Expect to encounter setbacks and be prepared to deal with them. You are bound to feel fresh panic and depression at some stage of your treatment. Just when you think you have conquered crossing a wide street in an agoraphobia program, your next step may fail, leaving you standing at the curb frightened and disappointed. Setbacks can last a minute or weeks. When they occur, you may feel dejected for days: “I thought I had conquered that phobia, that particular street, yet there were those feelings again, preventing me from crossing.”
You must realize that setbacks are part of the whole learning process connected with phobias. Don’t dwell on why you can eat in a restaurant one day and not the next. Accept your bad days and rejoice in the good days. Setbacks are especially likely to happen if for any reason you are unable to practice your exposure tasks for some period of time. If you have to be in bed for a few days because of a cold or flu or some other illness, it will be more difficult to get started again, but perseverance will get you over the hump.
Setbacks are the signals for you to try again until you have conquered the situation where it occurred. Setbacks gradually fade once you no longer avoid the fact that they occurred and tackle them instead: “Next week I’ll cross that wide street—the one that I couldn’t cross this week. I’ll have coffee in that shop on the other side.”
Although setbacks are inevitable, you can learn to cope with them. Don’t be bluffed by any strange new nervous feelings. What will be will be. It is no use being confident on Saturday and being put out on Sunday when panic strikes out of the blue. You have to be ready for it and deal with it, to try, try, and try again until you have reached the stage described by one phobic after treatment: “Yes, I still get the panics from time to time now, but it’s different, you know— now I don’t have to run away from them. I can just experience them and let them pass while I carry on with whatever I happen to be doing at the time.” Recovery lies in meeting precisely those situations you fear; those are the ones you have to master.
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