sidney wrote:
What helped us a lot, is using the ABC-model of anxiety and stress in cognitive therapy.
It's fairly easy to explain, I got my six-year old to understand it.
The model basically shows how, in a certain situation (a) fear and anxiety (c) are induced by what we think (b), not by the actual situation itself. Once you understand that it isn't the situation that is causing distress, but your thoughts and beliefs, it's a matter of rationalising. You need to 'replace' the irrational thoughts by rational ones. This sounds hard, but if you break it all down, it's quite feasable.
You, or better, he himself, just needs to identify exactly when he gets anxious, what it is he thinks at that moment, and how it makes him feel.
So that would look more or less like this:
A- (sound of) airplane
B- the apocalyptic war has begun and we are all going to die
C- I'm scared
Then you question B. In this case, I think you need to focus on probability vs possibility. This can be done by asking, 'what is the evidence for the thought being true?' and 'what is the evidence against this thought being true?'. It is useful to do this in a quite a structured manner and to write it down. Just keep asking questions. there's a lot of online resources to help you ask the right questions. Once you're there, he should try to 'replace' his thoughts about the apocalypse with a rational one that doesn't cause anxiety.
It got my son over his water fobia. He's still scared, but at least he's able to get in the water now. The good thing is, you can use it for anything. The technique offers you a deeper understanding of anxiety, which in itself, reduces it.
It's the socratic method.
11 Mar 2013, 10:35 am
