I’ve spoken with hundreds of people with phobia (mainly emetophobia and agoraphobia) and dozens of therapists who treat it. A major topic is setbacks, relapse, and lost progress. I’m writing today to say that there is no such thing as a setback in phobia recovery.

I don’t mean that there won’t be hard days. There will be hard days. I also don’t mean that there won’t be days where you go back to old habits, that will happen too. What I mean, is recovery is not linear, and a bad day or old habits do not set you backward in time. When we think of recovery we often think of a graph, like this.

In fact, this is the graph from Bia’s impact report, where we show that users report significant improvements during their time using Bia. I can tell you this with 100% confidence, no one, and I mean no one, recovers from phobia immediately, on their first try, without hard days or setbacks. It does not happen, just like someone learning a language doesn’t say the wrong thing from time to time, or someone learning a new instrument doesn’t occasionally play the wrong note. We use graphs because they are simple and easy, but it’s the wrong way to think about recovery. A much better visual is a pyramid.

I wrote about my personal recovery pyramid in depth here on medium.

In this visual, every single day, you add a stone to your pyramid. This includes good days but almost more importantly it includes bad days. Each bad day is an opportunity to process and learn. Most people with phobia are incredibly hard on themselves, and these “bad days” exist as a constant torture of guilt, shame, and regret, on top of the day to day suffering we experience. Part of the recovery process is to pause here, and give yourself some credit. Imagine someone else who was your age when your phobia started. They are scared, alone, suffering, they are confused. Would you put the same guilt, shame, and regret that you place on yourself on this person? You wouldn’t. And you shouldn’t to yourself.

When you fall back to old habits, that’s a stone in the pyramid. When you set a goal for yourself and you don’t reach it, that’s a stone in the pyramid. You try something new and it doesn’t go as expected, that’s a stone. Every day of life, in our careers, school, personal relationships, hobbies and more, we get stones to add to our pyramid.

When will the pyramid be done?

Never.

That doesn’t mean we have to suffer from phobia forever. Each time our pyramid gets bigger, we can see more of the world around us. Even after my recovery from emetophobia, I still get to add stones to my pyramid, and stand tall on the top and experience life through a lens that has been crafted by decades of days, good, but I think more importantly, the bad ones too.

For more on emetophobia including resources, tools, and our recovery community, visit Bia — The Phobia Recovery App