this understands a piece of exposure therapy yes in a perfect world we'd be able to expose ourselves to the thing and it would go better than we had anticipated and then it would slowly lessen the anxiety about that however for most of us this is the truth that we will go out and because we're so filled with anxiety and stress about it it might not go well we might say something stupid or embarrassing or oh I forgot my mind went blank right therefore the biggest piece of exposure therapy that I want to talk about today
is the buildup before you even do the exposures and that buildup IS when we create and grow and essentially strengthen our resources that means that when we start to feel anxious overwhelmed stressed out we feel that we have something to do we might do a body shake we might put a cold rag on our neck we might have a fidget toy we might call a friend we might go for a walk you know shaking it out dunking our face in cold water there's a ton of different things that we can do we can even do
grounding techniques if those happen to work all of that can help us manage as we feel the anxiety ramping before we get to the point where we're like my mind is blank I can't think straight I'm my Palms are like sweating like crazy I feel like I'm going to faint until our anxiety gets too high we want to stop it before it gets there so a ton of the work in exposure therapy is to build up those resources so that as we imagine ourselves exposing you know ourselves to that situation or thing or person or
whatever as it builds and we feel it build we have something to do an action we can take and that is super empowering and that's what in the end allows us to go out into the world expose ourselves to the to the anxiety producing situations and to manage it
