Dear Karen:

Reads like the past experience of your teenage years when you got drunk and did things you regret was triggered 6 weeks ago when you got drunk from that free wine you mentioned.

Anxiety is like a sticky substance. It got stuck now to your relationship with your partner.

It is time to attend competent, quality psychotherapy, is it not?

anita

Dear Karen:

You can get instant but temporary relief by any number of unharmful activities such as exercise, a long, fast walk, yoga, guided meditation (the mindfulness theme), a hot bath or a cold shower, spending time in nature and so forth. There is value to these healthy distractions. A break from obsessing is a good thing.

There is a panic element to anxiety and extreme thinking results. In the very title of your thread, “ruining my life”- that is extreme. Look at all  the parts of our life that are okay, you are still sheltered, fed, still in a relationship with a good man, you are waiting for therapy, dedicated to healing, so your life is not being ruined and fast.

Try to not  panic. I suffered from OCD for decades. The good news is healing is possible and available to you. It takes time, it is long term, it may not be complete, but it is possible and available. If you do take a walk nature,  in a wooded area perhaps, look around you at all the trees that have been injured, how they heal. They don’t even try. There is healing in nature, available to all living things. It happens all the time.

I will soon be away from the computer for about 15 hours. I hope other members will answer you before I am back. Feel  free to post anytime. If you do, I will answer you when I am back.

anita

Dear Karen:

“with a flash my mind becomes cloudy again”- this is the anxiety triggered, chemicals in the brain released and the cloudy experience is the result; chemicals are released to the rest of the body and you feel  sick to your stomach.

The process of healing involved different strategies. One is how to calm yourself, so that you have more and more “moments of clarity” and less and less of that cloudy experience. Guided meditation and mindfulness practice are two ways to use for this purpose. Then there is the uncovering of the origin of your anxiety, early childhood experiences. There is also the learning and improving of communication skills with others, assertiveness skills. There is the element of selecting your interactions and relationships with others, letting go of the people in your life who encourage your anxiety.

anita

Dear Karen:

Do you remember being anxious as a child, before you were a teenager?

anita

Dear Karen:

What were you worried about when you were a young child?

anita

Dear Karen:

Looking at the beginning of your anxiety will not resolve your anxiety, it will only help as part of the healing. According to your one or two liner responses to my questions, reads to me that indeed it is uncomfortable to go back there.

It is for me too. It is scary for anyone and everyone to become aware of time of acute fear. Interestingly, I never re-experienced that fear of long ago. What I  experienced instead was fear every day, fear attaching itself to this, that and the other thing.

Going back to the past, for me, has been understanding more thoroughly the fear of then. Didn’t re-experience it though. It may not be possible to re-experience it because  of the long established and reliable dissociation, that “one big dream” experience.

anita

Dear Karen:

If you want, you can tell me more about what thoughts you experience  when things are “imperfect, out of my control or unfinished”, a couple of examples, perhaps, as well as anything else you would like to share that may be relevant, you can do so in one post or in a series of posts as things occur to you.

I will be away from the computer for about fifteen hours.

anita