Talk:Casadastraphobia/@comment-178.220.202.128-20181227230324/@comment-24.168.22.143-20190102035138

Beating this phobia for me was a multistep process, but I did eventually beat it. Like you I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also panic disorder and, most importantly, bipolar disorder. Getting over casadastraphobia required that I first fixed the 'big' issues, before I was ready to address the specific issue. It is thought that phobias, in general, are misplaced cues by our brains. We feel anxious for biochemical reasons, but our brain searches for a psychological reason. The result, it's thought, is that it assigns the anxiety to a specific trigger, and, in doing so, makes the trigger out to seem like a bigger threat than it actually is, and ruins our risk management. We know, intuitively, that gravity can not just simply start to work in a completely different fashion than it has for the past hundreds of billions of years, and that, if it could, it would have much more drastic and global effects than simply us falling up. But because the brain has attributed an intense experience of anxiety to the 'possibility', our sense of how likely it is to happen (which is so close to zero percent, we should rather expect a plane to fall on our exact position than for it to happen), is warped, and we come to believe, even against our logical assessment, that it is /at least/ a possibility.

What this all means is that, in order to really address this maladjusted phobia, we would first have to deal with the situation, i.e. generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsive disoder, or panic disorder, that's feeding it in the first place. Cut off the fuel, and it's much easier to put out the fire. That's going to require a lot of work. For me, it took medication to bring my anxiety down to a more managable level, and therapy to give me the tools to address it, but more importantly, it took a lot of homework -- there's not magical pill for anxiety, it takes work, and realistic goals, and continual, incremental progress. What I found, after a few years, was that my anxiety, in general, had become much more managable, and that I had become an expert on my own mental health. This empowered me to do something about my casadastraphobia. And what I did was exposure therapy.

I brought myself to deal with it in small, and increasingly potent doses. I started off by bringing a heavy bag to put on my chest and stomach, while I lay in a nearby field with my eyes closed. Eventually, I opened my eyes for a second, then a few seconds, and then many seconds. Next I replaced my bag with something lighter, and then something even lighter, and eventually just my phone. Then I had nothing on my chest, but kept my eyes closed. And then I opened my eyes with nothing on my chest, but had my heavy bag next to me in case I felt like I couldn't do it. And then I practiced keeping them open a greater and greater amount of time, and eventually without my bag. See, what I was doing was, I was training my brain to understand that my fear was unfounded, but I did it in a way that wasn't self-traumatizing. I didn't demand of myself that I be immediately be cured. I retaught myself to trust in the fundamental laws of our universe as they have always existed, and relearned how to do proper risk assessment.

As you can see, it is certainly a process. It's not quick, and it's not easy, but it is completely doable with time and effort. If there's more going on than just your anxiety (like there was for me with bipolar disorder), you may have to address that first. Other disorders, including physical one, can be fuel for anxiety. The psychosis that bipolar disoder can cause can be a huge source of anxiety anfd beliefs in the possibility of the unnatural. Stress from painful conditions can also feed anxiety. Unaddressed sources of life stress can cause anxiety. These need to be dealt with appropriately, and in a sensible order, which is one of the great benefits of therapy -- to help you establish goals, a plan, and tools to accomplish these necessary incremental steps. Never give up on the possibility of being well. Everyone is different, and so are their situations, but as long as you /do/ have the resources to make things better a little at a time, put your faith in the fact that you /can/ use them, and don't give up on them if you don't make progress as quickly as you want. You must always be realistic with yourself, and willing to accept set-backs, but you will always be able to regain lost ground and catch back up to where you were before. You just have to not give up.