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...

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Taking Time to Care

arfie
arfie

Martyrdom and advice giving are two of the hotter topics in my own therapy circles. Nobody seems surprised to hear that my martyr complex has been heavily theraputed. The advice-giving surprises ALLOT of people as a therapy topic, but playing expert and advice-giving are common deflection tools for avoiding our own problems. Girl howdy, I was good at that psycho tick. Despite all that therapy, I fall into that old guise allot more easily than I slide into my HS blue jeans. If I can't dazzle you with brilliance, I will baffle you with bullshit. Either way, I will avoid looking at my own problems in the process. I come by the psychosis honestly. My highly dysfunctional family tree is chock full of nuts who would rather run anybody's life but their own.


None of that has much to do with the benefits of caring about other people's pain, most especially within a peer support network. When I take the time to care and share strictly personal experience, I review my own herstory and often find tools and progress I had forgotten or not even realized before. The boundaries of my tortured existance grow when other people heal and grow with with me.


Am I making sense? If so, does anybody have items to add to the bennies list?

shakyinside
shakyinside
Oh yes I’ve got a family that concentrates so much on others failings both real and imagined while ignoring their own worse problems. I’d call it a superiority complex with no basis in fact. Its pathological and ingrained and they validate each other. Why change what works? I grew up as the youngest being so criticised and denigrated and subjected to violence that when I finally got away I took over where they left off. No one is a bigger critic of me than me. Old habits die hard. Sadly I’ve never really found mutual healing and growth with others. DS is the closest I’ve ever come, especially before all the changes.
arfie
arfie
My birth family doesn't judge others anywhere so much as it monopolizes on human suffering. There's profit in them there wounds! ! ! Just ask a syndicated advice columnist, self-help author or a host of other well-paid pros, all the way down to the child sex traffickers. That trickle down effect gets grody and chaotic before it runs out.

It was my live peer support network who introduced me to more productive and sustainable ways to care. My psych pros plied the brute force when needed. I'm still a bit dubious about on-line peer support. The lack of physical cues makes it hard to know what is on the other end of the connection.
shakyinside
shakyinside
I actually value your insights and experiences so don’t be too hard on yourself, and maybe martyrdom was forced upon you rather than being an actual choice. We just try to make sense of things in our own way, normal reactions to an abnormal experience? And yes I know what you think of the term normal lol.
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