Hi there. I suffer from Bipolar Disorder and Anxiety NOS, where essentially I have features of both social anxiety disorder and panic disorder with agoraphobia. I’d been in therapy for six or seven years and managed to reach a point where I was able to go it alone. I could leave home and go most places, take public transit, got a job working in a women’s clothing store inside a mall that required I act like a bubbly, highly social extrovert. Therapy ended in 2018 and I was fine for the most part - when my stress levels were extra high some public settings would trigger panic attacks if just the right circumstances were met, and I still worried too much about basic mistakes at times, but considering my starting point it was amazing and with continued personal work I’d hopefully struggle with these less as time went on. I was super excited to maybe one day even have a full-time job with this company and no longer need disability assistance to support myself.

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Then the pandemic hit. Stores closed, routines changed, and my brain just... broke. The panic attacks in grocery stores started up again, every visit, sometimes worse than they were all those years ago, and I couldn’t seem to do anything to reduce the frequency or bring my social anxiety in check. Then things started reopening. I did fine on transit because there was nobody on it and got all excited that maybe I hadn’t lost all of my functioning during the shutdown, but then at work I became such an anxious wreck - couldn’t sleep, couldn’t shut my mind up for even a second, just constantly in a severely anxious state and it just seemed to get worse with each day that passed. I ended up quitting my job. Then my mother injured her back and I had to take on doing all of the grocery shopping and picking up her prescriptions using now busier public transit. And the panicking and anxiety kept going strong. Her back eventually got better, grocery shopping returned to a shared single weekend event, and eventually the constant anxiety became less constant but still greatly affects my functioning in many ways (eg I can’t check the mail during normal hours as I may run into people, I can’t walk through the lobby or front stairs of the apartment because it’s busier and I might run into people, I can’t call unfamiliar places but I can still answer my phone at least, anticipatory anxiety got me like “we are two minutes behind our routine schedule it will now be TOO BUSY”). This has left me very depressed, struggling with feeling like a burden, and feeling absolutely hopeless about regaining those abilities I fought so hard to get back once already.

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I was finally able to talk to my doctor in November. He referred me to a short term, six session free counselling service. We booked for my first sessions this month, I did my first bit of homework, and in the second session after describing what exactly is occurring with my panic attacks she suggested that I stop going to the grocery store, and noted that we wouldn’t be able to work on that issue with the number of sessions we have available. I said I couldn’t do that because my mum still can’t lift the heavy groceries, but on mentioning it to my mum after we did figure out a way to have me help without being in the grocery store.

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...but I remember having it drilled into my head in therapy before that I should not stop going to places otherwise I may lose the ability to be in the space and have to work back up to it, and I won’t have that therapy to help me this time. **So question #1: has anybody been told by their therapist to stop going somewhere because of their panic and anxiety before? How did that work out?**

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We were to instead work on making it possible for me to go on walks at my suggestion because clearly I am an idiot and wasn’t thinking things through, because the only pair of shoes I have right now are mesh. And it’s rainy season. And the forecast yesterday evening changed from cloudy to rain. And I have oddly shaped feet that mean I need to try on shoes before buying. In a store. At a mall. On a weekend when I can be taken there in a car because I can’t even walk down the street right now even on the rare dry day without turning into a wreck.

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**Question #2: am I right that maybe this therapy just isn’t going to be able to help me at all?** I have four sessions remaining, they’re every two weeks. Thus far I’m only more aware of all that I can’t do, seeing nothing but barriers to success, the feelings of hopelessness and being a burden are just growing stronger, and the thoughts swirling in my head are verging on dangerous.

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Sorry for the novel, but I figure context mattered here.