U.K. PARURESIS TRUST: Re: Feedback on Manchester follow-up workshop Nov 2012

I returned last weekend from the follow up workshop in Manchester. This was just six weeks after the mind blowing experience of the beginner's workshop.

Before the beginners workshop I could pee in a public cubicle or at a very quiet public urinal with no one present. I have played team sports all my life and I also like of a few pints of Guinness. So busy pubs and football dressing rooms and indeed football stadiums are very familiar to me. I only say this because a lot of guys on the workshop seemed curious about this. My AP, while mild, was not the least severe of the participants by any means. I think it's just that I adopted my own crazy raft of coping strategies. On the surface I would appear to most people as a big burly Gaelic football playing, Guinness drinking, confident guy. Underneath AP has been eating me alive from the inside out since I was 12.

The follow up workshop was a different experience. It was much less stressful and it was nearly all practice which was great. I had done de-sensing once a week between workshops. However, I realized quickly that I had lost ground on where I was after the first workshop. By the debrief on Saturday I was just about back to where I was at the end of the first workshop. I was flying back Saturday night. I hand't lost spirit but I was frustrated and annoyed with myself. I was in my head over-thinking everything.

Then something amazing happened. Gabriele wanted to do some more work, I had two or three hours before my flight so we went downstairs to the hotel toilets and did some urinal work. I knew Gabriele well from the first workshop but we hadn't ever worked together. Somehow there was less pressure, no judgement, no thoughts, we started talking to each other at the urinal and we both started to pee. We moved next to each other, tried the same thing, same result. Then we went back to the bar had a drink and tried the same thing twice more, it worked every time.

Somehow, seeing someone else and myself succeed without judgement unlocked a door in my mind, it wasn't about positive thoughts or negative thoughts, it was no thought, no judgement, just a bond between two blokes. Elation afterwards, I had never in my life peed next to a grown man at a urinal.

I met up with another workshop participant yesterday in Dublin. It was another fantastic experience. It's such a relief to be able to talk to another fantastic human being and normalise this. Then go off and visit some public toilets as if its the most normal thing in the world.

I have also agreed to be a point of contact for anyone in Dublin who would like to meet up. Andrew has my details.

Thanks so much again to Andrew and the most amazing bunch of guys you could ever hope to meet.

If you have AP and it is eating you up, please take this step. To say it's been life changing is no understatement.