions. She also said some of the things I do are just pep talks. Weird.

What I do to help me with my stress and anxiety is to take naps. I am getting better at this. Before , ie a couple months ago my naps lasted 2 hrs. Now I feel refreshed form 90 mins resting. I figure I cope my withdrawing . Or to put it more positively min vacations. I do fee refreshed and much better at coping when I wake. I do think in retrospect naps help me cope. Everybody copes differently with anxiety and stress. The question to me is how effective, how healthy is the coping. I do realize I could get more done if it weren't for my naps. I think Omer asked a very good question What does she suggest to help with being anxious.?

Maybe the ultimate goal is to work through the anxiety. Both my Ts have encouraged d iu attraction or whatever it takes to get through whatever is happening.

Swear your T and my T must have read the same book haha. My T says the exact same thing about building tolerance for discomfort, stop avoiding and stuffing down my feelings, stop seeking reassurance etc. I had to laugh at myself because I was indeed thinking "I HATE sitting with difficult feelings! I HATE when T is right but she's right!"

No, it's not strange but a particular school of thought based on self-support.

It is a fallacy (and rather ludicrous) to view Ts as sorcerers or voodoo master who 'do things at' clients - who merely sit there passively. The client is in control and the T merely guides.

Looking for distractions or for someone else to 'make it better' is not empowering and, in the long run, no help to you. The key to one's betterment is in one's hands. It seems this is what your T is driving at i.e. don't look outside of yourself.

It could be ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

I agree with everyone here.

I think the idea is to use internal resources rather than relying on external resources.

Tolerance does strengthen over time.

All I know is I refuse to talk about my Xanax with her. Because of course she’ll assume I’m taking it to “avoid” or “distract” from what I’m feeling. And if that gets back to the doctor who I see who she works with I will most likely not be prescribed it anymore when it actually really helps me. I have to be careful with this therapist.

I think that anything that makes you laugh is a good distraction. Here is a funny skit about a T:
YouTube

You should be able to talk about anything. Have you ever had a T that you feel like you can talk about anything you like with? My POV is that their job is to be understanding.

A while back, I was going through a period of pretty extreme anxiety and I still don't know exactly what made it flare up. At an appointment one day, I asked for some water because I knew it would help me to relax a little if I could just sip on something. I mentioned that it helped me feel better and my therapist said something like, "Yeah, I can see that you're using it as a self-soothing method." He said it in such a way that made it sound like he caught me doing something and was on to me. It made me feel self-conscious and I never did that again. I still don't see what the big deal is if we use a coping mechanism like that. It was either that or continue to let my heart race and thoughts run out of control until I probably would have stormed out of the room.

I understand that we should work on being in the moment and not allowing our anxiety and fears to rule us, but a simple external coping strategy only helps me to do that. If I can relax my body a bit then I can relax my mental state.

The page on thinking about thinking comes from cognitive therapy and it involves examining your own thoughts to look for what could be causing you to misrepresent situations which in turn could make you anxious. So - as you noted you can 'jump to conclusions' or 'catastrophe'. What does that mean? It means that your thoughts are making a HORRIFYING thing of landing up in a bad area on a road trip. Would it be such a horrifying thing? Well it raises the chances of seeing some crime - or somehow being a victim of crime. It doesn't make it LIKELY you will be a victim of a crime - it only makes it a bit more possible. So really, your thoughts are giving you an incorrect representation of things. In such a situation you could turn to another passenger and ask them for reassurance (which is not bad) but it would be better for YOU to be able to see the problem in your own thoughts and to self-correct. If you can learn to self-correct then you can eventually change your own thinking and then you have solved the problem at its root.