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Your power over anxiety.
Let's talk again about anxiety as it relates to the family. Anxiety is one of the most contagious mental conditions there is. Those of you who have had the opportunity to be around anxious people in your house know how hard it is not to be anxious when they are. It feels bad, huh? It takes experience and repeated attempts to develop the patience to not get anxious yourself so that you can help them deal with their anxiety. Let them own it, and learn to say, "I understand you're anxious - what can I do to help you?" You're not saying "Stop it, you're making me anxious!" Here's a good concept from cognitive therapy: no one makes us feel anything. We choose to feel. Even though we may think that so and-so made me feel angry, if you imagine a child that you don't know saying or doing the same thing, then you might be able to respond differently. Certainly our environment determines the possibilities of how we respond to a situation, but we always choose our responses. We could feel amused instead of angry, or we could feel hurt or nothing at all. The same behavior may elicit different responses, so we do have control over our responses. We can choose to be anxious around someone who is anxious, we can choose to be angry, or we can choose to be calm. It's hard to make these choices because some of our responses have become very routine, but they're still choices. Practice makes these choices possible.

Handling our own anxiety is important, and handling our anger and frustration is also. We can say "I used to get angry at this, but that takes a lot of energy, and I can also choose to sit back and observe. Boy, she's really having a tough time with this. It's too bad she's so anxious." Anger isn't as contagious as anxiety, but it needs to be managed as well because anxiety is one of the normal responses to someone else's anger. Your managing of your anger may be a real help to her managing of her anxiety. She may be able to help you by saying, "please don't get angry at me, I"m already anxious." You will have to hear that through the ears of a support person and not through the ears of the victim of her anxiety.

Sometimes families or individuals have a hard time dealing with the changes that this kind of problem, and this kind of recovery, require. What do you do if you or your family have that kind of difficulty? If you recognize it at home, try to discuss it in a way that won't be blaming, but rather educational. Most families don't have experience going through this kind of change before they do it for real the first time, so learning about it is a big part of coping with the change. If you don't really recognize the problems as related to change, bring in the difficulties and we can talk about them here. That is actually one of the functions of the behavior therapy group; many of the group members have been through this exercise with their families, and they are experts in recognizing the symptoms. It may also be that discussing this problem in a family therapy format would be appropriate, especially if the family is open to that kind of intervention. Some families will respond well to that forum, and other families won't. If open discussions with the family, which are the best place to start dealing with a family problem, are not an option for you, and you either can't wait for the group to get started or don't feel comfortable talking about your family in group, then one other forum would be individual therapy. Your therapist may be able to help you better understand what is going on with you and your family, and to plan some strategies to deal with the changes you're experiencing.

Now all of this leads us to one final question about families: what's normal in a family? I'm thinking about a cartoon I saw recently on this question. Has everyone heard about ACA, Adult Children of Alcoholics? Well, there are now "Adult Children of Everything" groups out there, suggesting that we all grew up in a family that was afflicted by something. This cartoon depicted the annual convention of the Adult Children of Normal Families, and in this whole big auditorium, only two individuals were present. Well, life isn't really that bad. But it would be helpful to define what is normal. Because most of us only grow up with one family (however that's defined), we may grow up feeling, "This is what's normal for families," or sometimes, "Every family is as screwed up as mine." What's normal is that every family has their stuff, their problems, their baggage. It's normal for families to experience conflict. It's normal for families to resist change, as well as to be regularly exposed to change as the family goes through its life cycle stages. It's normal for families to experience chaos from time to time, even frequently, and it's normal to have difficulty dealing with this kind of rapid change (that's really what chaos is: unpredictable, rapid change). What may not be normal is the way that some people and some families learn to deal with these problems. If you have a question about what's normal, always discuss it with someone.

There's a homework assignment I'd like to recommend to those of you with OCD to do for before you go on. We call this the Post-OCD Vision Work Sheet (see Figure 11). Simply take this form and list several, say up to 20, short, positive sentences about you or your life after OCD is no longer an issue for you. By positive I mean "I do..." type sentences rather than "I don't..." or "I'm not..." type. But there's one more thing. Write each sentence on one line only, and write them in the present tense, as if they were already true. These can be sentences about you, your life, your family, whatever you like. Some examples might be "I enjoy my free time," "I am satisfied with my job performance," or "I get along reasonably well with my in-laws." Some of these are going to be more important than others, and some will be more difficult than others. Don't worry too much about that right now. The importance of this assignment is to start thinking about life after OCD, so that when symptoms start to disappear, you will be ready to fill up that time or use that energy for something else. We want to help you avoid experiencing it as a loss or as a sudden hole where the OCD used to be. Bring your completed work sheets with you in two weeks; you won't have to hand them in, but we'll talk about them then.

Chapter 3 continued
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