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...
what do you get out of therapy peer support?
to my logic, therapy peers are not the same as age peers. i might or might not have anything in common with people the same age as i, aka: an age peer. my therapy peers and i share the bond of mental illness. whether we are currently employing professional services, maintaining progress made with professional services (my case) or grasping for straws in the first awareness that we need help, the desire to heal bonds me closely with my therapy peers whom i often call, "my sibs-in-healing." i doesn't even need to know your name to love you the way i wish i could love myself.
when i am in crisis, peer support never feels like enough to get me through. i wonder often if that feeling is proof that it takes a village to heal. there is no single source which can provide enough to get me through a crisis.
when i am doing well, sharing my experience with my peers serves as both reminder and positive reinforcement for the tools which brought me back from full blown psychotic breaks. i haven't been hospitalized (nor jailed) since 1999, but i take my therapy maintenance quite seriously. i don't ever want to go **there** again. i often call my therapy maintenance, "a spiritual diet." i hold that my spiritual diet is as critical a piece of self-care as my physical diet. we are what we eat.
open discussion. anything goes. even unsolicited advice.
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And its already been noted by the weather service as heat advisory today thru Wed here.I have a rack of St. Louis Cut Pork Ribs. I will use a charcoal snake method of two rows on bottom shingled around about 3/4 of way on outside of the grill. Then on top of those I will shingle a single layer of briquetted same around 3/4 of grill. Adding some chunks of wood every 3-4 inches around the grill.I...
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Hope the dog days of summer aren't getting you down!
group therapy run by a professional. And it was helpful. We all had different problems but we helped each other. I have never been in peer support without
A professional in the room. Don't know what that would be like. But posting here and getting suggestions, and support from others with anxiety is a big help to me. And very important.
the exception was truly exceptional. it was facilitated by a nurse practitioner who blended her knowledge and study with the familiarity of a peer. she was the only group that i felt any peer bonding in.
i guess that points out another bennie i get from peer support. my peers help me get the pro yaddahs out of the sterile academic environments into the messy world in which i live.
We learn about other people and how they think. We learn about other people's situations and problems. We can learn coping skills from someone else talking about how they cope healthily. We get educated from a good support group. But it can't do an individual crisis intervention by the very nature of what it is.
I watched a zoom support group this weekend for people with estrangement. It was kind of awful. Half the room left at the break, actually more than half the people in the room. I knew two other people who attended and I don't know what they think but did leave early and did not run my video as I decided to do some chores while I listened. On mute and trying to observe and listen rather than cut out early.
The woman who gave me the information was obfuscating about the group and about who she was so I went into this group with a bad attitude, just to see how this group was. And because I knew so many would attend. The woman organizing the group had no idea how to lead a group discussion and took at least a half hour to vent and moan and explain her story, couldn't shut up and kept the focus on her story. Horrible. The woman who told me about the group goes by Dr (not saying her first name) and another famous doctor uses the same moniker. This is the person who lied to me and used me to spread the word to get more attendees.
So I have to say that not all of these support groups are helpful. Not everyone has read a book on how to lead a discussion and what the goals of a support group are supposed to be. Not everyone is there to focus on others and lead without sharing all their own crap. I've been to an Al Anon group where the leader at that meeting cried and moaned about her sad situation the entire discussion.
I know about support groups because I have taken a college course and kept the text book and led many self help groups and attended many also. It is hit or miss. If it doesn't support our own wellness and gaining of coping skills, life skills, whatever, then it sucks as a support group. If one or two are allowed to hog the meeting by talking incessantly, it sucks. But some of us simply can't focus on learning from others so we definitely need to be with a licensed clinical therapist one to one. I'm at the point of don't waste my time!
i can't argue with a college course. . . i studied biology and engineering.
the thought of televising a support group meeting repulses me for the violation of anonymity.
i can't even imagine the entertainment value of watching.