Stress Center Peer Support

Hopeful Me - There is a very simple explanation about why you could not move when your husband came in to talk to you while you were napping. You were between a wakeful place and sleep. All you have to do is breathe slowly and say relax and your body does what you want it to do.

This is not an uncommon experience.

You both are way too much in your heads and need to practice observation of your thoughts. Stop identifying with them. Just watch them and learn to not react by bringing yourself back to your breath and focus your attention on that alone. (Your way is much more entertaining, I realize, but it's also a painful way to go about your day.) Just remind yourself that It's just the phobic mind. I do not have to give any of this any energy.

Use your stop sign after your first thought. Then your calm breath. Then get busy in the moment with something constructive. Keep your attention on what you are doing instead of the content of your mind.

You were born phobic and your mind is going to conjur up all kinds of "stuff". That's the nature of the phobic mind. There is no other explanation. Stop scaring yourselves.

Yes, that is a reasonable explanation Boon. And I may be able to relate with you Hopeful Me, for I too experience odd things. Yesterday I had come home from a doctor's appointment and my mom was taking a picture of my brother outside from the back entrence of our house. Now, there is this screen door at the back entrence which never stays open unless somebody holds it open, but as I watched my mom taking pictures of the outside scenary I noticed that that very door was staying open by itself, as if some unseen hand was holding it open. Now, I know it wasn't my mom holding the door open, because she has a stroke, and has use of only one arm. Later on my brother claimed that he might have been the one holding the door open, but I'm still not so sure of that, because there was a point were I was certain that nobody was holding open the door when I came over to the exact spot where my mom was taking pictures. And that very night when my dad came home we tested the screen door and found that it was impossible that it could stay open all on it's own. So you see Hopeful Me, wierd stuff happens to me too.
Josh