Anxiety, Be Gone!

Part of being on the Happiness Journey is figuring out how to stay there. It's about figuring out what DOES NOT make you happy or what stresses you out, and how to turn that into something happy.

I've always wanted to have a therapist. When I was going through the worst of my clinically diagnosed depression and anxiety (now I am living better through chemistry), I was seeing someone. My parents were gracious and understanding enough to help me not stress further over the money. But I went several weeks, and spent all the time just talking. I was never really given any advice or assignments to make me feel better. I was simply paying him to listen, when I was also being listened to by people who already knew me and wanted to help. It was very un-fruitful. What a disappointment.

I still would love to find someone. After being tremendously (and quite often) highly anxious for so long, I pretty much refuse to take any of it in anymore. It scares me now when I feel like I'm about to have a panic attack because I don't want to fall back into that yucky place. So when something comes up that I don't want to deal with or don't know how to deal with, I want to and often do shut down.

Not so good. I feel like a therapist would help me through this stuff. After all, SARK has written in her books about proudly seeking mental health professionals, since it's a part of our health too. Go to the general practitioner, your ob/gyn, and a therapist for optimal health. Makes sense to me.

I don't know how to find a good one, but I've thought a lot about it in the last week. Now that all this has come to light recently too (about not wanting to perpetuate un-happiness cycles), I think I might be able to approach things in a different way. And fortunately, I have a very supportive and logical (but sensitive enough) husband to really help me along the way.

So when I see something yucky on the horizon, I am now DETERMINED to nip it in the bud, before anything anxiety-inducing ever comes to fruition. It may take a while for this to become my new habit, but it's a new self-promise.

Hopefully, by writing this, I will become more accountable to myself and cyberspace.