How I successfully cope with Anxiety

I decided to set up this website because I don’t want the struggle I went through to be your struggle. I want to spare you some of the anguish and confusion that I experienced of not knowing what was wrong with me emotionally. I know there’s a lot of people who feel “lost” and “confused” emotionally and are not really sure how to find a way out. The fact may be that you feel the way you do because of what happened to you. What you experienced. Your emotional response to that event or events may be completely normal. How your body has coped has kept you alive and for that its done its job well. However, learning to change your bodies coping mechanisms that are at times unhelpful and addressing your pain directly can be a helpful solution to healing and improving your overall emotional health.

I would like to share a bit of my story so that you can understand how I came to this realization.

My Personal Experince

When I look back on my life the most difficult thing that happened to me was when I was 16 is my father unexpectedly passed away of natural causes. I had left for school in the morning saying goodbye to my father as he left for work. In the evening instead of seeing my father, I was greeted by a policeman and a family friend who proceeded to inform me that “there’s been an accident..I’m sorry to inform you that your father passed away”.. My father had died of unexpected natural causes. None of us saw it coming, it was totally unexpected. While my family reacted with immediate tears, I mostly reacted with numbness. I pretty much shut down. In hindsight this was due to the timing of the event. My father died while I was in the midst of dealing with common issues that teenagers face, issues that to a young mind feel overwhelming at the time. As a result, I was a young guy unprepared to deal with an emotional blow of such magnitude.

My brain and body in an effort to cope with the fallout, coped by attributing all the added pain and suffering to other factors not my fathers death. I was so disconnected from my feelings at that point that I really believed and felt my fathers death was not “that big of a deal” and that it wasn’t the real cause of my upheaval. Instead of dealing with the difficult emotions of grief, I continued in the same pattern as before obsessing about things that happened in the past (not related to my father) and ruminating about what I could and should have done differently. This maladaptive coping mechanism only got more ingrained as the years passed and unfortunately and understandably I felt completely stuck and unable to move on and cope with life.

This behavior continued for A LONG time. It got so bad that I was displaying all the symptoms of pure-0 OCD. All the checking and rechecking, trying to counter negative thoughts with positive ones, and all the mental compulsions to quell my anxiety.¹ I was inside my head constantly. I still held down a job and carried my responsibilities as best I could but was emotionally shut down. I ground my teeth at night, everyday felt difficult, and I was temperamental. In spite of these challenges I maintained a relationship and got married but the mental compulsions and obsessions continued.

I might mention that during this long period I tried to find solutions. I went for help (though limited). I scoured the internet. Mostly everything I came across was a dead end. I tried exposure therapy on myself but it made things worse for me at least. I refused to go on meds because I didn’t want to complicate my situation with drugs (though I understand some may need to go on professionally prescribed meds in order to cope with their situation).

I didn’t make any headway until my wife read a book called The Body Keeps The Score. My behavior and symptoms lined up with a person who has trauma. I never thought loosing a loved one unexpectedly at a young age could cause trauma. But it can.² It took me a while to realize and come to grips with the fact that it was in fact not dealing with my fathers death by acknowledging its real impact on my life and emotions that was the cause. Once I came to grips with this fact then I began the difficult “rehab” period. I began to try my best to stop the maladaptive coping mechanisms that by now had become almost automatic for me. I began to address the feelings, such as the heavy sadness I felt from the loss. I talked about my father, and about his death and how it made me feel. I wept about it. I also wrote about it and expressed how I felt by listening to music. As time went on I began to open up more and more. At the same time I noticed I started to feel a bit better. I began to not feel the need as much to obsess and “run” in my head. I also noticed that the anxiety I felt overwhelmingly when I got randomly triggered and in social situations, began to subside slowly over time. I started to realize that the anxiety I felt was a secondary emotion, the primary one being sadness.³ I began to feel more calm in these situations and to actually “feel” the people in the room and to feel what I was actually feeling.

Today I feel that I have improved substantially. My wife has said that my change is like night and day. Its been a lot of work to get to this point. I gradually unlearned bad habits and learned to address the truth of what I felt. Stopping the obsessions and compulsions in my head and addressing the feelings driving them. Sitting with these emotions and pain and moving on with my day without doing the unhelpful mental exercises though very difficult has been the breakthrough that I needed.⁴ Now I am much more hopeful of the future and have more room emotionally to enjoy life and connect with people. I am slowly but steadily regaining my emotional strength. The results speak for themselves.

I understand that everyone’s “traumatic” experience is different. I use the word trauma as more of a general term because I know that PTSD is a completely different thing than what I experienced.⁵ What I have learned though is that if you are dealing with anxiety, depression and other emotional challenges, its a good idea to fist investigate if there is an underlying cause. While depression for example can result from a complex interaction of social, psychological and biological factors, people who have lived through abuse, severe losses or other adverse events are more likely to develop depression.⁶ The same goes with anxiety. While there can be other factors that cause anxiety, the fact is that trauma and chronic anxiety go hand in hand.⁷ So again it is good to first reflect on any major traumatic experiences or periods that you may have gone through in the past and never sufficiently addressed. Of course everyone is on a spectrum and some “bad” experiences are worse than others. Diagnosing the symptoms is a start but looking under the rocks at what might be causing your diagnosis is good to consider. Its sort of like the difference between fire and smoke. When you hear a fire alarm its annoying but its not the cause. The cause is the fire itself. Sometimes fires are not immediately obvious. They can hide inside walls and in other areas of a building. But its essential to find that fire and address it or it will keep burning out of control. Continuously turning off alarms never works as long as the fire burns and the smoke from it keeps tripping them.

If any of what I am saying resonates with you please consider my other articles. I want to point out that I am not a doctor of any sort. So take what I say for what its worth. The conclusions I have drawn are based on my own experience and what I have observed with other people. I also draw a lot from the research I have done. I guess in the end you must test a theory before it becomes a fact for you. So you won’t really know if what I’m saying is true until you apply it and if it actually improves your situation. Hopefully, there’s something of what I have said that you will find helpful.