It's Baaaccckkkk

[KwanYingirl]

The percussive din of anxiety is at it again. All I wanted was to get to Boston and take my daughter and her boyfriend to see one of my favorite singer/songwriter/humanitarians, Bruce Cockburn. All last week it was gnawing at my edges, camouflaged as depression until I spoke the words "I have to visit my mother while I'm in the area". And that was that. Once I connected the cause of the riot in my body to my anxiety, it subsided. Do you have trouble, like me, to recognize the triggers of anxiety? What clues do you have that your anxiety is infiltrating your activities like a virus invading an unsuspecting host?

 

[Chava]

Yes! Sometimes I don't really recognize how stressed I am until I have an image in my head of setting myself on fire. HELLO! But more than anxiety I feel a weird sort of dread (doom, trapped, helpless)...like some kind of anxiety-depression hybrid. I feel stressed, physical pain gets worse, I feel generally negative and incapable of joy. Then a stressful thing passes that I didn't even know was stressing me and my mood shifts. So lots of times I notice it after the fact.

 

[greenleaf]

Over the years, I have become much better at identifying causes of some emotions, and the sequence seems more in awareness now. Anger at my abuser would sometimes go into floating anxiety so fast I wasn't even aware of the anger; took a long time to get that one, but now I can be aware of that sort of anger.

With other emotional reactions I still have to work hard at it and the emotion seems to have a really vague "shape" in a sense when I first manage to pin it down at all; something to do with how much I've processed the whole issue or something.