# Exposure Ideas Thread



## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Ok, so I am now really struggling to find new kinds of stuff do to in my exposure. I am working on a lot more other stuff now, but I still need to keep pressing on with this while the stuff like volunteering and so forth comes through (probably a few weeks away from that yet). Obviously my therapist is still off sick so she isn't there to help (and she hasn't ever really helped with this stuff anyway, annoyingly).

So, *edit, perhaps a better way to find things to expose myself to would be to ask people what _they_ avoid / dislike, and there is a fair chance I will also avoid those things.

So two questions

1. What do you avoid?
2. Can you think of any exposure tasks?


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

Job interviews!! My funnest form of exposure!! Job interviews also include numerous phone screenings. So. much. fun.


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## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

Good on you!


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Thank you 

Yeh, this is the edited version of the thread, the original listed the stuff I had been doing and was asking for ideas in any areas, but wasn't getting anything so I figured that asking for what other people avoided might give me some ideas (as I probably avoid them too).



Holds The Key said:


> Good idea.
> 
> This is an interesting task because [and I'm probably not alone] there are probably things I avoid that I don't really consciously acknowledge that I avoid. Making a list forces me to identify and consider those situations. Anyway, here goes (note: some may sound kind of stupid)...


Yeh, this is probably why this incarnation of the thread won't work either . But thank you for braving up to it, it has given me some ideas.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.a) I rent a house along a busy boulevard and I'm responsible for picking up the garbage and mowing the grass weeds in the 2-meter wide strip between my property line and the road. I avoid doing it during the weekend or weekday rush hours because more people will be _staring _at me during those times.


This could be done by making a note of which times are busiest and progressively doing them at more and more difficult times.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.b) I avoid going downtown to go to museums, markets, libraries, and galleries that I'd enjoy seeing. The anxiety of being _in _those places isn't too bad. It's the thought of finding parking (not much available / low-cost parking there), negotiating the pedestrian-filled streets, and entering any buildings that gives me the most anxiety. Because those preliminary tasks are needed to get to the part that I like (being in the building), it makes the whole outing a lot less appealing.


Ah, I honestly hadn't considered this, well @Sheska always reminds me of stuff like this, but I really should see if there are any art galleries or libraries or something nearby I could go to.

I guess in your case, could some kind of planning be done, so scope out in advance the parking situation, plan out the least busy times, and so forth. I do know what you mean re parking and stuff actually, its all kinda uncertain, and uncertainty means anxiety. I may need to look further afield in order to increase uncertainty and raise up the anxiety again.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.c) The nicer city parks. I don't mind going with someone else, but I feel really out of place going to them on my own unless I'm bicycling.


Maybe there are some gardens or something I could go to 



Holds The Key said:


> 1.d) Going to any shop where the customer service people work for commission-bolstered wages.


Nice. Resisting high pressured sales people = assertiveness training. Interesting possibilities here.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.e) Visiting family friends (older people who would appreciate the visit even though we're not close).


Doable for you perhaps (with difficulty), my family has no friends though 



Holds The Key said:


> 1.f) Checking in with old friend-type acquaintances to see how they are doing or to suggest we get together for coffee.


Crap, I could totally do that with the chap I met at the party the other day, that would be really ****ing awkward tho. Maybe organising some kind of pub visit though somewhere with a few people might be a good plan.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.g) Telling my last employer / manager how much I loved working for them - that years later, I still look back to that job and working for them with a lot of fondness.


Interesting, would it matter which medium? Could you write them a letter to let them know, that might be a nice touch and I think its better to do that rather than not at all 



Holds The Key said:


> 1.h) Going to the lake. Sometimes I will go, but generally I do a lot of avoiding first. I balk at going due to the massive increase in tourism in the area during the past ten years. It's resulted in too many loud, annoying people destroying the peaceful tranquility of a day at the lake with their power-boats and motorized water-crafts. And it's impossible to get anywhere within a reasonable amount of time with increased amount of the RVs on the highway (who don't allow faster vehicles to pass them).


