Anita,

THANK YOU. Truly, just thank you. Your advice and replies are so helpful. I will absolutely try the NPARR method. I am happy that I have another tool in my toolbox to use when the anxiety returns.

I love what you said about the setbacks being apart of the process. It helped put things into perspective for me.

As for the guilt trips with my family – my plan is to try and recognize when they are happening and in a polite way share with them how it is making me feel. This will be very hard for me but it is my goal to communicate my feelings with my family more and hope that they respond well. If they don’t, Im not sure what my plan will be but I know I need to hold firm in setting the boundaries I need. Wish me luck! Lol

thanks again,

nala1234

Thanks for checking in again. Life has just gotten busy so I have had less time to post. But I really really appreciate you being here.
Overall though between therapy and posting here, I have started to feel a lot better with the relationship  anxiety.  I have been able to really calm down and feel connected with my boyfriend which had been hard for me to do when my brain was doing everything in its power to push me away from him.

Through your help as well as my therapists, I have been able to see and realize that how self sabotaging I am and how over the last few months, I have not been talking to myself, about myself in a nice way. Due to this, all of the brokenness inside me from past family and friend relationships, need to heal.

I have been working on my life timeline and allowing pieces of myself come up, sit with those feelings and really try to come to peace with it and forgive. It has been quite the week, but I think I am on the right path. I would say over the past 4/5 days I haven’t had any intrusive thoughts about my relationship. I still have a lot of physical anxiety, and intrusive thoughts about other things, but it seems to have taken a shift from my relationship and I am now able to focus on me. It’s not perfect, I sometimes need to remind myself that any thoughts that come up are allowed. I have such a fear of the relationship anxiety I do not want to just push it away. My goal is to just let anything and everything come up and figure out what those thoughts are making me believe about myself and sit with that belief. My therapist has been having me focus on this and so far it has been really helpful.

I do wonder why there is such a sudden switch though as to why the intrusive thoughts have just stopped. I don’t fully understand it and it leaves me very fearful for their return. I don’t feel confident yet that I know how to manage them. Also, like I mentioned above, I still get a lot of physical anxiety. My chest feels so tight, my heart is being squeezed, my breathing is harder, my heart is beating faster. It is so uncomfortable, but when this is happening, no racing or intrusive thoughts are happening. And don’t get me wrong, I much prefer this to the racing thoughts but I don’t understand why I am even feeling anxious in the first place. I will sit there feeling this way and go through a list in my head of all things that have made me feel anxious in the past and if one feels stronger than the other, I go with that, but it is so forced. It’s like I have to force these thoughts into my head. Have you ever heard of this before? Any idea how/why you can feel so physically anxious but not have racing thoughts?

I think I should give a little more background on my family. Up until I was about 10 years old I had the most ideal childhood. Full of so much love, laughter, happiness, I mean really, it was pure bliss. When I say family relationship issues, it’s not really between me and a family member.

My mom went through a bad depression for years (starting when I was about 10) and never did anything about it. She has so much unresolved trauma. My dad dealing with this over the years, has created his own traumas. My brother and I were always effected by this but I think watching how my mom dealt with all of her own issues and feelings, we never talked about anything that bothered us. We hid it away, our mom would tell us that we don’t need anyone knowing our family business and that we should never talk to any of our friends about our family problems. My mom had a really rough few years, a lot happened to her at once and it is what sent her into this depression that I am talking about.

My upbringing never really taught me how to process sad or negative feelings. If there was a problem, I was taught to fix it with my head held high. Kill with kindness and be a leader. I was never taught that it was okay to share my life with anyone and it taught me to always have my guard up. I truly don’t think it was intentional but growing up learning this, it has always made me think I can’t let anyone ever see me weak and it left me craving attention. I don’t think I realized that is why I have always craved attention until now, but it just clicked as I was writing this.

I don’t question my parents love for me. I know they love me, but I think sometimes it is a little bit of an unhealthy love. It is a depending love, which hurts me because it makes me feel like if I cannot help them then they will grow to not like me? I question this because that is how I feel but I feel silly saying it because if I ever talked to them about it, they would never in a million years say they would stop loving or liking me. But it is how I am asked for things. It is always such a guilt trip and makes it nearly impossible to say no. Guilt trips are a bigggg thing in my family. They have been used my whole life, and I won’t lie, I have used them too bc it just seems like the norm when communicating or needing something with my family. I know they are wrong though and I actively make sure I don’t use them on others because I know how damaging they can be. My parents & brother just need a lot of help, with so many things, and they have no one else to turn to, so they depend on me. At the same time though, even as I recognize all of the problems I have with my family, I still get homesick and want to be around them. I still feel like they are a safe place for me, especially when I am feeling so anxious.

A few side notes not on the family topic:

Things that I constantly question when I am anxious are “if my problems are with my immediate family, why are my anxious thoughts about my boyfriend?” “What if this isn’t anxiety and I really just don’t love my boyfriend anymore but I am too blind/broken/ scared to see that?” “What if I put in all of this work with therapy, and nothing changes?”

Even when I am not feeling anxious, or I take an anxiety medication (I have one btw, I just don’t like to take it regularly, I try to only take it when I am having a panic attack, my hopes are to work through my anxieties through therapy, but the medication really does help calm me down.) In the back of my mind, I feel worried about the next time my anxiety will come back up, or I will think about my anxious thoughts as a way to test myself to see if it is just anxiety or if they are really how I am feeling… this gets so hard because I start to think well, if it is in my brain right now and I am not feeling anxious then it must be valid… but I am putting my anxious thoughts in my head when I am not anxious. It’s a vicious cycle.

Again, I want to thank you both. Your insight has helped me more than you can even imagine.

Thank you so much for your reply. Hearing the thoughts of other really help to make myself feel more validated because I know so much of this is self sabotage. It is hard to me to really see that though because I don’t feel like my life growing up was anything out of the ordinary, my family had their hardships, but I never felt unloved by my parents, I don’t think. I think because there isn’t one single event that may have caused they anxieties I am having, it is really really hard for me to pin point where I should try to start healing. I do understand this is why my therapist is trying to go through my childhood and in the long run I think it will be helpful to me, but right now I was really looking for some immediate relief from these thoughts. They are so hard to combat as not true, it really feels like I can’t trust myself because it is my own brain shouting unwanted things at me. I have a hard time trusting myself due to my anxiety and it makes me feel like I am in an impossible, never ending loop.