willy2

Yoga and heating pads are great suggestions too!

One thing that may help if you exercise is to strengthen your back muscles by doing pulling exercises. This has helped me with my general upper back shoulder and neck pain:specs:

Rabbitgirl, I love what you said and I copied below and you are soo right! Also, it is like exercise. You don't start with the biggest weights on the first day, you just continue to lift the smaller ones for a long, long, time before anything like progress happens. After a while, you find that you can quiet your thoughts, abandon obsessing about things, and be focused when you need to. Great advice:up:

Thanks for all the great meditation advice. I learned a lot in your post:heartbeat

Any update docpsychrn42? Let us know how you are doing?

Love the 2b at the end of your moniker :)

You're welcome... Happy Holidays :)

This is really interesting and not surprising. My first reaction to CBT and TEA forms etc was that they appeared to be Taoist in nature. I wish western medicine would embrace eastern forms more often:up:

You're welcome. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink as they say. I hope your daughter is feeling better.

Great advice Finn and Zoe :)

Sorry for being so late in replying. The TEA form is a simple thought countering exercise where you list the thoughts that cause anxiousness and stress and then identify the common thinking errors in your thoughts and refute them and replace the original thought with more objective and less upsetting thoughts. I learned them in my CBT group and in the book we used by Sam Obitz which diagrams them in it as well. I have read other CBT books since that call them by other names like the CBT thought countering exercise or the triple column technique but they all work the same. We all learn bad thinking/processing habits when we are young and don't even realize they are there and need to be corrected and that's what the TEA form helps you do... Reprogram your brain to process things in less upsetting ways. It sounds too basic to work but it does if you do them and you can change your life in a matter of a few months. I think they would work great for your teenage daughter but the hard part would be getting her to do them everyday:twocents: Best of luck:)

Thanks for answering for me while I was absent. I could not have answered any better:yeah: I am so happy to hear CBT was useful for you also:up: The book by Sam Obitz that we used in my CBT group referenced the book Feeling Good you mentioned as an additional resource and I have read it and it is really good, but I think it would have been a bit overwhelming for me to digest if it was my first exposure to CBT. However Burns book does go way more in depth into the exercises and offers additional useful strategies:)

There is a lot of good advice so please take whatever advice resonates with you so that you can start to feel some relief. Like one person said you have to treat yourself in order to help others. Thinking of you:heartbeat

I was on meds for my stress and anxiety before I found CBT and it cured me and got me off meds in a reasonable period of time. CBT taught me how to help myself deal with all the stress in my life and grow and learn better coping strategies. The thought countering exercise called the TEA form exercise taught me to think more clearly and accurately about things and once I did my worries and stress levels began to subside. We used the CBT starter book "Been There, Done That? Do This! by Sam Obitz in the group I was in and it was inspirational and simple. Like anything in life the more you put in the more you get out of CBT. That's why I think group settings can be especially effective with CBT because you can see the people that are working the hardest to get well making the most progress and it becomes infectious. I also finding relaxation breathing techniques and meditation really helpful, especially for helping in getting a good nights sleep.

I agree with everything Angie had to say. Really good advice. From personal experience i would suggest trying to find a counselor or group who specializes in CBT aka cognitive therapy. Hang in there:heartbeat