I sense irritation more than avoidance (justifiably so). Actually reminds me of an episode of baywatch where there were lots of hoons on jetski's which David Hasslehoff hated with a passion.



Holds The Key said:


> 1.i) I avoid doing my classwork. It was a mistake trying to take online classes for two difficult-for-me subjects; I should have arranged to take them on campus. Just thinking about them fills me with dread, so when I sit down to work, it can take me a long time (30-90 minutes) to calm down enough to get anything accomplished.


I wonder if there is any way this can be broken down into small chunks. Small chunks of tasks don't tend to carry the _weight_ of the whole, and if you can split them up then its harder to avoid as it's just "5 minutes of x".



Holds The Key said:


> 1.j) I avoid my neighbour as much as possible because she's nuts (more nuts than me). I have to be extra assertive with her and, even then, she's still pesters me. I'm afraid that my level of assertiveness will need to expand into aggressive territory in order for her to understand that I don't want her attention. I hate being forced to be aggressive just to get a small amount of respect. But maybe people who are aggressive themselves (like she is) only understand others when they are aggressive too.


Yeh, I don't know how you should handle that one tbh. Damn unfortunate you got such a neighbour . I would say keep up the assertiveness (and perhaps try to look on it as an opportunity to practice assertiveness, rather than a thing in itself, I know that is stretching it a bit though, but if she won't go away even if you are assertive, then its like an assertiveness training dummy lol).



Holds The Key said:


> 2. I don't know. I will have to think about it more.


Thank you.

The areas I most struggle with are:

1. Phone calls
2. Conversations (being in situations where conversations would spontaneously arise would be great)

Thank you for your detailed and useful response though, that gives me some ideas, I will put them in my file .


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Actually, @Holds The Key if I can find museums / galleries and so forth, then there are also phone calls to those places I can do beforehand to inquire about opening times and other bull**** questions


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

@Holds The Key nah don't worry re the other thread. I might have been grumpy . Those kinds of parties are always tricky and leave me feeling a bit unhappy.

Yeh, I mean I don't even know if we have galleries and such nearby, maybe a little further afield, and its stuff I haven't done before so yeh, interesting and anxiety inducing.

Atm, I just hope my therapist will be available this week, this will be week 5 without having seen her, a break like this isn't good and I am struggling to find motivation atm.

My friend recently forced me to watch that ep of Baywatch


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

@Holds The Key yeh, the friend I was blanking is one who made constant passive aggressive comments. I wouldn't even (for example) have been able to wear a bracelet in front of him without him saying "what the **** is that on your wrist?" or similar. With all the changes I am going through atm I just didn't want someone like that poking away at me, and it wasn't even malicious in his case, its just he has that kind of streak of judgement that is automatic. It would be couched as a "joke", and its just too much. I would go round there and be just worrying and waiting for a comment, so, nah.

Generally speaking though, I will try to keep a friendship going, to some degree.

Oh motivation, its just difficult doing the exposures because I don't have a clear plan about what to do. In the early stages I knew exactly what I was doing exposure wise, I got up, went out and did it. Now I am low on tasks, and I can't find the progression to get to the more difficult ones, and the steps to take me where I want to be, I don't know what I am doing each day, so its not very motivating. I am not getting a sense of achievement because the exposure isn't necessarily progressing me towards my goals. I am stuck around the "can make slightly **** conversation" level, and have been for a while.

Days like today (with the weird woman's reaction to the time) threatens to put me back too, I hypothesised that I might run into a difficult member of the public, but I didn't think I would run into one so soon (1/5 on this task). I mean she showed me the time, but the daggers she was shooting me.

I know I am doing this task specifically now for a while though now, so there is that .

1. I need to know whether it was the way I asked that caused the reaction (it might have been)
2. I need to know what % of people will respond negatively
3. I need to be able to tolerate such negative responses
4. It is more difficult now, a proper challenge to go back in and do it, so I want to do it.


