Anxiety (Fear) and Facing/Avoiding the Unknown

[katz]

Yes, and I hear you. I call it anticipatory anxiety; that might be the technical term as well? For me, it has to do with my expectation that something will always go wrong and I won't have control of it or my responses. I think it has to do with not being able to protect myself in the past or in trusting the wrong people and having had so many things go wrong that have resulted in harm to me. I work at this off and on to smooth out my anxiety, but it stays up around a 10 most days. It makes life, making decisions and following through on almost all tasks very complicated and exhausting.

Hoping you find some peace about this and a way to cope or deal better with it.

Thank you for putting it this way. It pointed out a few new things for me to think about.

I can relate to this - I think it was more generalised anxiety related for me than PTSD. With the anxiety - I don't like the thought of not knowing what will happen. With PTSD it's more thinking something bad WILL happen.

But I completely understand the worry that something will go wrong or you will be humiliated, as it happens to me all the time.

I found writing down the possible outcomes and the likelihood that it will happen, and what you will do if it does happen helps me a lot. Because it let's you see logically, that anything bad is unlikely to happen, and that you will have a plan in place if it does.

This is one of the coping tricks that one of my childhood T taught me. I just ask myself "what is the worst thing that can happen?" Then I can be prepared for "that". And I end up finding out that the outcome is no where near as bad as I expected it would be. I then find out that I can handle it. Which makes me proud of myself.