Ed
I personally think that you might be thinking to much into things . Your looking well in the past and looking for what the problem could be now based on that.
I think this is a huge problem with most therapy . You fix the now then go back and work on what may have caused it .
I try and explain what i mean .
Anxiety is not a disorder on its own . Anxiety is the reaction to a disorder , It is the thoughts and fear behind things . I believe that what is behind things is stress and stress alone . As we recover and start to take control over things then the anxiety tones down , we become less scared, less reactive and less worried about the symptoms . But that does not mean that they are not hard to live with and cause us stress. It takes time to come down from such a high , it never just stops over night.
As we become less reactive to the symptoms of a whole, our anxiety drops and stops feeding the stress it causes . As this happens the stress on our body drops and we slowly start to settle .
But this takes time and takes effort on many levels to come about . As this happens things in our life will cause additional stress and increase sysmptoms. It is very important to see thing and to not go looking into the past to much in order to look for the cause of things.
Remember that stress in peoples life will cause you to feel stressed. But in a normal person it is not as bad . But in a person that is recovering from really high stress then it will take a bigger effect .
In the last month - six weeks my symptoms have increased but my anxiety has not . In those weeks i have had the flu , children home from school annoying me, cold weather has increased and to top it all off i have tried to cut my finger off which has stopped me doing alot of things i want. All this has been stressful as i expect that it would be to anyone . But it is important that i understand that it has increased my symptom because my body is still in recovery mode. It is important as hard as it is that i accept this and do things that will help my body heal out of this stressful time rather than feed it with more worry and fears .
I personally believe that a short cause of benzos would help you . It will help get your body settled quicker . I wonder if SSRI would be of any benefit long term and if they would in fact harm your recovery more . But the one thing i would be doing is stepping up the things to help your body recover quicker.
In short i think that you have just hard a really stressful few weeks and are focused on the over all problem than just looking at the stress these few weeks have caused .
Not sure if you ever read my post but this is how i see my anxiety and it might help explain a bit better what i mean
http://anxietyforum.net/forum/showth...My-philosophy&
Remember its not backwards , just a bump in the road .
cheers