Dear mima37:

You are welcome.

I’ve suffered severe stress from early childhood and throughout childhood. That severe stress damaged my body, leading to OCD (including multiple compulsions, every hour, every day) and Tourette Syndrome. I no longer do the OCD compulsion for the last 25 years or so, but I do suffer from motor and vocal tics, although not at the severity of early on, but these tics still lower my quality of live every day, and significantly so, because a tic is involved with a subjective distress, and it happens multiple times per hour, all day long. So I know body damage as a result of stress.

You wrote: “I wish I knew how to work on the chronic stress response I’m stuck in and how to get out of the anxiety for good. Even though it’s much better I’m still stuck”- I used to hope that I will heal and no longer suffer anxiety; I used to hope that I will no longer suffer these tics. What I learned is that although I am healing, there is no way I can live long enough to heal completely. Healing of this kind is simply too slow. Even if life was unlimited in time, I don’t think all damage can be undone.

All we can do, I believe, is heal as much as is possible for us. No longer expecting complete healing is in itself healing. Like the Serenity Prayer I quoted yesterday, we have to accept the damage that we cannot heal, and heal the damage that we can heal.

With realistic expectations- we heal; having unrealistic expectations- we get stuck.

anita