The New England Center for Anxiety and Stress Management is excited to offer two new intensive outpatient programs designed for social anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder. Although anxiety disorders are among the most commonly diagnosed disorders, they are easily treatable with appropriate interventions. Jody uses gradual exposure therapy, which teaches how to downshift from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic.  This allows people to disengage from the “flight and fight” response into the “rest and digest” In addition, Jody also use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is a valuable tool for overcoming stress, negative emotions, and faulty thought patterns associated with anxiety.

Jody’s story…

After struggling with separation anxiety since early childhood, Jody was recruited during her senior year of high school to play Division 1 Field Hockey. She decided to attend Boston University and arrived for preseason training during the fall of 1981. At that time, she experienced a degree of nervousness, which she thought was a normal part of the changes she was experiencing. However, within 24 hours of arriving at BU, her panic disorder started to rear its ugly horns. Jody explained, “My heart was racing. I was having thoughts of ‘get me out of here!’ It also seemed like I was simultaneously hearing a voice say, ‘you’re being ridiculous. This is normal, you will get over it…you will disappoint and let so many people down if you quit.’” Jody hoped that if she just ignored the voice, it would go away.

But the panic and catastrophic thoughts didn’t just go away. In fact, they seemed to hold her hostage. Looking back, Jody realized she would have been diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia (she couldn’t leave her dorm/house). As time went on, the anxiety caused her sports and academic performance to suffer. Jody ended up with a back injury, became school avoidant, and failed all of her classes that semester.

Unbeknownst to her, Jody instinctively began exposure work on herself, at age 19. She set a goal to go to the mall she had visited a hundred times before the panic set in. It took a month, but she finally got to the mall. She shares, “I felt like I had completed the greatest accomplishment of my life. It started giving me hope that I could live ‘normally’ Again.”

Jody ended up in the field of neuroscience, specializing in the stress response system. In 2011, she helped open an inpatient facility, Mountain Valley Treatment Center, which treated adolescents with a primary diagnosis of anxiety. The treatment intervention employed at the clinic was gradual exposure therapy. When exposure therapy was introduced to Jody, she immediately realized she had treated herself with the therapy, some 30 years earlier. Now, she was learning the clinical intervention of gradual exposure therapy from one of the leading exposure experts in the country. With the skillset she has today, it would have taken her two days to get to the mall instead of 4 weeks.