Rockford Day 2 Treatment Summary

7/23/2024

Day 2 summary at Rockford at the Orchards:
-9:30 a.m. start time allowed me to give the girls a walk and ride again today.
-Arrived 10 minutes early and entered at the correct entry point.
-Open discussion about the goals that we set for the previous day. My main goal was to practice proper breathing. Told the group that my first attempt failed because I was too anxious and found that in that state I grind my teeth and barely breathe at all. (15-20 seconds between breaths). The 2nd attempt was successful and done while casually walking around the block. No one was surprised about my breathing cadence when anxious.
-Watched a Netflix video of Brene Brown's "Call to Courage" packed full of content but my main take-away was when something happens that triggers strong emotions, we often immediately create a story to make sense of what happened. These stories are often one-sided worst-case scenarios, and they seldom contain the full truth. Yeah, this is me.
-Learned coping mechanisms in the form of TIPP. It stands for temperature (splash cold water in your face), intense exercise (drop down and do 10 pushups), paced breathing (longer exhale than inhale), and progressive muscle relaxation (make a fist, squeeze hard, hold 5-seconds, release). TIPP skills are a set of distress tolerance techniques that can help people regulate their emotions and manage difficult situations.
Key takeaway from day 2
Making up stories in my head as a result of something that happens to trigger emotions must be fended off by a coping mechanism to introduce logical thinking.
Highlight
While eating lunch one of the younger participants had the courage to approach me and ask if he could sit with me. He was intrigued by my response of ultrarunning when asked by the facilitator on day one to name something unique about myself. He has similar goals and started to ask questions while we ate. As we talked we found that we graduated from the same high school 36 years apart. We also discovered we have similar challenges that have brought us to therapy. In less than 5-minutes of talking he managed to break down some pretty hefty walls I built to protect myself from social anxiety. I spoke more in the session after lunch than I had previously.
Goal
Schedule an appointment with an external psychiatrist for aftercare treatment and medicine.
Concerns:
None
Response
After 10 hours of therapy and two doses of medication, I feel more emotionally balanced than ever. Still work to do but I've definitely turned a corner.


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