Analogy...

[Beevee]

This just came to me (I'm supposed to be working 🙄).

Anxiety: You cannot see the wood because of all the trees.

Knowledge and understanding: You can now see the wood amongst all the trees.

Acceptance: Your pathway out of those woods.

❤

[MindfulMoment]

Can I just shrink you down and put you in my pocket and carry you around everywhere I go? I need a friend in my real life like you so much. I hope you know how much your understanding brings hope.

[Beevee in reply to MindfulMoment]

Thank you 😊. I have walked a mile (and more) in your shoes and just passing on the knowledge and experience gained.

Sufferers may have lost or feel that there is no hope but that is just because anxiety is making you feel that way. Accept it all. It's a bluff.

And, if people feel that they have reached rock bottom, all is not lost because the only way to go from there is upwards. 🌞

[MindfulMoment in reply to Beevee]

I wish that 20 years ago I had known these things. I wish along the way just one therapist would have stopped harping on breathing and just told me to let go. All the coping and counting and grounding and smelling this and reading that, none of it works until you let go. It was the missing piece I’ve been searching for my whole life. It’s the tool that never fails if I’ll just use it. You’re my lifeline right now so don’t go anywhere lol

[LifeIsThePitts in reply to MindfulMoment]

Read yours, Crystal-clear & Beevee's thread on anxiety forum yesterday.

I cannot agree with you more. Rewiring our faulty programming is like untangling a ball of 🧶 yarn after a box of kittens finish playing with it 😁

I'm in this process with you and Crystal-clear. It's foreign to feel good and I still feel guilty for feeling good. My default programmer/Inner child, AKA Bertha, still pushes the anxiety defcon 5 panic button 🔘 regularly. Suppressing this response is a challenge because fleeing and self isolation is the only blanket coping strategy I know. VERY infantile and undeveloped...sheer self preservation.

Feeling happy is foreign to us. We don't know what to do with it and our default safety net is to revert to "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Yeppers.... totally guilty here.🙋🤷🤦 desperately trying to replace old habits with new ones.

I fell victim to the idea that I needed to change myself into someone new. I've since revised that narrative from "change" to "accept". I'm trying to introduce myself to Me. I don't know whom I actually am as an adult...Im learning, though. I don't have to fix myself, I no longer refer to me as being broken or damaged goods. My defeatist mentality was detrimental and destructive to my fragile ego as a mental health sufferer... especially when the war was being waged on myself from within! I had to shed that illusion and stop the lies to start moving forward.

You're amazing and doing awesome things. Don't lose sight of your goals. The old programming will continue to run in the background and try to pull you into old patterns. Our emotional Factory settings are deeply entrenched in our automatic responses and rewriting the default setting is definitely taking me longer than I expected. BUT the difference is, is that I'm aware of it for the first time and actively doing something about it. I've wallowed and blamed many things and people for my shortcomings. It's time to take responsibility for my actions and improve myself from within. Grasping for society or outside influences to heal myself in the inside is a practice in futility and failure.... been there, done that, millions of times 🥴😶‍🌫️🤪 let's break the cycle together!!

[Beevee in reply to LifeIsThePitts]

Brilliant. You've got this. 💪🏼No one is "broke" so nothing needs fixing. Just acceptance.

[MindfulMoment in reply to LifeIsThePitts]

You wrote exactly my thoughts in such an elegant way. That’s exactly where I am. I have given myself the excuse that I can’t because of MY anxiety for too long. It isn’t my anxiety, it’s a chemical discharge when it isnt even necessary. My body is doing what it should just not at the proper time. I’ve allowed that stupid exchange of chemicals to control my entire life, who I am, what I do, how I connect, what I wear, how I see myself, what I’m capable of, and on and on. I have avoided living because it might be scary. Or I might panic. When the truth is, who cares… if I panic then it’ll pass and I might actually have fun. I want to live again, good, bad, scary, sad… I want it all. And I won’t stop until I get it.

