my anxiety is going crazy because of where i am sitting in the restaurant with my boyfriend, we usually sit with me on the left him on the right but tonight we’re not. why is this causing me such anxiety that things are not how they always are?
I’m sorry your anxiety was high. Does it feel like the anxiety was coming from a specific fear that something would happen if you sat that way, or did it just feel “wrong?” In ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention therapy for OCD/anxiety) we try to identify the core fear so that we can create exposures that address that fear specifically.
Are you familiar with Just Right OCD? This sounds like it could potentially fall under that!
So from an ERP perspective we would not engage in the "why", instead accept the feeling, I feel anxious and I don't need to "do" anything. I am not in any real danger- it is a false alarm, so I will keep doing what I am doing in spite of how it feels. It can be hard but eventually when you allow yourself to sit in those anxious feelings your brain learns that it was a false alarm and that the feeling will go away on its own.
