- Messages
- 724
- Location
- Yorkshire, England
The useful CBT I had for my phobia was what I would class as mostly common-sense, and what most people would try anyway. I had a sort of pick and mix attitude to most of it, and one of the therapists had ME anyway, so she taught me pacing, and was mostly ok.
I guess I got lucky with the less dogmatic approach, and the thing that strikes me the most, is that the 'Fear Avoidance Behaviour' is/was the opposite of what most people with ME have. Part of the struggle was that some of the fear was irrational, and some of it was rational, and it didn't seem, if applied dogmatically, to help the part of the fear that was rational.
As you can imagine, when you have something like a phobia, you do not in anyway fantasize about doing the activity that you fear and you act in ways to avoid it. In ME, most people would happily do the act(s) if they physically could, and I would guess that most at some point mourn the loss of the ability to do so.
It should be pretty easy to do an experiment to test the fear by measuring some basic bodily functions, and in ME there must be people with phobias who would could be tested.
In my case, a simple visualization exercise would be enough to test the theory, and I was also, a few years before ME, deconditioned, and the symptoms then were nothing like the symptoms I have now either.
It would be interesting to see the differences between the success rates for phobia treatment and CBT for ME, because I can't see them being the same at all.
I guess I got lucky with the less dogmatic approach, and the thing that strikes me the most, is that the 'Fear Avoidance Behaviour' is/was the opposite of what most people with ME have. Part of the struggle was that some of the fear was irrational, and some of it was rational, and it didn't seem, if applied dogmatically, to help the part of the fear that was rational.
As you can imagine, when you have something like a phobia, you do not in anyway fantasize about doing the activity that you fear and you act in ways to avoid it. In ME, most people would happily do the act(s) if they physically could, and I would guess that most at some point mourn the loss of the ability to do so.
It should be pretty easy to do an experiment to test the fear by measuring some basic bodily functions, and in ME there must be people with phobias who would could be tested.
In my case, a simple visualization exercise would be enough to test the theory, and I was also, a few years before ME, deconditioned, and the symptoms then were nothing like the symptoms I have now either.
It would be interesting to see the differences between the success rates for phobia treatment and CBT for ME, because I can't see them being the same at all.