Dear June:

You are welcome and thank you for checking in with me, good to have a conversation with you! I prefer autumn and winter over a hot summer anytime, particularly when it comes to a hot and humid summer, unless I am all in the water of the Mediterranean sea: the only body of water I’ve been in that is not too cold, and the only escape from the summer heat and humidity that I knew as a child.

“The more that I try to push down my anxiety, the more it want to explode“- the nature of emotions and emotional states (like anxiety) is that the more we re-press, the more the emotion ex-presses, ex-plode. What we push down must come up.

“Sometimes I just have to…be present… acknowledging that I have those feelings and thoughts but also I can defeat it myself, it’s in a weird way for myself is liberating“-

– the more we deny or minimize our feelings (emotions), the more they grow and take over. Acknowledge them and they shrink and retreat. The problem is that unless an emotion/  anxiety is intense, we don’t notice it, so it grows. Key is to acknowledge anxiety when normally we won’t be paying attention, which means to plan to acknowledge it periodically during our waking hours, and be present with it.

anita