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 know biologically I'm screwed up. Not that it helps but at least it does explain a lot.
I found out a few years ago that a great-grandmother of mine was in a sanitarium once. My Dad had anxiety issues and I remember he had to take zanex (or however it's spelled). This was during later teens or after high school briefly (as I remember). I never knew anything about anybody having an anxiety disorder or knew what he was anxious about. But we often found him off in a corner somewhere talking to himself and thought it was funny (not funny haha but funny as in unusual). Yet today I find that is a useful method of dealing with my anxieties - using my smart self to interact with my anxious self.
I never thought of myself as anxious during those years but looking back I remember when I switched grade schools and started 6th grade, I swear I was nervous every morning.It never dawned on me that nervousness might be the beginning of anxiety back then. years later my OCD started.So it's clear that I inherited a predisposition to anxiety from him.
Anybody else trace their anxiety back through family?
I found out a few years ago that a great-grandmother of mine was in a sanitarium once. My Dad had anxiety issues and I remember he had to take zanex (or however it's spelled). This was during later teens or after high school briefly (as I remember). I never knew anything about anybody having an anxiety disorder or knew what he was anxious about. But we often found him off in a corner somewhere talking to himself and thought it was funny (not funny haha but funny as in unusual). Yet today I find that is a useful method of dealing with my anxieties - using my smart self to interact with my anxious self.
I never thought of myself as anxious during those years but looking back I remember when I switched grade schools and started 6th grade, I swear I was nervous every morning.It never dawned on me that nervousness might be the beginning of anxiety back then. years later my OCD started.So it's clear that I inherited a predisposition to anxiety from him.
Anybody else trace their anxiety back through family?
Be that as it may, i think I learned my anxiety from my mother. Straightforwardly learned it, via nurture not nature. I think she had it, has it, and is in serious denial about it.
I was taught to overthink, my childhood was filled with long, 2 - 3 hour 'discussions' on what I had done wrong. High powered university level analysis used on a prepubescent child, and by the end of this time I would be paralysed with anxiety. I could not show stress: she got angry and it added hours to the procedure. It created someone who was terrified of getting it wrong, considered getting things wrong to be a very dangerous exercise, and also I had special rules to live by with far higher standards than my peers. This isolated me badly.
I was also raised to be very judgemental of friends, so no friend was ever good enough for mum, and the pressure to ditch them was unspoken but always there. She herself has no friends.
As I have uncovered what has been wrong with these things I have got better: as I have spent time with normal people and had to go through my emotions and get past them I have got better, so I think the jury's out on nature versus nurture, quite possibly a bit of each. If it's curable, it has to be nurture. :D If it were nature, we'd just have to live with it.