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...
Another share from one of my meditation readers. My own lifelong struggle with anxiety started from a highly dysfunctional childhood, so for me, this is an especially important meditation. At 66 years of age, dysfunctional habits from my childhood still emerge often enough to need unlearning. Then we get to the Corona marshal laws which have disabled 40 odd years of psychotherapy tools. How do I unlearn those in order to comply with the marshal laws? Prayers in progress that typing out this meditation here will help to reinforce it in my damaged brain. For me, unlearning is much harder than learning.
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The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. ~Gloria Steinem
So much of our lives has been spent learning information that is either useless or dysfunctional. Very little time is spent teaching us how to live, how to take care of ourselves, how to live with one another or how to be in touch with our feelings and know what we want and need.
We have spent so much time learning how to stuff our feelings and be out of touch with ourselves that we often experience our hearts and minds as foreign territory.
What a miracle it is that after all these years of trying to shut off our awarenesses, stuff our feelings and be someone other than ourselves, we're still in there somewhere! We just need to peel off the learnings to find us.
When I feel like a stranger in a strange land, maybe I am. And, remember, someone must be in there feeling all this!
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Thank you for the sharing space.
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I did the dumbest thing today. I charged my earbuds, unplugged the block and put the block in my little bag instead of the earbuds. I wasn't happy about that when I got to the gym. What a dummy!
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Ever since I stopped doing therapy because of insurance, I've been feeling that old tense and irritable sense of anxiety and stress. I hate that. I was making so many strides and changes during therapy, my therapist would acknowledge all of my progress and accomplishments, and I miss that reassurance. Today I thought about it, and I made those changes! She would always tell me that I chose to...
You've shared it in a way that makes a lot of sense in that the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land is how it seems, to everyone.
Then along came Corona. . . Time to unlearn the unlearning?
Seriously though arfie, thanks for sharing that quote. It's absolutely a thing that I have been working with lately... unlearning associations I've created between negative emotions and anxiety and between a little bit of anxiety and a LOT of anxiety. It's been a theme that I've talked about with my therapist several times this go-around. I certainly have a lot to unlearn to make space to learn some new, more useful stuff.
Thanks for sharing.
In "Shell Shock" therapy, we studied allot on how to manage what are now called, "PTSD Flashbacks." In those support groups, identifying and defusing/unlearing the triggers was critical to managing our flashbacks.
I wonder if we are pursuing the same goal under different names, Brockster. Just wondering. . . Comparing is a dangerous pastime, at best.
For what it's worth
The transition from "Shell Shock" therapy to "PTSD" therapy felt both natural and logical while I was still in psychotherapy at the VA. The theories sure are different in civilian PTSD groups. PTSD is classified as an anxiety disorder and I fully agree with that classification. These days I am gaining more support from generalized anxiety groups than the highly specialized PTSD groups. Specialists seem to overlook most everything outside their strictly personal direct line of vision.
So yeah, breaking those associations, or unlearning them, is one of the things that I'm really looking at working on in therapy (along with the internal narratives, or beliefs, or whatever you want to call them) that been created to support the faulty associations.
And, just to make it more fun, unlearning these things seems to be more difficult than learning, like, quantum mechanics. Go figure.
I blame them for having turned me into a full-blown language freak. Their experiments with using foreign language to route new neural pathways resonated loudly with me. If I can describe a traumatic event in a foreign language, the new neural pathway is formed, at least in theory. More and more, I swear by the theory.
Is it a good thing that I can now obsess in 3 different languages? 4 if you count music as a language. I count music as my first language. but I'm not ready to defend that belief in front of a doctoral review committee. Obsessive hyper-expression is seldom comprehensible in an language, so I don't worry that part much. Rerouting the neural pathway is the goal.
(And maybe I need to start doing my duolingo lessons again)