Phone work

Hi my name is Rich, aka known here as "Older Guy".

I am having lots of anxiety about making phone calls about my medical situation. The medical practice I am working with and talking to on the phone has some people that are unfriendly and unhelpful. I am just trying to get treatment. Yet this one woman is unhelpful and impatient. It's good for me to write this out and what's going on. It has now been about 2 weeks since I started trying to get approval and there always seems to be another step. Very frustrating. My sister, who used this same medical practice, is asking me how it is going and because the diagnosis is cancer, is impatient about getting approval. I think she has forgotten that her own approval process took a while. Anyway, I am rambling now. Thanks for reading.

You're having trouble calling on the phone. I’ve have that to a certain degree.

I once postponed calling someone for probably 5 years or more. I tried to analyze that and I believe it was because I'm very sensitive to criticism and near the end of the previous conversation he had said or implied something negative which was like putting up a stone wall.

I don’t like rejection or disapproval and will go to a lot of trouble to avoid that, like not calling him back for 5 years even though there was something I needed to ask him which had a deadline. Finally, I just called on a whim without thinking about it. The conversation went good and I got the needed data.

Another time I applied for a job and didn’t hear from the boss. I was guessing he had found something he didn’t like in my resume and it was like a stonewall between me and calling him back about the job. My girlfriend had to say go head and call him before I would do that. Turned out I had given him the phone number of an apt. I no longer lived in is why it appeared he hadn’t called me back. I got the job but I was about to miss that chance because of my sensitivity and my phone and criticism phobia.

I have sensitive ears to noise and my ear doctor gave me a written excuse about not having to go on the firing line again. I was to call my military person about that. But because of phone phobia I didn't. If it hadn’t been for my negative unconscious, I could have simply mailed him the excuse, so I couldn’t do that, either. I had victory phobia. I had problem solving phobia.

This reminds, also, of the pilot of a small aircraft who was running out of gas and called Douglas military airport near Washington D.C. to ask if he could emergency land there. He was told “You certainly may NOT land at Douglas airport.” And then she added in a meek voice, “unless it is an emergency.” His ego was destroyed and he crashed.

So this happens.

Maybe your sister can call the clinic and get you registered, or get the questions that you need to answer, and write out the responses and mail them to the group.

https://smith.ai/blog/telephobia says he causes of this are:

Performance anxiety; Depression; An Extremely Introverted Personality.

I think you're going to have to come to grips with this and either you're going to win or it's going to win.

If you have Victory Phobia that's going to make it worse. If you have Problem Solving Phobia that's going to make it worse.

If you are fighting against the tenants of what your parents told you when you were five, that's going to make it worse. If you have I Don't Want to Grow Up Phobia that's going to make it worse.

You, just like I, are the problem and nobody's going to talk us out of it. And that is our victory. Phone phobia is not the problem. We are the problem. There's nothing we can do about this. It's called thinning the herd.