Baby Steps

     I finally get it. I finally understand the importance of progress in baby steps, in tiny puzzle pieces, when working on recovering from mental health conditions. It all just came together this week, and I actually got to see some of the baby steps pay off. Now, I understand why my therapist stressed over and over that I shouldn't push myself so hard to make leaps and bounds.
     I took one small step this week, and I discussed beginning exposure therapy with my therapist. I put it off, and I put it off for around a month. Every time I thought about it, I pictured this downward spiral that would set me back to the place when I couldn't function at my usual level. I was also terrified of the process. To me, exposure therapy felt like diving headlong into the deep end of the pool even though I can't swim and hoping I didn't drown.
     My therapist never pushed the idea of exposure therapy. She always told me that I would be in control of whenever and however we worked on that part of my treatment. She always also stressed one other thing about exposure therapy: it would happen in baby steps. She wouldn't start exposure therapy with me unless I agreed to go in baby steps, one piece of my OCD puzzle at a time.
     I agreed to go about exposure therapy in baby steps. After I agreed, though, I wondered if it was even possible for me to go at the baby steps pace. I'm sort of an all or nothing, just dive in and force myself to swim even though I might actually drown, sort of person. What if my idea of baby steps is different than my therapists idea of baby steps? (It is...thank goodness.)
     It took a couple of weeks of planning, but by this week, we were ready to try out an exposure exercise during my session. I was so anxious by the morning of my session that I was doing chores just to try to keep myself distracted before I left. By the time I got up to her office and sat on the couch, my palms were sweaty and my chest hurt a little. I dreaded the exposure. (I had been flooded by a previous therapist, so I knew an exposure might put me in the same place.)
     Then she explained how things were going to work. I was literally just looking at something triggering (a list I had made the night before that revolved around my religious obsessions) for 5 minutes at most. I was also only allowed to let my anxiety go up by 2 points from my baseline anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10, which was the limit I set for myself. I also had to tell her the relaxation methods I was going to use before we began. This was my therapist's idea of baby steps.
     I was relieved. My idea of baby steps was that I was actually going to do the thing that triggered my OCD (that I had brought the list for) for the whole hour session. I expected that I would be in sheer panic the whole time, and that I would have to just tough it out because that's what you did during exposure therapy is you toughed it out. I expected that I might have to take an Ativan when I got home. That was my idea of baby steps. (Maybe I really don't understand baby steps after all.)
     My first exposure went well. I had some trouble with intrusive thoughts for the rest of the day, but I knew how to cope with them. (A baby step from the talking part of therapy.) I had slightly elevated anxiety after I got home and realized that I actually had to be alone with my anxious brain, but I also knew how to cope with that, too, because we had worked on that in therapy as well. (Another baby step.) I realized that progress in baby steps might not be a bad thing after all. The baby steps had turned out to be just as important as the big leaps I had pushed myself toward.
     I'll end with this: Learning how to do things in baby steps may be more difficult for some of us (me...definitely me). Progress in baby steps when we're dealing with mental health conditions doesn't mean that we're lazy or not trying hard enough; it means we're trying to hang on to the little bit of progress we may have already made. Sometimes, even just the baby steps feel like we might lose it before we get one foot in front of the other, but as long as we're still going we're doing great. Baby steps are a good thing. The baby steps of progress will come together one day, and make a big picture of improvement that we've accomplished.