Dear Aislynn:

What a post! Still amazing to me how well you write, no matter how you feel there is this one constant: good, detailed writing. No doubt in my mind you are a skillful and talented writer.

As to the content of your post: yes, a regression in well being it is, and each one of those is also an opportunity to walk farther along the path of healing, as I call it.

I could relate so well to everything you described so well: the nausea and feeling like vomiting, the cold (goosebumps) and hot sensations, the lying in bed awake… the OCD thoughts of leaving the light on and so forth. And I know the panicky feelings, getting scared of the fear itself and how worse can it get, adding fear to fear.

When I got off the anti anxiety pills I was on for so many years I got those anxiety attacks. A few days after I gradually stopped taking any of those pills, that one evening, I felt the fear increasing in me and I thought to myself: I have to get back on those pills, I can’t handle this! And then I remembered an exercise I did before and tried it and it worked!

This is the exercise: when you are significantly afraid and the fear is escalating, you become mindful of it, meaning you become aware that not ALL of you is scared, only part of you. You move yourself from being suffocated underneath the fear, freeing yourself that way so that you can position yourself side by side to the fear and observe it. You position yourself so you are no longer one with the fear but you can observe it from another part of your brain.

It is like you can look at your foot and see your big toe. The big toe is part of you but it is not all of you. It is there, you can see it, but you can see it from a distance away. And if the toe hurts, it hurts, just it, not all of you.

There are more thoughts I have about your post, but this exercise here, I wonder if you can practice it next time…Please do post again and again… You are doing very well in this non linear process, Aislynn!

anita