It gets easier

On my third week of class, my husband couldn't make it.  Our not-so-reliable babysitter couldn't make it because she was dying of the plague.  Or perhaps it was a simple headcold... I've never been able to tell the difference with her.  I felt like I was an early astronaut, being sent into space by myself, with no help of rescue if things went wrong.  And I had a horrible suspicion that it would go very, very wrong.

I was the one who was wrong.  Without my husband there, I had nobody to prove anything to - except myself.  Heck, I could sit it out and not climb at all, and tell my husband I made it to the top.  I could tell him that I climbed Mount Everest, and he would have no proof either way (except for the fact that I would have to have a Star Trek transporter to get there, up, down, and back in the hour an a half that I was gone.  As I don't have a transporter in my purse, that really wasn't an option.

I had completed several climbing classes, and guess what - each time it gets easier!  On my first climb I got past my goal of 5 feet, and made it about halfway up the 30 foot wall.  On my next lesson, I made it about 20 feet.  The first week without my husband I learned how to trust the rope to swing over to better handholds.  Trusting the rope and my belayer was a huge breakthrough.  Honestly, I sat there for a good solid minute before I could convince my hands and feet to let go for the mere second that it took to swing over to that elusive handhold that was just out of reach.

It felt like cheating.

For some unknown reason, I had it in my mind that it was cheating if I used the rope to get to a new spot on that wall.  It was at that moment that I realized that climbing isn't so much about doing it all by myself.  Climbing isn't a solo sport... unless you're one of those crazy freeclimbers - I don't know what they're thinking when they do that.  Seriously - what type of mental process does it take for someone to think, "I am going to climb a rock without any safety ropes."  It must be a special form of crazy.  To me, climbing is challenging myself to push past my fear, to solve the mental puzzle that is planning not just my next move, but the next 3 moves.  I don't like getting stuck with no idea on how to proceed.  That's when the panic sets in.

Speaking of panic, I found that by my third day climbing I wasn't having utter panic at the thought of being off my beloved terra firma.  I felt nervous, jittery, tense with anticipation of the fear that I knew I would feel, but it wasn't a mindless panic anymore.  The CBT was working.  I was retraining my brain to have a new reaction to a stressful situation, one that didn't involve mindless reactions learned through years of panic, but rather a logical, well-thought out process of talking myself out of learned behavior.

I find that there is a cycle of defeatism that occurs with my phobia (and experts in the field believe it as well).  First comes fear of panicking in the situation.  Then the situation happens, and a panic attack occurs, reinforcing the belief that panic would happen.  The next time the trigger situation is met, because panic happened before the mind is sure it will happen... so it does.  It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.  It's defeatist.  It makes me mad that I, a rational human being, have let myself do and be something so illogical.  So Pavlovian   Somehow I had believed that I was above such conditioning.  I also believed, in my heart of hearts, that something that is so simple on first glance (CBT), wouldn't work.

I proved myself wrong.