Setbacks

While you are working on controlling your panic attacks, phobias, triggers and fears, the road to recovery will include many temporary failures. These are called setbacks. There is an "up and down" aspect to recovery which can be exhausting and frustrating. Sometimes it feels like you are back to square one, to your very worst moments. The most alarming pitfall to recovery can be a temporary return of panic after weeks, months, or even years with no attacks. You can waste a lot of energy trying to figure out why this happens.

Setbacks can be triggered by memories of old fears, new fears and stresses, or even minor changes in your life that threaten your sense of security. There can be a surprisingly quick return of all the old patterns (for example, "all or nothing thinking"). The setback can be small and resolve itself quickly, or it can be a devastating, catastrophic event. People tend to withdraw from setbacks in fear and fall into the trap of trying to fight them. Many revert back to old patterns of avoidance and feelings of hopelessness. It can seem as if you are back where you started with no possibility of any forward movement. In other words, you feel despair, and you feel stuck.

Setbacks are an inevitable part of recovery and should be viewed as opportunities to practice coping with fears in the right way. Some tension or strain has sensitized the nerves once more. Memory stirred by some sound, sight, or smell may have triggered the panic almost reflexively. When taken by surprise in this way, the panic can be experienced very intensely. If you feel depressed or despairing during a setback, it's likely having no anxiety at all is what you mistakenly want and expect. On a thinking level you must realize that having no anxiety at all is not possible or practical. Recovery means being able to cope with your fears, panic and triggers, not obliterate them completely. We will all feel stress and its symptoms as long as we live. A setbacks may seem like a failure, but we can't go forward in recovery without them. This is a hard lesson to learn. But in time, you can learn to go along with a setback, and to get out of one by proceeding in a systematic way - by setting a plan of action and following through.

It is helpful to remind yourself that to be in a setback, you need to have made some progress before. You have learned some skills and achieved some success, and you still have more that needs to be learned. Recovery lies on the other side of a setback, and you will never lose what you have already gained.