[LifeIsThePitts in reply to MindfulMoment]

I love everything you just said!! LIFE is a whole range of emotions... good, bad, ugly, sad, happy, mad...we need them all to be well rounded and balanced individuals. I falsely believed that to be cured, I needed to banish all the icky hard emotions from my life. So untrue! The icky sticky yucky hard emotions are what make the beautiful ones so dang special and rewarding! ☯️

I used to have to have perfect makeup, perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect outfit in order to be seen in public. I'd never imagine going to work without my professional mask (🎭 mask-arade) on! We all know what that looks like. Heaven forbid if my perfectly coiffed hair was accidentally windblown between the car and the restaurant!! OMG 😱 my life was over due to a catastrophic hair emergency!

I haven't worn ANY makeup since 2016... saved thousands of dollars 💰 and I think I've had 4 haircuts since Aug '19 right before my second shoulder surgery. Seriously...no lie.

My physical health dumped on me after decades of untreated mental health took me down... the 2 are inexplicably intertwined and will definitely affect each other over time. 4 spine fusions in my back and neck, both shoulders reconstructed and gallbladder removed. 7 major surgeries in 5 1/2 yrs. My double neck fusion was April '22, 8 months after my gallbladder was removed.

That was my last procedure...and I vowed that THAT absolutely WOULD be my LAST surgical procedure! My husband just had his rotator cuff surgery a week ago today...I think I jinxed him 😆

I'm so thrilled you're on this awesome journey. Please keep us updated on your progress and share your challenges, too. We're all here to learn and support each other's successes and comfort our losses, as well.

Namaste ❤️🙏

[Beevee in reply to MindfulMoment]

You are SOOOO ready for recovery and kicking anxiety's butt, assuming it has one.

[Beevee in reply to Beevee]

If it does have a butt, it must have a face so give that a good slap as well 😆

[LifeIsThePitts in reply to Beevee]

Baby got back!!!....& front 😆imma gonna beech slap BOTH ends

[LifeIsThePitts]

I was just saying this yesterday! Until I could see the forest for the trees, I couldn't make progress in mitigating my wildly oscillating anxiety and depression. The big picture was completely out of focus... blinded by the trees of bad coping mechanisms and poor reactions based on an immature emotional IQ. My intellectual IQ & maturity far outweighs my emotional IQ. Childhood traumas, sexual abuse and losing my mom at 19 stunted me. Much of my emotional self is stuck at ages 4 and 19. I never grew up...I did not know how.

My mind matured but my emotional side didn't. I separated the two. I nurtured the smart but starved the emotional. My mental health has suffered dramatically. Then my physical health finally followed suit. The 2 go hand in hand. After nearly succumbing to s.i. in Jan '22, I started TMS treatment. That was the most significant event in my mental health history.

The doors have been opened and I'm constructively working through my issues by essentially reuniting my stunted pieces of self, like a dissociated family reunion, in my head. I've got to nurture the parts that need maturing and reunite them with my higher functioning intelligence. I've put my inner child in time out. Bertha NEEDS a vacation from running the show.

I'm moving forward slooooowly 🦥 but it's hard to unwire the faulty programming.

It's normal for anxiety and depression people to find it difficult to embrace Happy. Our default mode, or factory settings, are wired for discomfort. Shedding the illusion of trying to be something I'm not is falling by the wayside. I thought getting better meant becoming something other than me.... like I would never be enough as I am. That's not it. It's recognizing me for what I AM...not what I think I should be.

Learning to love what I have, not what (I think) I want😉🫂

[mizzou7016]

is the path out a bridge....or a trail.....sometimes if it is a trail.....the wood covers the path and we have to find an alternate route....

[Beevee in reply to mizzou7016]

Not a bridge. There may be stumbles and obstacles along the way but you don't go round them. You face them and overcome them by keeping moving forward. The pathway to recovery appears before you when you learn to accept. Setbacks are the signposts that tell you that you are on the right path and a measure of how far you travelled along that path to recovery.