“Ok.” She nodded. “That’s true. But let me counter that with this: people these days are very aware of bloodborne pathogens - not just HIV - and how to safely handle blood. So the likelihood is that even if youwereto bleed in public, nobody’s going to be wallowing in it.”
She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but still, itfeltrisky. “But one mistake and boom,” I countered. “Someone’s life changes forever.”
“Do you have herpes?”
I blinked at the apparent nonsequitur. “Uh…not that I know of?”
“I do,” she went on, ignoring my perplexed expression. “It’s actually localized on my hands, which is really uncommon compared to mouth or genital herpes, but it does happen.”
“Uh…ok?”
“When I have an outbreak, I get blisters on my fingers, and herpes is highly transmissible from the fluid in those blisters. So I have to be really aware of keeping my hands clean and moisturized, and then keeping them safely away from potential points of infecting someone.”
Oh, I saw where she was going with this. “Ok but like, nobody dies from herpes.”
“True.” She nodded. “But - and I don’t know about anyone else - when I got the diagnosis, it kinda felt like my life was over, in the sense that the freedom I’d had to just…touch anyone and anything was gone. Suddenly I needed to live my life super-conscious in a way I’d never done before.” She smiled slightly. “Was that over-dramatic of me? Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t change that that’s how I felt. I’m not saying it’s the same,” she went on when I started to speak, “but Iamtrying to reflect back to you how that experience isn’t limited to you, and perhaps make you think about how rational or irrational your fear is.”
I shrugged. “Still feels pretty rational to me. If you’re infectious, you really do need to be conscious of it.”
“And that’s fair,” she agreed with a nod. “But do remember that you’re not the only person in the world with a transmissible medical condition. You’re not somehow a unique scourge.”
Unique scourge, I mouthed to myself, unable to stop a smirk at a pair of words I didn’t think I’d ever heard put together before. Then I sobered. “I mean, I guess I know that. But…” I shook my head, unable to put my finger on the argument I wanted to make. “Just because I’m not unique doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about.”
She cocked her head to the side, considering. “Let’s try to tease out the difference between worry and fear for a minute. You can be worried about something without fearing it. Are you worried or fearful?”
I thought about that. “Both?” I ventured. “Fear is just a bigger version of worry.”
“I’m going to disagree with that. To me, ‘fear’ implies a level of paralysis and powerlessness that ‘worry’ doesn’t. Youfearmonsters, youworryabout whether you turned off the stove before you left the house.”
“Well -”
“And I think,” she went on without waiting for me to finish, “that at this moment, you’refearinga monster when you really should just beworryingabout the stove.”
Huh? “I think you lost me a little.”
“Ok, let me try to clarify,” she said, holding up her hands placatingly. “You carry a transmissible illness. It is one hundred percent logical to worry about transmitting it, in the sense that you need to be aware of your status and, say, whether you’re leaving blood smears wherever you go. But at the same time, being conscious of it doesn’t mean you need to be paralyzed by it. It’s not this evil monster that is destined to take over your life. Part of your job here in therapy is to figure out how tokeepit from taking over your life when it doesn’t need to. Keeping things in proportion is important. And I think that currently you’re letting it paralyze you; part of my job is to shake you out of the paralysis. So…” She grinned. “Shake, shake, shake.”
I knew I was supposed to return the grin, but…it was easy for her to say. “Buthow?” I asked, a plaintive note breaking into my voice. “It goes back to the rational versus the emotions, and how I can’t stop the emotions even with logic.”
“Honestly?” She shrugged. “A lot of repetition, mostly. When you feel the emotions swelling, you can do things to break that paralysis.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged again. “Lots of things. Anything from literally pinching yourself -” I winced. “- to repeating affirmations to yourself, to keeping a post-it note in your wallet that you look at when you need it. It looks different for everyone. But the overarching theme is something that can remind you that you aren’t necessarily ruled by your emotions. That’s part of what separates human from animal, our ability to rise above visceral emotion.”
“So…which do I do?”
“You tell me,” she shot back. “Do any of those ideas resonate right off the bat? If so, try that one. If not…hell, try them all. I have a worksheet somewhere…” She grabbed her laptop off her desk and focused on the screen. “Just gotta find it, give me a minute.” Obediently, I waited while she navigated the computer. “Ah, here we go.” The printer whirred to life and she reached over to pull a piece of paper from it, then handed it to me. I looked down at a surprisingly low-res print-out of a bulleted list.
“‘Call a friend’?” I read off the top of the list. “Am I on a game show?”
She cracked a bare smile that clearly said I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. “Keep reading.”
“‘Shake it off by moving your body’,” I obediently kept reading. “‘Journal your feelings, snap your rubber band, engage in self-care’.” I looked up at her skeptically. “These feel really basic.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Emotions are very basic, hindbrain things. Sometimes you have to fight them with hindbrain-stimulating strategies. So think about it: do any of those seem like something you could remember to do when you’re spiraling?”
As ordered, I thought about it. “What does ‘snap your rubber band’ mean? Like, is that literal? I reach into my desk drawer and slingshot a rubber band across the room?”
