Of course, your phobia or obsession or anxious worry is about something specific that frightens you. But in order to treat the anxiety disorders and OCD, you have to learn to rise above the specific topic that you fear so that you can treat the disorder itself. You’re going to hear about Mary, who worried about suffocating on a plane or having a heart attack or being crushed by the ceiling of a parking garage. If she wants to recover from her claustrophobia, then she has to downgrade those specific worries. She needs to decide that even though she feels as though she is going to suffocate, her job is to turn away from that specific fear. In the same way, work to make your content – your specific worry, your topic – irrelevant. Your job? It is to face a generic sense of doubt and a generic sense of distress.