You always drive.

There’s a good reason for it and you’ve had the reason for years. Driving means you leave when you want to leave. It means you’re not standing on a pavement at half ten working out whose turn it is to decide the night’s over. So you drive, and you offer before anybody’s asked, which makes it look like generosity. Some times it is.

It works, too. That’s the part nobody’s ever going to argue with. You’ve not once been stuck somewhere you couldn’t get out of, and you’d struggle to name an evening that went wrong because you were the one holding the keys.

Now count how long you’ve been doing it.

A precaution that works never gets looked at again

Anything that fails gets reviewed. You change it, or you stop doing it, or somebody tells you to. A precaution that works gets no review at all, because there’s nothing to review. It did its job, the evening passed, and the whole arrangement goes back in the drawer until the next time.

So it stays. And it keeps staying, through years when your circumstances changed twice and your reasons for needing it stopped applying, because nobody audits the thing that hasn’t gone wrong.

Here’s the question I’d put to you, and I’d want a straight answer. Could you manage an evening where you weren’t the driver?

You won’t know. That’s not a failure of nerve, it’s a gap in your information. You’ve never tried it and found it unbearable. You’ve never tried it and found it fine either. The question has never once come up in a form that could be answered, because you’ve been arranging things so it can’t.

What the precaution has been telling you

Every time you arrange an evening so the thing can’t happen, you write one more line in the case for arranging it.

That’s the uncomfortable mechanic, and it’s worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. A precaution isn’t neutral. It’s an argument about what would happen without it, made in your own handwriting, filed without comment, and never tested. The worry says that would be bad. The precaution says agreed, and makes sure it can’t come up. They want the same thing. They’re on the same side.

Which means the precaution can’t ever be the thing that settles the worry down, however well it works. The better it works, the longer the question stays shut.

Three doors, same shape

If it’s your body, the precaution is having a route A and a route B, the end of the row nearest the door, the far car park, the thing you ate before you came out so you wouldn’t have to decide anything once you’d arrived.

If it’s the room, the precaution is the person you walk in with. It’s the hour you said you could stay, announced at the door before anybody asked you how long you’d got. It’s the seat you take that has a sightline to the way out.

If it’s being seen, the precaution is standing at the back of the photograph. It’s the opinion you keep in your pocket until somebody more senior has said it first, so that what you say is a second, not a first.

Now stop looking at what the three are made of and look at what they do. All three are sensible. All three work. All three have a reason attached that would satisfy anybody who asked, which is why nobody has ever asked. And all three end the evening with the question in precisely the state it was in when the evening started. The woman who drives, the woman who leaves at nine and the woman who speaks second are all managing something well, and not one of them is finding anything out.

The half second before you say you’ll check is the fastest one of these there is

A sentence said in a doorway is a precaution too, and it’s the easyist one to do. No arranging, no route, no lift home. Half a second, and the question is closed with nobody in the room any the wiser.

The driving takes planning. The sentence takes nothing at all. They do an identical job.

Why the years haven’t helped

You’d expect fifteen years of managing something carefully to make the worry easier to bear. It’s reasonable to expect that. Fifteen years is a long time and you’ve been good at it.

It hasn’t, and this is why. Count up what those fifteen years produced. Fifteen years of evenings where the precaution held. Fifteen years of arriving home when you wanted to, parking where you meant to, leaving at the hour you’d named. Not one single evening where the question got an answer, because the precaution was in place on every one of them.

So you’ve got an enormous amount of evidence about your own arranging, and almost none about anything else. The file is thick and it’s all about the same thing.

This is ordinary cognitive behavioural ground rather than anything clever. Avoidance keeps a question closed, and a closed question can’t lose an argument. It’s the reason careful, competent, well-managed years can leave a worry exactly where it began, looking the same as it did at the start.

One thing, and it’s only reading

Nothing is being asked of you today. The asking happens next time.

Write down the precautions. Not to feel anything about them, and not in order of how frightening they are. Write them the way you’d write a list of standing orders: the things you do every time, without deciding, because at some point you decided once.

Then put a mark next to the ones that are load bearing. The lift home you genuinely need. The timing that fits around somebody else. The thing your own comfort depends on, which is nobody’s business but yours. Keep every one of those, and keep your GP in the loop about anything that belongs with them.

What’s left over is the interesting part of the list. Those are the ones still running on a reason that stopped applying a while ago, and you’ll recognise them because you can’t remember what started them.

Next Sunday, we'll look at one of them. Just one, on a day that suits you.

When your body has been making your decisions for you, that is the work I do. Book a Reset Session at HypnoGirl.

Confidence Connection is the Business, Social and Body confidence blog written by Kathryn Dunn, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist based in York, Yorkshire and working online. One essay each week, in plain language, and one thing worth trying. More at ConfidenceConnection.co.uk

Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In is a free relaxation recording, about twelve minutes long, for the times you want to feel calmer before social events or business meetings. It’s a general relaxation recording rather than a treatment for anything. Sign up here and you’ll also join Confidence Connection, my weekly email, which carries each new post to your inbox along with a bit extra.

Hypnotherapy is not a substitute for medical care and does not diagnose any condition. The essays and the recording are for information and relaxation, and sit alongside the care you get from your GP.

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