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VidaliaTheOnionQueen
4,512 M Seeking Light 6
PathStep 7 Compassion hearts164 Forum posts7 Forum upvotes9 Current upvotes9 Age GroupAdult Last activeSeptember, 2021 Member sinceMarch 25, 2018
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I defeated my depression by winning small battles against my anxiety
Anxiety Support / by VidaliaTheOnionQueen
Last post
 July 15th, 2018
...See more I've had anxiety and depression since I was 6. I became more aware of it as I got closer to adulthood. I had used dissociation to cope early on, but I didn't realize this until recently. I use to think that my anxiety and depression were two separate issues, but in my mid 20s I realized that my anxiety caused most (if not all) of my depression. And when I say "anxiety", I don't just mean social anixety. I have anixety about cooking, cleaning, drawing, crafting, exercising, going outside, being in a moving vehicle, etc etc... Anxiety has been controling my life like an overprotective parent and ruining it. The funny thing about anxiety is that it can be irrational or rational fear. The latter is harder to fight. Anxiety is basically instinct, one that may or may not be helpful.​​​​​ We cannot hide from every non life-threatening threat forever. We'll never experience a proper shred of life that way. But fighting the subconcious is hard. We're not exactly in control of it. The brain can process a bad experience with something and label that something in general as negative. So, when you ever think about trying it again, your brain will be like, "No, fam, that brings pain." Bam, now you have anxiety over something that might not even turn out bad next time. I believe the biggest fear that anxiety stems from is fear of failure, including rejection. It can hurt our pride and/or or make us feel grief for what we ruined. It can make us feel worthless. It's that feeling of worthlessness that makes me become depressed. And the more I go on not proving myself wrong, even if it's by lack of trying, the more I beleive I'm worthless. I combatted feelings of worthlessness by bullet journalling. I started by listing goals. No matter how big they were. Then I went under them and wrote out smaller goals I needed to complete in order to reach those bigger goals. I did the same for those sub-goals and so on until I reached goals I felt capable of doing. The goals I felt capable of doing didn't have to meet regualr standards for a "goal". They could have been something as simple as doing the dishes. Now, for a "normal" proper functioning person, these goals wouldn't be much of a win. However, for someone who sturggled to get up and do even the smallest of things, it as a win for me. It took more effort and will power for me to do such small things than it would for them. The point was that I recognized my small wins. The more small wins I completed, the more I felt comfortable doing them and the more capable I felt of doing something "harder". I never looked at the biggest goal or how far away I was from completing them. Completeing them wasn't really the point. It would be nice to complete all the goals, but the main point was to improve myself by doing something productive. Not looking at the end goals took away the part of anxiety that repeatedly tells you it's pointless and you'll never make it. To help keep that part of anxiety even further away, if I didn't complete the goal in the time I had set or I utterly failed the goal, I would just push it back to be completed or retried later. When they were completed didn't matter. All that mattered is that they get completed at some point. Starting off without serious expectations made it easier for me to start on goals and progress. I was striving for progress not perfection. I would write more about it, but I don't want to make this any longer.
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Dissociating: My social anxiety causes me to dissociate and it's ruining my life
Anxiety Support / by VidaliaTheOnionQueen
Last post
 April 3rd, 2018
...See more Dissociation can be a great way to cope with thngs that bother you, to help you talk about and address it. However, this isn't coping. This is involuntarily running away and it is ruining my life because it's making it impossible for me to function. I don't completely understand my social anxiety, but I do know it stems from at least 4 things: 1) The fear that I'm going to do something stupid on accident. 2) The fear that there will be an akward misunderstanding. 3) The fear that people are going to harshly judge me due to something stupid I did. 4) The fear that people are going to harshly judge me due to a misunderstanding, And then these fears create this stress on me which then cause me to fumble and stumble and do exactly what I was afraid of doing. And then it just gets worse from there. I have a horrible time acting on my feet and smoothing over situations when I know very well what's going on through other peope's heads, especially when you can see it on their faces and/or hear it in their tone. My mind immediately jumps to, "This is impossible and pointless. They'll never change their mind about this situation and me." And I feel this way because that has been my experience multiple times throughout life. People get this impression of someone and they hold onto it stubbornly, especially when it's negative. It's like they just want to have a reason to hate you or think little of you. When you try to explain the misunderstanding or how you're not always this stupid/awkward, they just scoff like, "Yea, right. Sure." There's something extremely discouraging about people implying you're lying when you're actually giving them the dead honest truth. So, I cope with the stress of my social anxiety by involuntarily dissociating. It's possibe that it somehow started off as voluntary in the very beginnng by deciding to just ignore everything and eveyone, shutting myself away, but now it's like an instinctive defense mechanism. And I never realized I did this or how bad it was until now. I was aware of the feelngs I would have, but I didn't understand them. I didn't know what it was or why it happened. As far as I knew, this was completely normal. When I dissociate, I zone out. I feel detached from my body. I don't care much about what's going on around me, only what I'm trying to focus on. Yet everything is so loud around me, it almost makes me jump. I almost cannot understand anything that's happening around me, being spoken to me, or even what I'm trying to focus on. I feel like I need to concentrate on every action and word I make. This can cause me to freeze up, stutter and hesitate often, or come off as robotic. Usually it makes me seem like a malfuctioning robot. I won't even be able to do the simpliest of things, such as walk. It's overwhelming and I often end up walking or sitting around in a state of shock. This was all especially bad when I was working. Most easily available jobs are customer service oriented. That's always bound to have the most pressure, confrontation, and misunderstandings. It throws the worst people at you. You have to deal with the most bitter, self entitled, and judge mental people while also having to think on your feet to smooth things over. The drama with my coworkers did not help. Sometimes it was caused by misuderstandings and other times it was unprovoked. The anxiety of my job caused me to involuntarily dissociate horribly and ths affected my work performance which caused me more stress and anxiety. It was a vicious circle. I have since quit my job and never looked back. I'm trying to find a way to function as an adult without the stress of having to socalize with coworkers and employees, because I have no idea how to stop this dissociation nor how to get rid of my social anxiety when it's not even an illogical fear.
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