tough day today

[ss_worrier]

Just need to vent some of the anxiety of today...I've been in CBT therapy for two years suffering from GAD symptoms, and due to self-confidence issues much of my anxiety has to do with love and relationships. Suffered throughout much of my last long relationship, and yesterday a girl that i've been dating for a little over two months went back to her home country and it's very unclear what's gonna happen between us. We did talk about it (on my initiative) and she wanted us to just say goodbye and hope to see each other in the future, so that's what happened. At first I was okay because I'd already done so much worrying about the goodbye-moment for the past month or so, so when it finally happened I took it pretty well. But then she cried so much on the way to the airport that I guess I finally realized that she actually likes me, I obviously knew that since before but my anxiety always persuaded me to deny that to a large extent, since I find it very hard to believe that anyone could have those feelings for me, rationally I obviously know it but my anxiety is very good at persuading me. And I guess that set something off for me, since realizing that I was liked in a very real way by someone else my anxiety spun off on fear of being abandoned, fear of being alone, fear of never finding someone else etc. It's been going on pretty constantly since yesterday afternoon. I do have a great fear of goodbye's due to family traumas.

Anyways, right now I don't really know what to do, I feel like my whole world is spinning. My heart feels heavy, and the back of my head feels very cold, which usually happens to me when the anxiety gets particularly strong. I keep thinking of all the ways through which she will meet someone else (the thought of me meeting someone else I just shove away and deem as impossible), I imagine her meeting her ex-boyfriend and getting back together with him (she meets him on a regular basis since they're still very good friends), I keep getting stuck in these jealous and pessimistic thoughts, trying to predict the future in a way that's negative for me 'cause then I'll at least be prepared for all the bad things that are just waiting to happen. This isn't really new to me, I do this to some extent on most days, it's just that right now I'm having such a hard time calming myself down I'm afraid it'll lead to a panick attack. This is one of the worst situations I could imagine for my relationship anxiety since I hate dealing with uncertainties, it's one of my main fears. I wish I could just let go and live in reality rather than in my thoughts. This pattern keeps repeating itself even when I just come a little close to getting into a relationship, so I should know better than to let myself be swallowed by the thoughts.

[ss_worrier]

just woke up, it's all starting over again. the first thing i do when i open my eyes is to look for the anxious thoughts and grab a hold of them. i've been through these exact thought patterns before, and whenever the anxious periods are over i tend to almost laugh at myself cause i know how silly it is to let thoughts like these control my whole existence. but somehow i manage to convince myself that this time it's different, this time the thoughts are real, even though the patterns and feelings are the same but the circumstances keeps changing, different one with the last ex girlfriend but still centered around loosing her to someone else, jealousy of her ex-boyfriends, making myself out to be not worthy of love, etc. i hate this so very much and i just can't take another day of being eaten up by these thoughts, like yesterday.

[ss_worrier]

It's been a few hours since I woke up and the anxiety just keeps getting worse. Just met a couple of friends for lunch and talked about our upcoming trip to Thailand (which I'm sure will just be a golden time for my anxious thoughts, they tend to increase a lot during trips with friends and family, for some reason). Them talking about how they're gonna exercise to make their stomach muscles look good and so on threw me into a vortex of anxiety since I've been sensitive about my weight ever since I was a chubby kid. I keep thinking about how they're going to be sleeping around with girls while I don't. And the thing is I don't even think I want to, I never was the kind of person to do intimate things like that with virtual strangers. And at this point I don't even know what's going on between me and the girl I've been dating for the past two months, who left the country were we lived yesterday, which is the major cause of my anxiety right now, as I wrote before I keep having a lot of negative thoughts around her and being separated, her ex-boyfriends and so on. So I'm not that kind of person anyway, like some of my friends are, but I think that whenever they talk like that I start feeling like a looser and get into the fat-kid-cliché in my mind, being sad about how I don't look as good as other people do and how I can't find love etc.

