Re: Trigger Loops

[Guest guest]

Very interesting. Reminds me of the ACT acceptance concept: "If you're not willing to have it, you've got it." It also reminds me of when I was 12 and had to go home from school with a stomach flu. For months afterwards I became terrified that I'd get sick again, and experience the embarrassment of having to have my Mom pick me up from school and then be nauseous and vomiting all day and into the night. So naturally I'd anxiously scan the feelings from my stomach for any incipient sign of nausea. And that brought on psychosomatic nausea which I could never convince myself *wasn't* the dreaded stomach flu. My pre-teen hypochondria taught me better than any logic course could, that you can't prove a negative. One night when I was fretting about what might be a stomach flu, my Mom, who had heard quite enough by this point, said, "if you get sick, you get sick and if you don't, you don't." This had never occurred to me. I thought something like, "You mean I can let my biggest fear just be there and stay possible and not do anything to try and shut it out? Really?" When I let this sink in and stopped trying to exclude the stomach flu possibility something strange happened: along with the idea that I might get horribly sick to my stomach I began to entertain the idea that I might *not* get horribly sick to my stomach. And soon the idea of getting sick to my stomach stopped being such an obsession, or an obsession at all. Jim