Dear rainbowmystica:

When you made a choice to not worry and as a consequence of your choice, you didn’t worry- that was you exercising power over your well being. The more you are able to do it, the better.

Regarding not having others proud of your work, I suppose you mean your mother discouraging your writing… because of the severe lack of her support, you do need others’ support. One support source should be your therapist. But you need and will need others to be on your side, to encourage you. Get as much support as you can from non family people.

I think I know what happened to you watching the movie: first you were so involved in the movie, excited. You kind of forgot to be anxious. You were successfully distracted from your own anxiety. What felt normal is that you were present at the moment, involved with what was happening there. That does feel normal.

What happened after the movie is that you were no longer involved with something outside of you, and you became aware, again, of your anxiety . What happened soon after is you dissociated. This is what we do when we are too anxious- we get overwhelmed with fear; it becomes to us for us to endure, so we split our awareness from the fear.

You split from you, so the de ja vu, the double memory is a split of you (one memory) from you (the other memory).

Dissociation does feel like being not normal, strange, weird. I know it because I was often dissociated. When I was dissociated, split, I felt strange, abnormal. I thought there was something very wrong with me for feeling so weird, so abnormal. Looking back now, I know that dissociation is.. a normal reaction to anxiety. It protected me from feeling too much fear but the downside of it was that it felt so very strange.

Do you want to tell me about your idea for a story? I would very much like to know what it is…?

anita