Yeah this isn't really too pleasant of a period. Just wish that I could be out of it, look back and laugh at my thoughts and treat them as distant and their underlying causes as something that I can deal with through long-time therapy. But right know no matter how hard I try I just can't shake them, it's so much harder than it usually is. I had a few drinks with friends last night, that might be a reason why today is so especially hard. I just need someone to tell me that my thoughts aren't a reflection of reality and that I can choose not to live in them if I don't want to. Thanks for reading, sorry about the message being a bit confusing but that tends to happen when I just vent...

[ss_worrier]

Thank you so much for replying, just knowing that someone listened to my problems helps a lot. I know that being sad when someone close to you has left is perfectly normal, I'll even go as far as to admit to myself that feeling that big pain my chest for the whole day when she was leaving is something I have to live with, since I simply happen to be a very sentimental kind of person. What I do think is unreasonable, on the other hand (and which I certainly hope is not normal) is being consumed by the thoughts, repeating over and over again scenarios that might happen, in which she meets new (or in my head more often ex-boyfriends) guys and I end up feeling like a fool thinking that anyone could ever like me in that way.

I obsess over this, and every little thing that reminds me of her or the country where she's from even takes me back to that place in my mind. Even reading news from a country that she recently traveled to takes me back to the thoughts that I had on her meeting new guys there, even though I know now that it didn't happen and we stayed in touch almost every day despite lack of telecommunications in that country. And when she left, I was actually pretty okay till I realized how sad she was, that sort of proved to me that she actually liked me, but that just made the possibility of loosing that so much harder to bare.

Often it's difficult for me to separate these anxious thoughts from "real" and justified feelings. I don't expect to ever get to live in a world where I'm never sad or tormented by bad feelings, I just want to be able not to grab a hold of them and let them occupy my thoughts from the moment I wake up. I do think that somewhere deep down I know what feelings are my "real" ones, I just find it very hard to bring them up and let them replace the anxiety. Again, I don't expect not to miss her; missing her means that what we had was good, but I think that it's possible I'm not even letting the real feeling of missing her through because the negative anxiety-thoughts are crowding everything else out. I find it difficult even to go about with what I am supposed to do during the day because the anxiety is so overpowering at times.

Thank you for your excellent point on how being different isn't a bad thing. When I think above my anxiety I am proud of the person I am; I like to think that I am quite 'nerdy' in a way since I am very interested in the world around me, more so than a lot of people my age and I know that a lot of people consider me smart -- I am proud of this and I am proud of my achievements (some of which I will admit are in part caused by the feeling of a need to compensate for my lack of self-confidence in other areas), but part of me also resents me for not being one of the "popular" and "cool" kids in school, not having a real girlfriend till very late, etc.. I know that my perception of myself in this area, and the perception I had in school, is one of the major sources for my anxiety issues surrounding love and relationships. I guess I kept it hidden under the surface for long but and it all flared up when my anxiety kicked in like two and a half years ago.

I talk to a therapist once a week, it's been about two years since I started therapy and I guess that I have improved slightly. But then again I think that therapy has also made me so aware of the anxiety that I have made it into even more of a part of my existence than it used to be. I have chosen to not get any kind of medication for my problems, but I am up to a point where I feel like I just can't take this seemingly never-ending thing and that maybe meds would be of good help for me.

Again, thanks a lot for your help. Just some human contact on this sort of relieves it.

[ss_worrier]

Hey,

Again, thank you so much for your help. You've really helped me in handling my anxiety over the past days. Especially what you wrote about how I should admit to myself that my anxiety will make the "real" feelings stronger/worse was helpful to me, I think it helps in trying to distinguish the anxious feelings and thoughts from the "real" ones.