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## 629753 (Apr 7, 2015)

~Exposure therapy cant cure your SA. Only disbelieving thoughts can


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## 629753 (Apr 7, 2015)

Holds The Key said:


> Having a bad day?


Hey, life will continue to be as ****ty if you keep believing thoughts. Dont believe me, look at yourself, has life really changed?


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

impedido10 said:


> ~Exposure therapy cant cure your SA. Only disbelieving thoughts can





impedido10 said:


> Hey, life will continue to be as ****ty if you keep believing thoughts. Dont believe me, look at yourself, has life really changed?


I have warned you about this before. Take this stuff somewhere else. Seriously, this is a thread where I am asking for help and support I don't need you popping up and telling me the therapy which has proven amazingly effective for me is bull****. Seriously, what is it with you?


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

@Holds The Key thanks for the responses  - will reply properly in a bit, I need to wash away the weird folate induced rage with massive amounts of cake :b


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

Holds The Key said:


> @splendidbob
> I thought it might be _that _friend, but I didn't want to assume it was for sure. Yeah, they need you far more than you need them. By making those passive aggressive comments and judgments, they are trying to maintain a hierarchy within your friendship where they feel like they're on top. It's not you though; it's just they way they approach Life in general: everything is about judgment, control, and domination. Their job is all about that too. And there are people in their life whom they willingly allow to have control over them (e.g. employer, spouse, other coworkers who are nastier).
> So, no matter what you do, that friend is always going to judge and attempt to control you through shaming. People like that are not fun to be around. They don't typically have authentic friendships with anyone.
> 
> ...


 Yeh, pretty much. Honestly I am fine without him in my life, the only awkwardness was from those kinds of events, which are rare. My feeling is it's just too risky to have him as a friend any more, I don't need that kind of undermining influence. The bad thing is I changed my mind at christmas, spoke to him, then just ended up blanking him, which wasn't very assertive (I basically had already done the assertive bit, so it was weird). Ho hum though.



Holds The Key said:


> Motivation:
> 
> Oh yeah, I've been struggling with motivation in an important area of my life at the moment, so I understand how much it sucks not being able to generate it fairly easily. Doing those small steps, successfully builds confidence which enhances the feeling of wanting to continue&#8230; but you have to up the ante in order for the pleasure to come from those small successes. Then it becomes a matter of choosing small tasks that will give you those opportunities to create a successful situation. Okay&#8230;
> 
> ...


I guess the difficulty here is that all I have to ask people, and all I ask them basically is:

1. Excuse me, have you got the time
2. How has your day been
3. Has it been busy today
4. Blah blah the weather

I don't have the stuff in the conversation bank to do conversations properly. I can active listen and ask questions, but I just don't seem to have the repertoire of conversation topics and general subjects, and ways to enter and exit from conversations gracefully. It's very clumsy for me.



Holds The Key said:


> Re: Weird woman's reaction to the time
> 
> 1. You probably did nothing to deserve that reaction. There are many, _many _reasons why she was reacting that way and all of them have nothing to do with you. Even if you did something that was the cause for her reaction-really, was it necessary for her to react that way?_ Nooooo!_ You only ask for the time, which is socially acceptable.


Deserve no, but I probably could have mitigated it, as my body language wasn't as good as it could have been. I have to be quite careful as I am a large, slightly intimidating looking guy and if I don't overplay the friendliness and smiling (which I forget sometimes) I probably come off as aggressive. That isn't to say I deserve frostiness, it's just it probably is within my control to mitigate it.



Holds The Key said:


> 2. Nope, you don't need to know that percentage of how many people will potentially respond negatively. :b It _will _happen - you can guarantee yourself you'll meet those people. Some people are going to think you're lovely. Some people will barely take note of your interaction with them. Some people are going to react negatively. It could be their personality or they could just be having a bad day&#8230; doesn't matter. Most people are going to be decent and, once in a while, you get one that's not. (see video below)


Oh, I know, that's more to determine the difficulty of the task . A difficult task carries more probability of grumpy reactions.



