Starsparkle, your symptoms and experiences could have been me speaking. 20 years I have struggled, tried various things, some times bit better, sometimes plumbing real depths I didn't think I could survive mentally.
Health paranoias, agoraphobia, yet still having to do school runs, appointments, running a busy home, sometimes managing in a state of utmost fear, sometimes just cancelling and not attempting things, missing out on lots of life...
I am also doing the CBT with Robin Hall. I have been trying it for maybe 5 weeks now and whilst I am not panic free, I know I am fractionally better than I was when I ordered it.
The change in attitude and learned behaviour we are after is not easily won. If it was we and millions of others would not suffer for decades as we do. We haven't chosen to be fearful consciously.
There are tasks I have to force myself to do which I do often fail at carrying out without panic but they are actually what help me most.
The only way I can stop feeling panic about panic is to push on through it.
The other evening I had to drive further out of my comfort zone to pick somebody up. I hate driving. It was dark. I was alone. My breathing had been off all day, as I parked the car I thought I am just going to stop breathing now, I can't get any more breath in. The leg trembling panic crashed in with full force, I didn't know what to do with myself. There was no help to be found. It was my worst nightmare pretty much. And I was trapped, I had to wait there.
It was the best thing that could have happened to me.
I realised how much I think to myself I have waited the panic out now I can go home.
When I hadn't really, hadn't actually had a proper what I call 'life threatening' panic and remained with it, experiencing it in all it's awfulness, and waited it out until I was entirely out the other side.
What I had been doing is having low level panics and managing, as I have enabled myself to do during 20 years, but carrying on and still feeling relief as I neared home. Tricking myself that actually I had been carrying out my CBT.
Either that or when the real biggies hit I just fled and couldn't even begin to wait them out.
My thinking is slowly shifting. You must practise every bit of what Robin says, are you filling in the worksheets? You have to repeat, repeat, repeat, it is practise and repetition that will start to undermine your current thought patterns. We are creatures of habit and you are now trying to shift a very engrained way of being.
Every time you write and analyse your thoughts and achievements and experiences and prove to yourself you are still alive, it erodes the old ways of thinking ever so slightly. It is boring and tedious, it is an effort, I keep forgetting to print more sheets out, I go through so many!M! but it is the methodical way of doing it that will give you results. Sometimes I feel like I am back at school
You WILL get there, the power to change you behaviour and cognition is entirely there in your own mind.
Ask yourself honestly when the last panic was that you had, did you wait with it entirely, did you only leave the situation once you were as calm as you are sitting in your own bed? And if you honestly are doing this, are you then analysing what you are doing and thinking in these situations so to re train your thoughts and learn from each experience how wrong you were?