The Emotionary No. 12 Relieved

Relieved

[ri-leev-d] adjective

Relieved is like a whistling kettle, just turned off the boil. Released from boiling toil, the waters settle. Whistle whittles down to steamy whisper. So much potential now. What for these waters now?

Go warm a bath, defrost a path. A steaming cup of tea might be most fitting.

CBT Application: Relief is often a felt experience after a period of high anxiety. It’s always a nice feeling but in CBT, we want to make sure that relief doesn’t come through the use of ‘Safety Behaviours’. We can know if safety behaviours are present if we can credit the feeling of relief to a specific behaviour that we’ve been doing (e.g. having that extra glass of wine to ‘take the edge’ off or our day) or avoidance pattern (e.g. choosing not to go to the party because we don’t know many people there).

• Practise: Next time you feel relief, ask yourself: Did the 'worrisome thing' not happen because I spent time worrying about it, or would it have turned out fine anyway?

• Sometimes we can get caught up in our worries and develop a belief that by worrying about the situation until we feel a sense of relief, that it was our worry that prevented the bad thing from happening. This can be the case but often, worrying ‘bogs’ us down and leaves us feeling exhausted. If we can change the focus of attention from our worry onto something else, we will often find that the worrisome event never occurred anyway, showing us that our worry was not really helping the situation. This is easier said than done, so if you need help with this, get in touch to discuss how CBT can help you to manage worry, anxiety or other difficult thoughts.

• Contact Simon by emailing: simon@avoncbt.com