Holds The Key said:


> 3.I guess if you were to approach people who look rather grumpy, then you could build up your tolerance for negative body language and maybe even negative conversations. It might help to have a friend or family member with you, in case the interaction is unpleasant---the friend / family member can remind you that you didn't deserve the stranger's crankiness.


No friends / family members to do this with, they all think its silly (would be terrified themselves to do it).



Holds The Key said:


> 4.I think that purposefully approaching cranky people could be a bit fun&#8230; because you're _expecting _a bad reaction and might actually get a good one. If looking at it as a source of entertainment, it might be a bit more motivating to give it a go, if only just to see what happens (when you poke a bear). I'm not trying to make light of your anxiety here, of course, because approaching strangers can be really difficult sometimes (or all of the time) and I experience that anxiety too. But this does kind of sound like it has the potential to be comical.


Yeh, certainly, there isn't anything inherently problematic purposefully trying to get grumpy reactions, its just a very difficult task. The mere threat of a bad reaction raises the task from a 3/10 to a 7 probably now. I have since the start realised that peoples reactions aren't usually to do with me (the time I saw one grumpy staff member, and then he was even grumpier with someone else, and was super friendly with me the next day lol). But this one was different, the first time there was _clear_ hostility directed at me.



Holds The Key said:


> One more thing...
> 
> I've been watching this television program for the past few days. It's about High Court Bailiffs who show up, unannounced, at people's doorstep to seize their property or to evict them from their home. The bailiffs (especially the older gentlemen, Paul and Steve) show a tremendous amount of assertiveness, calm, and compassion, all while dealing with people who are probably having one of the worst days of their life---which makes the situation extremely emotional and volatile. Talk about approaching "grumpy people"! It's interesting to watch, in an inspiring way (for someone who fears potentially volatile interactions, like me).
> 
> ...


Heh, they handle it well, no doubt . Interesting.


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## 629753 (Apr 7, 2015)

splendidbob said:


> I have warned you about this before. Take this stuff somewhere else. Seriously, this is a thread where I am asking for help and support I don't need you popping up and telling me the therapy which has proven amazingly effective for me is bull****. Seriously, what is it with you?


Exposure therapy wont get rid of ur Sa, just saying


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

@impedido10 ok mate, as you seem to want to continue annoying me, it's time to put your money where your mouth is.

As you don't have any anxiety any more you are going to make a video of yourself singing a song and post it up in the vids thread. You won't struggle with this as you have no anxiety. You can totally override any anxiety with your Noah method.

Deal?


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## 629753 (Apr 7, 2015)

splendidbob said:


> @impedido10 ok mate, as you seem to want to continue annoying me, it's time to put your money where your mouth is.
> 
> As you don't have any anxiety any more you are going to make a video of yourself singing a song and post it up in the vids thread. You won't struggle with this as you have no anxiety. You can totally override any anxiety with your Noah method.
> 
> Deal?


I dont have a videocam soo i cant. I posted a lot of my rap songs on the internet doe


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

impedido10 said:


> I dont have a videocam soo i cant. I posted a lot of my rap songs on the internet doe


You don't have a phone with a camera on? Can you borrow one from a friend for it (I assume you have lots of friends, you no longer have anxiety, some of them must have phones).

You don't know anyone with a camera or a means of recording yourself?


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## 629753 (Apr 7, 2015)

splendidbob said:


> You don't have a phone with a camera on? Can you borrow one from a friend for it (I assume you have lots of friends, you no longer have anxiety, some of them must have phones).
> 
> You don't know anyone with a camera or a means of recording yourself?


I dont have to prove anything. Believe it or not, its your choice. Just saying its possible to lose SA


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

impedido10 said:


> I dont have to prove anything. Believe it or not, its your choice. Just saying its possible to lose SA


Well you kinda do, since you have come into my thread where I am asking for help and support, and are dismissing the therapy that has helped me make _huge strides_ in my anxiety (and its the therapy with scientific backing too, let's not forget).

