#graded exposure

[rickblosser]

Break Comfort Zone: Steps for Personal Growth

Break comfort zone with graded exposure, weekly reps, and simple tracking to build confidence and real personal growth.

[reachingforaspark]

hello, just wanted to drop in and tell you that i just read graded exposure! so so in love w the way you write eddie (how he's so obviously moments away from breaking, putting himself together through sheer force of will bc the idea that he's allowed to be any other way is unthinkable) and his perpetual tension w Everything esp w buck, so incredibly enamoured by the way you portray chris and buck's relationship as independent from where they stand w eddie. i just [clenches fist] they love each other so damn much. divorced parents coded i'm obsessed

Oh my goodness!! Thank you so much, you've totally made my day💕

I loved writing Eddie in this story, at the point he was at the end of 5A, I think I entered a bit of a fugue state and wrote this chapter in 24hrs because I just had this urgency to express some of that overwhelming tension and weight he was experiencing. It is so hard to believe where he was at this time last season to this season. Seeing him free himself from some of that expectation, acknowledge his trauma to first to himself and then more freely to his friends and family, it makes me want to cry all the time!!

And the divorced dad's era was definitely a central vibe of this story! I loved the way the show went in 5b, but gosh I had fun planning out and working through Eddie and Buck negotiating their situation.

Thank you so much for reading it, even though it is incomplete and has remained that way for a long time.

I do have some ~10,000 words from the next two chapters, so if you're interested here's a scene from later on in the story below the cut!

“Yeah, Dad, go have some fun!” Chris, ever Carla’s little mimic, pipes in. “Carla and I need to get my homework done.”

“In my own home!” Eddie says, but goes to change his shirt.

He shoots Buck a quick text, asking if he’s free to grab a drink. It’s fine, it’s fine. They’ve never had a problem before that couldn’t be worked out over a beer or two.

“Go,” Carla shoos at him again, “say hi to Buck for me.”

He’s in the car already when Buck replies.

Sorry, on a 24.

Eddie’s not sure what is more telling, the use of punctuation or lack of emojis, or the fact that Buck hasn’t even suggested an alternative evening, like tomorrow when he’s off shift. Well, it’s not that Eddie can go back inside now. Too many questions, or a knowing look from Carla. He contemplates for a moment. If Buck was on shift, Bobby was probably on shift, Hen too. He starts the car, resolved to go… somewhere, and pulls onto the street and starts driving.

Eddie hadn’t even known Buck was working today.

Eddie finds himself sitting in a room with a tray of glass beads in front of him. One of the more bewildering turns of his life in recent months, and there have been a few more curveballs lately for sure.

There’s a woman in the corner braiding cloth into a rug, another knitting a pot holder. There’s some wool thing happening at the end of the table he can’t even guess at, fluff spread about the place. The woman sitting beside Pepa has a scrap booking toolbox packed so tightly and efficiently it puts his old med kit to shame.

Unfortunately for Eddie, Pepa’s community craft group are as serious about their gossip as they are their crafts.

“Eddie,” A woman whose name he possibly was given earlier asks, “how is your new job going?”

He gives Pepa the side eye as he responds. She raises an eyebrow back, like, you crashed my evening, remember?

“And Christopher, any new pictures?”

He does, in fact, have pictures. Buck sent through some from when he took Chris to the library yesterday, Chris sitting in a beanbag, Chris scanning the mountain of books to be brought home, Chris in the back of the Jeep, new book already cracked open in his lap. They got out far too many for him to get through in the next month, not that Buck ever says no.

“Did Buck take him to the library?” Pepa asks.

“Ah, Buck.” The ladies around the table say Buck’s name in unison and cross themselves.

It’s a little creepy. Pepa clocks his reaction to that too. He concentrates on shifting the little beads into little groups, bluer ones here, greener ones there.

“Eddie, he saved your life on that street.” Pepa pats his hand on her way to picking up needle nose pliers. “I’m grateful for him everyday.”

“Yeah.” Eddie says.

He gestures at the wires in front of him. “Pepa, I don’t know what this is supposed to look like.”

“It can look however you want, Eddie. It doesn’t matter, as long as you like it.”

Eddie has to squint one eye closed to thread the tiny beads onto the wiring, one after the other, as the chatter settles around him. It’s mostly harmonious. There’s the occasional mutter of discontent.

“Did I get that right?” He whispers over to Pepa, his Spanish not quite up to the rapid exchange Rita and Paloma are engaged with at the end of the table. “Her son’s first wife’s brother?”

“Hush, Eddie, don’t be rude.” Pepa hisses back, as though her ear isn’t tilted in that direction too.

Eddie makes a pair of earrings. The dangling kind, with loops of tiny seed beading in a deep blue. They remind him of the kind of thing Shannon would wear when they were twenty, loose floral dresses and earrings that made gently clicking noises when she walked, and got tangled up in her hair by the end of the day.

Eddie’s version are crooked though, and that makes him think about the pinched little look Ana would get when Chris would make her a drawing and she’d coo a suggestion that he write a story to go along with it. And the one time Eddie had thought that maybe she preferred stories because she could get away with putting them away into a drawer, not keeping them pinned up on her very neat fridge.

It’s probably unkind, but he knows Ana would never wear these earrings.

He feels strangely proud of them.

[conformi]

Kenneth Noland, Graded Exposure, 1967 VS Franco Fontana, Texas, 1979

[mymentalworldaccordingtobek]

13 September 2014

From yesterday…

My plan is still to have an awesome long weekend with G.

The plan is going well to a point. Me and G were having an amazing time, totally overjoyed at being together, however she got some devastating family news and it has hit her hard.

Today…

Today was a lot of me sitting in cafés waiting for G to finish work, I sat in Costa until I thought the staff were getting a bit weirded out by how long I had been sitting there and then I moved to Sainsbury’s café until they looked suspicious and I went to Boots to look at hair dye. Then we had Chinese with Gs mum and everything seemed pretty relaxed. I talked to her mum and she talked to me so things were looking up, then G got the bad news and then everything took a turn for the worse. There were tears, G and her mum are out of sorts and now we are sitting on Gs bed while she talks to her brother. So a weird/uncomfortable evening.

The mental health side of things…

Today was like one massive graded exposure session. Sitting in two places that I don’t know for an extended period of time, by myself, and going into a shop and spending more than 5mins in there and not buying anything. It sounds small but for me its not. Its a massive thing. This evening is also a tough one, as I’m not sure of the correct responses to emotional situations and tonight has been a very emotionally charged environment. I’m hoping I have responded appropriately but we shall see when everything settles down a bit.

Plan…

My plan is for me and G to have a good last day together as I go home tomorrow night.

^.^

B

[eiretearoa]

Complex regional pain syndrome

Complex regional pain syndrome

Some of you will know what complex regional pain syndrome is – others might not, so I’ll describe it for you.

Imagine your hand (or it could be a foot, an ear, or any part of the body really). If you couldn’t imagine your hand, but instead your brain told you not to even think about it, you could have CRPS (pronounced CRIPS). If that hand also felt hot or cold, swollen (even if it’s not swollen),…

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