Saturday, December 4, 2010

Therapy - Legs

Since I've not been making any real progress getting back on the subway by myself and therefore haven't had much to post about from an anxiety stand point I've decided to post about my weekly therapy sessions. My hope is that having this journal of therapy will help me in the future but also that posting about my weekly sessions will perhaps help to trigger more things to talk to my therapist about in the next session.

This week I spoke mostly about a set of recurring dreams I've had where my legs are not functioning completely. The dreams occur in one of three versions. The first version is where my legs are basically paralyzed and I am forced to move myself about with my arms - either by dragging my legs as I crawl with my arms or by using some kind of wheeled device that I push / move with my arms. The second version of the dreams I am on a bicycle. The pedals lock so that I can not push them to move the bicycle and I'm essentially stuck in place. The third set of dreams take place when I am driving a car - always a manual transmission - and the seat is pushed way forward in the car so that my knees are practically in my chest and moving my legs to push the clutch or break and gas is very difficult.

My therapist believes that my anxiety - specifically the current subway anxiety as well as previous elevator related anxiety - stems from not just a fear of being stuck but a fear of being unable to escape. In an elevator or subway, were I to become stuck, my legs would be figuratively useless as there would be no where for me to go. However, my therapist believes that I have a fear of being in danger and being unable to get myself to safety.

I find this all very interesting as there has not been (at least as far as I can remember) a time in my life when I was stuck in a dangerous situation in which I could not get myself to safety. In fact, there has been no real time in my life when I was in any kind of siginficatant danger.