Love yourself Jessa, only when you love yourself can you accept the love of others.

Hey Jessa,

The situation makes so much sense now. Thank you for telling me your story. I am really sorry you had to go through all of that. It strikes me that trust in itself is something that takes time to build or its something we instinctively know.

I do have one suggestion for trust issues – think of the people you trust a lot now in your life and why you can trust them so much. This kind of unconditional trust is reserved only for a few rare people actually.

The part that needs to be worked on is the defensiveness towards people outside of this circle – I am not asking you to blindly trust away but to take baby steps. I have come to realize that indeed there is a certain element of give and take in these situational relationships but the part that needs differentiation is what is actually malicious harmful situation and what isn’t. Your mind is on high alert and hence it likes to analyze as far as possible to avert this “perceived threat” – then you also have a secondary emotion of discomfort and guilt as to why you feel what you feel. The tendency to analyze facial expression is also your mind looking for “clues” and you get triggered further in some way.

Your past is very much rooted still in how you are responding to situations and therapy would be a great way to unroot the various blocks, learn ways to cope.

what do you think?

Regards,
Nina

Hey Jessa,

I am glad it was of some help. You aren’t the only one who does this – we all do to varying degrees. Our rational mind is very good at putting life into neat like compartments but frankly, the execution isn’t so simple for we are creatures of emotions and habits.

I would like to share though about the ways that have helped me with “obsessive worry” and “physical anxiety”.
Based on past experience, I feel there are usually two ways to cope with this kind of worry:

(1) Deflect (2) Dive

Everyday folks without a history of anxiety or neurotic tendencies dive into (1) as their coping means. But for people with anxiety or more distressing issues, deflect isn’t so easy actually because we are literally “reliving” something that started the problem in the first place.

What has helped me the most is to “dive” – “deflect” is now easier. By “dive”, i considered the thoughts i have when i have these anxieties – usually i use a messenger app to write a message to another fake account when the “thought vomit” comes – i write the worst possible version that my mind can come up with – usually a long angry rant about how the world is bad, people are mean, they always hurt me, they just want to use me blah blah…eventually i just calm down and i feel like i can have a more “rational” conversation with myself. I ask myself two things here:- “how true is this story you are telling yourself?” and “is the bigger picture of life still intact?” and i start writing the answers to that too. then i just delete the whole thing and never read it again.

This might seem like a rather long process to write this all down but it has helped somehow.

The second part of “dive” is an awareness about the things in my life that i actually like – no one has a perfect life but there are small things that do bring some happiness – Basically plain and simple gratitude for whatever i have in this moment…Positive energy is very important to make it easier to tolerate the negative ones. Some of the bad stuff can’t be rationalized away – we aren’t robots with switches but we can choose 6/10 times to focus on the “better” part instead.

The third part is “conditional exposure” to the source of discomfort – for example, if i dont trust people outside my comfort circle, then the way out is to simply take a chance once in a while (within sensible limits). I still have some levels of social anxiety but the way to break free is to do things that scare me in smaller doses – the tendency to over-think is still there but its lower when i am happier with my life and myself. My best friend is a great example of this – I have often mimicked her positive attitude many a times and this has helped a lot.

For the physical discomfort: The fourth is to simply space out somehow, go for a run or walk without the cell phone or just some good music on. Find that spot of “inner peace” in your mind.

I dont quite have perfect answers – everyone copes differently but i do hope that maybe something among this will help you. That worry that you feel, most of us actually do feel it at points in our life, so you aren’t alone in this at all.

Regards,
Nina