Dear Javairia:

You express yourself so well: “When  there are days where I feel a dark, dark hole inside of me from early wounds, everything on the outside suddenly feels so blindingly bright. Everyone around me, they seem so happy.. Everything feels so bright and beautiful, and it hurts my eyes. ‘I’m alone existing separately from this beautiful world’, that’s how I feel.”- beautifully articulated.

“I was being TOTALLY illogical, right?”- you were anxious today, much because of the family role that was given you (I wish it wasn’t!), to call your father for money. Anxiety starts someplace and spreads from there, like fire. Your anxiety started with the thoughts of calling your father, and from there it spread to worrying you will not have enough time to study, and from there to comparing yourself to classmates, and from there to comparing yourself to anyone and everyone.

“If you know what to do or  not to if you fall into the sudden loop of reminiscing unpleasant/ hurtful events for an entire day?”- do any of the following at any one time:

1. Distract- examples, take a walk outside, or get up from your chair and move around the house, listen to music, watch some quality youtube, take a cold shower, or a hot shower.

2. Express yourself, like you did posting here.

3. Listen to a guided meditation, such as Mark William’s series of mindfulness meditations, starting with regulating your breathing, or do any Mindfulness Exercise.

4. Try to accept that these early wounds (which keep getting re-opened when you make that call to your father, for example) are going to hurt for a long, long time. Not all day, every day, but occasionally. It is pain that you have to live with, so better live with it as peacefully as is possible for you. Don’t resist this pain, tensing up, don’t run away from it, in your own mind. Relax instead, keep yourself calm, again and again.

5. About it being bright out there, and everyone being so happy except for you- that’s a delusion. It is far, far… far from being the truth.

anita