Living With Anxiety: For Women in Charleston, South Carolina
Anxious thoughts and the accompanying rollercoaster of emotions keep you feeling constantly out of control.
Anxiety has a really cruel way of getting into your head and making you doubt everything you think you know about yourself. Your rational mind can tell you everything is just fine and your anxiety is probably just playing tricks on you. But, once it hits, you’re lost in a sea of fear and self-guilt. Your anxiety may only show up in certain places, like at work, in relationships, or in social settings. But when it does show up, it feels like it’s killing you. Everyone else may see you as doing great but you feel like your head is barely above water.
In some ways, your anxiety may feel like it’s one of your greatest strengths.
It may be the reason you work so hard and have found so much success. But, it also might be the reason you can never feel at peace. Your anxiety may also protect you. It helps you realize what are threats and challenges and hyperfocusing on them may help you overcome them. You may have started to believe that creating your worst case scenario in your head before it happens is a helpful strategy, because you basically have already experienced the worst thing that could happen, so you can’t actually be hurt. Or, you may have found that ruminating about “worst case scenarios”, “what if” thoughts, and your endless threads of guilt helps you feel control in a world that feels so out of control.
From the stomach aches you’ve had before the game, to the dread of thinking about having to go to school, to the constant fear about what’s going to happen, it’s not fair to have had to experience so much agony for so long. Just because you’ve been dealing with it for as long as you can remember, doesn’t mean you have to deal with it alone, or that it won’t get better. If your anxiety has led you to a place of hopelessness or if your cruel anxious thoughts have taken over your belief system, it’s terrifying but it’s not true. You have a chance to live more congruently. The anxiety may always be there but it doesn’t have to hold you back so much.
For those whose crippling fear holds them back…
Whether your fear prevents you from going somewhere or doing something, or it just plagues you the entire time beforehand, it’s not fair that you have to feel this way. You are so capable even if you can’t see it. Your truth about what you can do is there under all of that fear and shame.
For those with constant guilt and self-doubt at the end of the day
We can be so much more brutal to ourselves than anybody else is. If you said the wrong thing, that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. If you made a mistake, that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. If you’re making up scenarios to feel guilty about, that underlying self-hatred can be let go of.
For those with an anxious attachment style…
Big changes take time and anxious attachment styles run deep. It's so frustrating to feel like you understand where your problems come from but not be able to move past them. Healing from the inside out and practicing communicating your boundaries and needs will help you shine in your relationships, just like you do in all the other areas of your life!
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