Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
I've noticed this trend where whenever I come across someone who's both rude and assertive, I get an extremely irrational fear of them.
It's probably been going on since I was pretty young, really. It usually has nothing to do with social standing or any other factor about the person, just their attitude: rude and assertive. I've been afraid of random kids on the bus.
See, I've become more assertive over the years, but some part of me is still very fragile. I'm still afraid of a person who can come in and without a second thought shatter my ego and self image that I've built up over the years. I'm afraid of a personification of the person in my head who'd criticize my every action and thought.
If someone like that called me a bitch for no reason, as happened to my friend, I'd shrink and accept it. If they decided to go off on me, I'd accept it and feel crushed and ashamed. As such, when I meet this kind of person, I want to do everything I can to avoid them and avoid getting on their nerves. Of course, I don't even have to say that I understand that all this is very irrational. It's not something I've fully acknowledged until now, just brought up in bits and pieces with friends.
Extremely irrational fear and submission.
I think it's a holdover from how my relationship with my dad used to be. Maybe a tiny bit of how it still is. It feels a little dumb to "blame" all these behaviors on my upbringing, but I'd say that the whole situation definitely feels to familar to young me and my dad's relationship. Still feels dumb somehow.
I don't really know how to deal with this issue now that I've acknowledged it exists. I've told a few people bits and pieces and sometimes they understand and sometimes they don't. One person kind of just acted like I was crazy (this was during a crying fit after being talked down by an assertive person). This could probably be classified as a trigger.
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I haven't written in my diary on my computer since May because I thought that my computer was dying. I got away from writing but my computer is hanging in there. I think that I will start writing in it again. It's so therapeutic.
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First, I hope everyone is doing well, and continuing to fight that good fight! Keep up the great work on yourselves; I'm rooting for all of you!So, I started doing therapy at the beginning of the year, when I was in my most depressed state, but with my therapist, I made big changes and steps in the right direction. But, over a month ago, she couldn't take my insurance anymore, and I had to stop...
Hope you find some relief, Ollie. It sucks feeling intimidated. It breaks my heart when I notice my assertive nature causing good people to clam up.
For what it's worth:
Since "Trigger" became a fashionable word, I have had less and less confidence trying to figure out what qualifies as a trigger in the psych context. Lost in metaphor again. . . I've started looking for other words for ^it^.