Like right now, when she just appeared online on Facebook, without writing to me -- at first her simply logging in gives me a lot of anxiety because I instantly feel the pressure to write the "right" things to her, to create the perfect and overtly rosy and romantic situations and mood that I tend to make up in my head, and ultimately, I guess, to make sure I don't get abandoned and left alone. If the mood and conversation isn't instantly "fun", flowing well, playing out as I imagine in it my ideal fantasy world, in my mind it tends to lead me to the conclusion that there is something wrong with me and that she doesn't like me anymore, we will never last, etc. It's up to a point were I find myself getting very surprised when that isn't the case, even though I know it rarely is.

Anyway, she logged in and isn't writing to me (I haven't written to her either) which makes me worry about her having lost interest, not wanting to talk to me, not liking me anymore, debating with myself whether I should take initiative and write and what consequences my potential actions may have -- way too much thinking for a very small event. I am writing about this both to vent (which I find helps more than anything else) and since it is a perfect example of how I tend to go on and beat myself up way more than I have cause for. Sometimes I wonder what the people around me would think if only they knew how I play them out in my anxious world of thought, it's even funny in a way ;-)

This problem of me admitting and realizing what my anxiety problem does to me sort of touches on something that I've been thinking about related to my therapist. Her philosophy is very clear on diagnosing -- she doesn't want to put labels on me, that isn't the way she works. She never told me about GAD or any other names for what I struggle with -- this was something I found out about when randomly flipping through a brochure at my regular doctor's office. She is a certified CBT-therapist and yes, I do recognize that what we do is CBT, at least to some extent. She tends to do a lot of listening, and a lot of times when she asks questions she does it in order to identify events in my childhood where my thinking patterns may have evolved from.

So far so good, but what does concern me is that we don't really do a lot of exercises. Yes, she has helped me in discovering a lot about myself and clearing up a lot of my thinking habits and to realize important things about myself -- for example, I am pretty sure that it was through her help that I came to realize that my last relationship wasn't really the ideal thing for me at the time, I don't think I would have been able to muster up the courage to break it off if it hadn't been for her. But on the other hand, I was expecting CBT to be more about her guiding me in my own efforts in getting rid of the anxiety, through excercises etc. I do keep an anxiety-diary from time to time, but I only do it when I can't find any other way of getting out of the anxious cloud at the moment, and she rarely asks me to send it to her. Sometimes I wish that the therapy form was more constructive, even though I usually feel better after talking to her. I guess the best sessions are actually those when I feel worse right afterwards, only to feel much much better later on during the day. We do therapy over Skype since I'm currently living abroad. And yes, I have been seeing the same therapist for almost two years.

Again, I find what you wrote about being different both comforting and very true. I am proud of the person I am, even though I will probably be followed by the chubby child-version of me for many years to come. My therapist thinks that I need to come to terms with "him", and to start the grieving over what I feel like I've lost during my childhood and earlier teens. I think she's right about that. A lot of times I find myself trying to figure out the thinking and the actions of others in order to determine my own, probably because out of pure reflex I deem my own behavior in certain situations to be wrong, due to bad self-esteem within those particular situations (again, mostly concerning love and relationships). But the truth is that there is no model for human behavior, and everyone reacts and acts differently to everything. I try to convince myself that there is no point in trying to determine what other people would do and how they would think when confronted with certain situations, because 1) it is technically impossible to get into the head of someone else, and 2) the most important thing is how YOU feel and what you want to do. Easier said than done though, obviously...

I will keep thinking about medication. For the moment I don't think I am ready for it. I feel too dependent on my creativeness and my curious "drive" in the work that I do, and while I'm pretty sure that my anxiety actually accounts for some of it, I'm too afraid of what would happen if I lost it. But sometimes I feel like the positive sides of medicines will outweigh the negative ones, especially since I suffer from a couple of pretty significant physical health issues that are likely tightly intertwined with my anxiety (I've had two surgeries for stomach disorders). So medication may be the healthy alternative.

Again, thanks so much for reading. It helps a lot. Sorry for the long-ish post.

/B