Posted by Ross on 4/5/2013, 2:00 pm

hi, I attended the recent follow up workshop in London and wanted to say how great it was, and to tell a little of my story in the hope that it may inspire some of you to go on a workshop. I was one of those people who went to a beginners workshop a long time ago and didn't continue with a follow up but I recently noticed something that Andrew had said on the forum - "Not attending a follow-up workshop is in effect an avoidance behaviour!" and knowing that I still had avoidance tendancies, I signed up. So, before the beginner's workshop I couldn't even enter a public toilet and therefore had become quite agoraphobic, worked from home and only went as far as my local pub (50 meters away) so I could go home to pee. Not surprisingly I lost a great relationship as neither of us understood what was happening and I hit rock bottom. Eventually I found this forum, posted my long plea for help and was encouraged to attend a workshop which after the initial nerves became a fantastic experience - exploring and chatting for days about something that I'd kept to myself for so long (and didn't understand). Throughout the weekend I made huge progress and learned many strategies to help me on my way. After that positive experience I settled for years on being able to go into toilets and using urinals if there was enough space or using a cubicle. You could almost call that a cure since I now can observe how common this strategy is amongst men.  But ... there was still a lot of avoidance behaviour in my life, my stress levels were too high in relation to toilets and I began to forget all the great CBT stuff that I'd learned e.g. how to tune in to your muscles and relax them, positive thinking, breathing properly, only focussing on successes, creating a hierarchy to assess your progress etc etc ... etc Now the follow up workshop has put me back on track, I've got my folder with all the great info to refer to, I've got new friends to desense with and I'm also able to desense on my own although I think it's really important to be able to regularly meet face to face and desense/chat/progress with a fellow recoverer. This post has actually taken me a very long time to write as I analyse where I am with AP (and life in general) to try to write useful stuff ... so I'll stop there,  and just add that I feel the main thing about recovery is just to help your brain do what it's good at - learn by experience - and the best way to do that is to get on a workshop where you'll gain the power to give your brain lots of positive experiences - and these will displace the negative ones as your brain rewires itself. Keep moving forward and if you haven't yet, get on a follow up workshop -  which you can only do after attending a beginner's workshop ;-) Ross

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