There are reasons why you are the way you are now, but you’re probably so exhausted by trying to cope that you have no real idea how all this happened.
see them as the bad thoughts leaving your mind
The thing with stress and anxiety is that it grows on you, there is a sliding scale: stress, strain, anxiety, acute anxiety, depression, and it’s so easy to slide down that scale without realising that you joined it in the first place.
You start as a perfectly normal person, coping with your everyday life, then suddenly you feel frightened, tired, anxious about the smallest things, and you have to turn the light on and off 3 times every time you use it in case some bad, unknowable thing happens if you don’t.
Journal to take control
Find the Reasons
Forget everything else that anyone says about you and your state of mind, and start keeping a journal noting what’s happened to you in the past, and what’s happening now.
It’s really important that you understand this yourself, and don’t take other people’s words for what happened. It doesn’t matter what would or would not affect them, or how they perceive your life, how they think they would have handled, or handle, it, it only matters that you have been affected by it.
Trust Yourself First
You may not feel like a highly reliable person as you cower under the bed clothes unwilling to face another day, because life is just too much, but you are the authority on yourself, and you need to respect that idea.
I was constantly told I was an idiot, and when I went through this process I’m suggesting to you, I was stunned by how many real things had happened. It was years later that someone who had known me almost my entire life told me that I’d had the hardest life emotionally of anyone they’d ever met, and I didn’t deserve a moment of it. Hold on to that idea too.
So…
- Create a journal, focus on what has happened to you, but be bland about it, don’t get into the emotions, look for the facts.
- Then start writing in that journal daily, note where you’ve struggled, what has happened, and how you felt about it.
None of this is negative, this is information, it is knowledge, it is power. Just don’t use the journal as an excuse to dwell on what’s happened. If you dwell on the past it becomes your present and carries the attitudes, feelings, and decisions, that will become your future.
“The past isn’t just over, it literally no longer exists.” Gregg Braden
Deb Hawken 