It's like you just wandered into a hospital with some people doing rehab work from a car crash and opened the door and shouted in "yeh, you guys, that won't work" and then left :lol. Honestly, its pretty disgusting behaviour, and it's just so that you can justify your own avoidance. I don't mind you being avoidant, that is your business, but when you start actively disrupting other peoples attempts to make themselves better that I do mind.

So yeh, ultimately, if you are going to do this you _do_ have to prove yourself. You say exposure therapy doesn't work, and your magical Noah method does. So you have been challenged, you have two choices, either put up, or shut up.


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## nonhuman (Aug 22, 2016)

Don't feed the troll. This is a nice thread, so I keep on posting.

It would be a big exposure for me to randomly talk to a woman on the street. I did that in the past and I really sucked at it, but now that I remember how frightful this thought is, I guess I still have to do it again, right?


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## Cassoulet94 (Apr 3, 2014)

splendidbob said:


> impedido10 said:
> 
> 
> > I dont have to prove anything. Believe it or not, its your choice. Just saying its possible to lose SA
> ...


Hey,

I have no idea what is the Noah method is and I don't really give a ****. However it's true that exposure is supposed to be paired with cognitive work to have maximum efficiency, so yeah basically working on thoughts, as in CBT. You just practise exposure or do you also try to recondition yourself ? Not discussing the releavance of what you are doing, I'm just interested since you say you make progress while I have found that in my case exposure alone is not really enough.


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## SplendidBob (May 28, 2014)

nonhuman said:


> Don't feed the troll. This is a nice thread, so I keep on posting.
> 
> It would be a big exposure for me to randomly talk to a woman on the street. I did that in the past and I really sucked at it, but now that I remember how frightful this thought is, I guess I still have to do it again, right?


Oh yeh, its a tough exposure though. It might be easier to work up to it and you need to do it with regularity. I have a similar set of goals, haven't really made it past the first stage atm, but I am doing:

1. Asking people for the time
2. Asking women for the time
3. Smiling and saying hi to women

3. I can't do on the street though (have done this at the gym), but perhaps it's an idea. Not sure quite how you graduate to talking to women randomly, but asking them for the time, or something else would certainly serve as an opening.

Heh, I just realised I have actually done that by accident when I asked for the time then commented and had a small convo on her unusual watch. So perhaps that might be a useful intermediary. Ask for the time then add a positive comment / ask about something.

The idea though is to do something that isn't too stressful and do it a lot then gradually increase the intensity. I do a few daily, but its probably more efficacious to just spam the **** out of it (like I did on the day of asking). Tougher though.

Oh I should add, another reason to start small here is so you get used to promoting positive and friendly body language (this is much harder to do if you are doing harder tasks straight away, because you are more nervous and you forget). You don't want negative reactions on these tasks (unless you are purposefully trying to elicit them, in which case you do ).



Cassoulet94 said:


> Hey,
> 
> I have no idea what is the Noah method is and I don't really give a ****. However it's true that exposure is supposed to be paired with cognitive work to have maximum efficiency, so yeah basically working on thoughts, as in CBT. You just practise exposure or do you also try to recondition yourself ? Not discussing the releavance of what you are doing, I'm just interested since you say you make progress while I have found that in my case exposure alone is not really enough.


Thought challenging is dangerous for me in general since it is too close to performing compulsions in pure O OCD, so I won't purposefully use it. I probably do do it sometimes though (I definitely do it post exposure automatically to cut down that rumination) Yeh most likely efficacy could be improved with it. I should say I don't just do exposure therapy, I am doing talk therapy with a psychologist too.

I have absolutely no problem with thought challenging in though. Noah _isn't_ offering CBT though, he is a marketeer *******ising CBT into a "no effort" form so he can get YT subs and sell his ebook. I just don't like people trying to promote their own therapies (or other therapies) that have no established legitimate psychological credibility, and I especially don't like it when they try to do it by dismissing those therapies that do.


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