Thank you anita for your compliment.  Thanks for sharing more about yourself Joanna.

I have found running a great meditative activity.  Animals are known for helping anxious people.  Therapy dogs are one example.  I have a dog myself.  They make great running companions.

I want to share what really worked for my anxiety for my running, sitting meditation and self talk helped but still was with me.  When I went to a Body Talk practitioner, she helped resolve my anxiety in two sessions.  I can give this particular practitioner’s name/website if you ask but you can Google Body Talk to find others out there.  Some have a You Tube channel.

Take care,
Mark

* Dear Mark: if you would like me to respond to your post above, will you copy and paste it into your own thread, maybe the one you started today? I will be glad to respond there (before or after I take my soon to be sixteen or so hours break from the computer).

anita

Dear joanna:

Regarding medicine, or psychiatric drugs: I agree with you, they don’t cure a thing. For the 18 years I consumed heavy doses of three psychiatric drugs every day (excluding those times I tried to stop, failed and took them again, before my final successful withdrawal), at times I felt better, but my functioning in life deteriorated during all those years, got worse and worse.

Regarding your sharing about your mother: I understand better what you needed your father to see, to notice. Your mother attacked you when angry, yelled at you, used you to make a point… she scared you. Your father, he was indeed your hope. If only he saw you, if only he saw you scared and suffering, maybe he will help you.

But your mother didn’t allow you to visit him and then he died. Your hope died. But you didn’t and so, there is still hope. This man, not your boyfriend, I understand, was your hope, still is.

Not that a better life for you is possible through this man, but your hope is in him. Just like it was with your father.

If you re-read our communication on your thread (I just did), there are plenty of potentially helpful thoughts and ideas there. Please do re-read at times, when calm. Somethings that escaped you before when you read, may sink in a second or third time.

You wrote that you keep analyzing your thoughts and behaviors but it never helps. You never feel safe, you wrote. I have input about this safe feeling that I didn’t present to you yet, and it may be helpful: when we are children there is much magic to our thinking. We imagine safety to be more wonderful than it is, a happily-ever-after, all sunny, dreamy like experience. Because as adults we cannot experience such a magical existence (except momentarily, with the help of powerful drugs… before they stop working), we fail to experience the safety feeling that is realistic and possible for us to experience.

In other words, our expectations of what safety feels like are too high and unrealistic, and in comparison to that expectation, any feeling of safety doesn’t measure up.

When you find yourself alone, no one there to yell at you (like your mother did), when you, for a moment, are not yelling at yourself, when all you can hear is silence- there is safety in that moment. Isn’t there? Will you make a moment like this happen in your day, or night, listen to that silence and tell me about it?

anita

Dear joanna:

You are welcome.

You don’t have to wait to Thursday for him to get his stuff. You can let him know that you need his stuff out today, or tomorrow. You can let him know that you need him to pick up his stuff today, or tomorrow. If he can’t, he can send someone else to do so. If that is impossible, you can gather his things and secure them in a place outside your home, maybe a storage place for a week, so he can go there Thursday to pick up his stuff, not in your presence.

Notice the following, if you will: is there a motivation in you to cause him to change his mind Thursday, to … make him love you this one last time?

Also, as you “overthink and get nervous about seeing him”, you can make this an opportunity, with a pen in hand, and list all the things you say to yourself, all those self blaming statements you make. You are welcome to share those here, it may be helpful to you.

anita

Dear joanna:

You wrote that “Surprisingly I do not hope for anything to happen between us anymore” but later on the same post you wrote: “That’s the thing I’m thinking the most now, that he will fix everything again”-

Well, how will he fix everything again if not by making something happen between the two of you?

Maybe at one point you lost hope, but then the hope re-emerged?

You wrote, if I understand correctly, that you chose to see him for the transfer of his belongings because you don’t want him to think that you are angry at him or that you miss him-

what does it matter what he thinks unless you still want him in your life?

anita

Dear joanna:

I understand. I understand “hope, however illogical” very well. You do have the option, I figure, to call him and let him know that you will be sending his stuff to him, but having the hope you do, I think you will be keeping the Thursday meeting. Do you think you will be thinking a lot about it from now till Thursday? Maybe if you wrote down a few scenarios of how it is likely to happen, you can plan for each one, plan what you will say and how you react.

Maybe such planning will reduce the amount of time you will be re-playing the anticipated event Thursday and feeling nervous?

* Will be back to the computer in about seventeen hours or so.

anita