Baby Steps- From guest blogger Linda Hoenigsberg

One of my favorite movies of all time is “What About Bob,” directed by Frank Oz and starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss.  It came out in 1991, which means almost twenty years had passed between my first panic attack, and the agoraphobia and many single phobias that developed soon after.  I had had lots of time to practice overcoming my fears.  And, a lot of time to look back and find the whole thing just a little bit funny.

So, I could laugh along with the best of them when Bob had a hard time getting on an elevator or a bus, or living without his therapist for a month.  But I remember those feelings myself, and they weren’t funny at all at the time.  Fear is a hard taskmaster.  It tortures its victim and makes life feel like something you just want to get over with.

The type of therapy I was enduring at that time in my life was less than helpful.  In fact, I dare say it was downright harmful.  I thought that my first panic attack was something that rocketed down from somewhere “up there somewhere” and smacked me upside the head.  I was never told anything about the physiology of anxiety, or how my own thoughts continued to perpetuate it.  As a matter of fact, the words anxiety, or panic, never came up in any of our sessions.  As we continued to delve into my childhood past, one that was filled with neglect, trauma, and abandonment issues, I continued to get worse.  I developed agoraphobia (another word that was never mentioned) and lost my ability to drive, shop, get gas in my car, take an elevator, have a job.  My world got narrower and narrower, and all the while I thought I was the only one on the planet to have these feelings.  I thought I was going insane, a very, scary thought indeed.

One day, about three years into this nightmare, I went to the library (taking my significant other with me, of course…I couldn’t go anywhere alone!).  I was perusing the psychology self-help section and came upon a little paperback book titled “Hope and Help for Your Nerves,” by Dr. Claire Weekes.  “What a silly title for a book,” I thought.  But I took it home and read it from cover to cover in a matter of hours.  I couldn’t put that book down.  It was like reading my autobiography.  Dr. Weekes described what I was enduring as if she were in my body and brain looking out.  It was my first moment of clarity in three straight years of weekly therapy…from a little paperback book from the library.  Ugh.  She also wrote a book titled “Agoraphobia,” and I devoured that one in a single reading as well.  To this day I believe that those two books were the catalyst for all my improvement from that point on. 

I’m a therapist myself now.  I treat people who are experiencing those same feelings of fear, developing phobias, and who have dependency issues like Bob and I had.  I was talking with a client who was gaining some insight into his own feelings of dependency.  “I want to get over this and become able to do things on my own, move away from my parents, go to college.  But how does this happen?” he asked.  “Baby steps,” was my answer.  And for a few seconds I thought of Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) and his new book of the same title.  And I thought of Bob saying, “baby step into the elevator.”  And I thought, Yep! That’s the key!  I really think it’s important to accept where we are with all our feelings of dread and give ourselves permission to take two baby steps forward and one baby step back, over and over if we have to.  And be proud, because feeling the fear and doing it anyway is a very brave thing indeed.

Please stay in touch with Linda:

Visit her memoir blog 
www.lindalochridge.com

Website
www.lindahoenigsberg.com

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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/truth-be-told-lucinda-bassett/1113012231



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