Dear Kodi:

I read your 2016 and your 2017 threads where we communicated. I read your current post. I see you as a very conscientious, caring and responsible mother, wife and employee, very caring to not stress your husband, not wanting to negatively affect your son, and caring about doing a good job as an employee.

You have suffered from severe anxiety and depression since you were a teenager. You tried everything, including supplements, medications, therapy and yoga. Currently, at 40, anxiety and depression are killing you slowly and painfully, and you are utterly exhausted from all the fear, frustration, anger, depression, irritability, and guilt.

“I try so hard to turn the negatives into positives, but it seems that whenever I do, something goes wrong…. I feel like I’m out of options“-

– Maybe you are not out of options: maybe you have an option you did not adequately explore, and that is to no longer try so hard to turn the negatives into positives. Maybe if you accept the negatives, they will become less scary, think of the negatives and take deep breaths as you do.

“I know logically that I have a wonderful life but it’s completely passing me by“- the way we experience life is emotional, not logical. To experience a wonderful life emotionally, we need to be less afraid.

I am taking a moment right now to do what I suggested just now that you do… I just did, just a few moments. I imagined the things I am personally afraid of, bad things happening to people I care about. At first I had to remind myself that thinking/ imagining such things will not make them happen in real life, that my thought don’t have that kind of power. Next, I breathed slower and I felt depressed, but calm. Then I started to imagine myself panicking in the future when this or that happen, and felt that I should stop imagining my reactions to bad events and focus just on the events themselves.

Do you want to try it yourself? I think that it can be helpful to allow these thoughts and images to be. They don’t hurt anyone in real  life, and when I just allowed them to be, I felt an unexpected relaxation. Again, I remind myself (and let you know) that in no way do I want the things I imagined to happen, and I will give my life in an instance for these things to not happen. Thing is, me being so afraid is not helping anyone.

You say: “anxiety and depression are killing me“- it is the thoughts and images of bad things happening that are killing you, correct? So, when you sit comfortably in bed or on a sofa, somewhere comfortable, and when you are alone and it’s quiet around you: think those thoughts, imagine those things that scare you so much (minus your reactions to such things happening) while breathing slowly. It may work for you just as it did for me.

anita