Anxiety; Getting to the Root of the Matter

Detoxing your thought life can be work. I am not going to lie to you about the fact that anything in life that is worth anything will require work. Are you up for the challenge? I used to wonder all the time why do I feel like this? This overwhelming sadness that would come to haunt me and the fear that would rise up in my chest that would send my heart pounding like crazy! Yet I had no control over these sensations of anxiety when they started. I would wind up in the ER and my doctors office time and time again, I mean it got to the point to where I believe I could have hooked up the EKG machine myself. My kids would wonder what the heck is wrong with mom. I was a wreck!  So how do I get rid of these insane symptoms that keep happening to my body? Well it’s been a long road to get me to where I am today and believe me those sensations of anxiety try to rise up but I quickly get rid of them so they do not get to ruin my day. Now I have control over what I feel and this is how I did it.

Our minds thought processes are very powerful and our thoughts create our reality in this world. So what we believe and think are important. We cannot just allow random thoughts to roam around in our mind, we must begin to recognize and stop negative/toxic thoughts that lead to negative emotions. For most people including me there was a time when I did not give a thought about what I thought about and or how my thought life could negatively affect my body. I would just allow random thoughts to float in and out of my mind without ever examining those thoughts to see if they where even healthy for me to be thinking about. So I saw a therapist who told me my problem was in my mind and what my mind was telling my body to respond too. I was like Huh? What do you mean? She started to take me to my past and that is where it all got revealed.

The root matter

I remember living in uncertainty even as a child. When my step-dad would come home night after night drunk we would feel scared and those feelings of fear and uncertainty ruled my everyday life because I didn’t know what he was going to do next. Well I never knew how important the impact of these experiences would have in my adult life. Sometimes we gravitate toward the same toxicity that causes us anxiety because it’s familiar. Humans like to feel comfortable and we will gravitate towards things or individuals that are familiar even if those things and people are toxic. Growing up I still found myself in toxic dysfunctional relationships because they were familiar and though this sounds strange the toxic/negative life is what felt comfortable to me. My relationships where hard ones, I gravitated towards relationships that kept me feeling uncertain.  On my road to healing I found out that uncertainty was the culprit to my unhappy reality. My experience growing up was groomed in fear, me and fear where best friends. I found out that my comfort was the cause of my anxieties.  My mind kept trying to sub-consciously catapult me into a place where the negative/toxic familiar feelings resided. Anything that felt like uncertainty triggered anxiety. I know it sounds crazy but it is real.

So I had these thoughts that I would allow to roam around in my head, like," you will never amount to nothing in this life" and "who do you think you are anyway, you can't do this.". I wanted to branch out on my own and write but my thoughts concerning writing where toxic so whenever I would try to write I would get anxiety and feel like a failure and I would just stop writing. Thoughts of rejection rolled around in my head nonstop. The feelings of rejection that plagued my childhood were ruining my life. I would subconsciously also seek out ways to feel rejection because I needed to feel that comfortable familiar feeling. So my thoughts were saying stay from anything that rejects me, (feeling of rejection cause serious anxiety symptoms in your body because it tells your body that something is wrong) but on the other hand I had a need to feel the pain of rejection as well! My minds thought processes where in total contradiction of one another. So there was constant turmoil happening in my mind. I found out that the root of my anxiety was uncertainty. If someone is dependable and reliable I pulled away from them because my minds thought processes viewed this as unfamiliar so it rejected these normal dependable reliable feelings. This caused me more turmoil in my mind, see my mind would not allow me to recall goodness only pain stemming from fear and uncertainty. So when I met anyone who wanted to have a relationship with me that showed signs of uncertainty I gravitated towards them, I gravitated to what felt familiar but caused me so much pain.

 My relationship with God he has taught me how to face what I want to hide from.  When I feel anxiety start to manifest in my body, I set myself down and begin to ask myself some questions. What am I feeling? Is this feeling real or does it remind you of another place from a past experience? Asking myself these questions helps me to identify the truth about my circumstances and emotions. It is important to identify what it is that you are feeling, we have to dig deep to find the answers to why we feel what we feel in order to stop anxiety’s ugly reign in our lives.