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Overwhelming Anxiety After Challenge

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sasuva

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I feel a crushing, literally destructive anxiety after I challenge myself to participate in a biweekly activity I have been attending my entire life. The issue I have with the activity is that it is imperatively important to me, this means more to me than my own comfort or any other interest. I have acted out the physical and emotional abuse I had suffered as a child, resulting in a most strict discipline to attempt to help me. It did. Through years of recovery and support I have found my own inner child and his desire to be safe in thought, feeling and action.

In this, in this one instance, every time I challenge myself to attend, to listen, I get destroyed. Spending minutes will overwhelm me or rush me, anxiety, chaotic, involuntary memories of mistakes I made or abuse done to me will overtake me. I need to shut down as it runs me over. Whether it was work, my family of origin, school friends, peers, authority, whatever, I have had to go through this process where I acclimated to the relationship, but I cannot with this.

What more information do you need to help me?
 
Whether it was work, my family of origin, school friends, peers, authority, whatever, I have had to go through this process where I acclimated to the relationship, but I cannot with this.

Try reading Treatment of complex trauma, It's a good book on the list of reomended books to read about all kinds of trauma.
 
Thank you Phoenixrising, I will look into the book, is there a portion of the book that you would recommend in this instance? I have read books, articles and blogs till I ache on the topics of PTSD, cPTSD, abuse, abuse recovery, triggering, coping mechanisms, grounding, centering, meditative and mindfulness. I have been to retreats, gestalt, experiential exercises, cognitive behaviour therapy (cbt), dialectical behaviour therapy (dbt), all those "t's", I have knowledge in my head, I am finding in this instance I cannot get it to my heart. I would like someone's experience who has worked through an overwhelming event such as this and what were they able to hold on to in the details that gave them the positive result of overcoming this issue. Currently, every time I challenge I re-traumatize and cannot access the issue for weeks.

Thank you for the suggestions, please keep them coming.
 
What I am beginning to understand is this part of the panic attacks I cannot work through at home, I need to go to the event, incorporate grounding, calming exercises and "witness" with respect the memories, flashbacks and trauma. I need to work through these, overcoming the emotions and definitively resolving the issues as far as I can myself. I need to once and for all let myself make mistakes, to feel and act in a not perfect way, I survived each and every perceived mistake or traumatic situation. I need to choose to remind myself that in learning from the "mistake", it becomes a good and pleasant part of me. I am a compassionate and caring person because of that experience, and whatever lessons I learned are now a "behavior", I do not need to keep dredging up the lesson, I have learned from it. I no longer need to look back, I like who I am.

There are many lessons to celebrate, it will be difficult, but I will do it. I will let myself feel the weight, the depth and breadth of how other's acted menacingly or badly around me, even how I acted out, even how terribly I behaved, that I did learn, I did survive and am now thriving. I have seen the positive results of this type of therapy, that it was not a struggle, but an embracing of safe, comforting new truths to replace the dysfunction in my thoughts and feelings.
 
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