Dear Prash:

I am humor-challenged, I often don’t know if a person jokes. The smiley face suggests to me that you are joking, but I am not sure. If it is a joke, I like it, quite clever. I have no doubt that there is no advantage to anxiety. Fear, yes, its purpose is to motivate an animal to survive real life danger. But anxiety, oh no, no benefit whatsoever.

anita

Dear Prash:

You are welcome and thank you for being as gracious as you are. As a matter of fact you’ve been gracious, as far as I remember you have been gracious in all your communications here, with all members. Quite impressive.

I still don’t know if you were joking about anxiety being helpful to you. So you didn’t clarify that point to me. Do you believe anxiety (ongoing, reactivated fear when there is no real life danger presenting itself) is helpful to you?

anita

Dear Prash:

Now I am clear, thank you. I am glad you successfully engage in the “process of progressively reducing the level of anxiety”, and am glad that you generously share your experience with this process on these forums!

anita

Dear Prash:

You wrote yesterday regarding your history: “A major part of it I don’t recall”. If by history you mean your childhood, then you and I have this in common, I too remember so very little.

You asked if I experienced a resistance accessing my “scared child from the past”- I experienced it as an impossibility, not as something that was there to access if I only try hard enough and overcome a resistance. I didn’t have a feel of a child in me, as if there wasn’t one.

Looking back now, I know the child was there all along, every moment, every day, making herself known. But I didn’t see her, didn’t hear her. And yet, she was in control of me, insisting all along to be seen and heard.

“How has being in touch with the scared child helped you?”- being in touch is a recent development, still happening these very days, a re-association (undoing the disassociation) with the child that I was.

What is helping me is that I am able to disentangle that mass of emotions confused me before. I thought I was always angry with my mother. I didn’t know that before those years of anger, there was no greater pleasure for the young child that I was than to be in the presence of my mother. I now remember that pleasure. I didn’t know about it before. If I read about a child’s pleasure being with her mother, it didn’t register. I now feel it.

It is this pleasure, this desire for her, intense, most intense desire for her that was hiding from my awareness more than anything else.

I didn’t know. I am still in the process. It is a recent knowing. So I don’t have a before-and-after to present to you. I know this is healing.

All these years I was too afraid to remember that desire because I was afraid she will hurt me yet again. It took an un-negotiable commitment to never be in her presence again, no matter what, to feel that desire again, eventually. I had to feel safe enough, safe from her.

This is not an answer with a beginning, middle and end. This answer may not satisfy you. But this is all I have at this point, and it is as meaningful as can be, for me.

anita

Dear Prash:

You are welcome. Regarding your “scared child from the past”, or inner child, the common term, I just read your original post on this thread and he is there, italicized by me: “There is awareness that what I do is in line with my values and I am good as I am. Yet there seems to be a need for a pat on the back. An absence of that is not a permanent de motivator”-

Your inner child is hiding at the end of sentences that start with “There is… there seems… An absence…”. You are highly intellectual, rational, educated, well articulated, excellent vocabulary and grammar. Your inner child is hidden behind well established Intellect and education; distant, removed.

If you ever want to access him, in private, if you so choose, start sentences with him speaking like a five year old. The italicized would be something like: hug me, hold me, tell me I’m okay. Or.. help me.

anita

Dear Prash:

This purity you mentioned (“feel my inner child in all his purity”)- it is this purity in you that moved me this early morning as I read your message, made me feel close to you, as far as we are in the world.

You are very welcome. You asked me earlier: “How has being in touch with the scared child help you?”- it is decreasing my anxiety. You expressed that you suffer from anxiety. If you access your inner child, your anxiety too will lessen. In our lives at times our anxiety  is less because we are busier (you mentioned recently needing more than the hours in a day), or because of this or that circumstance, but when we are less busy, circumstances change, the anxiety increases.

The only way I know to reliably lessen the anxiety regardless of most circumstances, if not all, is through accessing the scared inner child. The resistance you mentioned doing so is probably the natural unwillingness to be more aware of pain. All organisms withdraw from pain. And so, the access needs to be done in small portions, with breaks in between, little by little, over time.

anita

Dear Prash:

You express yourself so very well, skillful and talented. A pleasure to read from you. I wish you the best as well and farewell for now. I will read from you if you post, when and where you do.

anita

Dear Prash:

Welcome back to your own thread, Prash!

The thinking you are trying to break away from is “thinking there is not enough time”. But it may very well be that there really is not enough time to do all the things you aim at doing in any one day or week, or month. If this is the case, better think what is true to reality, that there isn’t enough time.

And if there isn’t enough time, prioritize what you intend to do in any one day, postpone or eliminate tasks that are not time sensitive or urgent. Otherwise review your goals in life, let’s say for the next year or so, and maybe eliminate a goal, give up on it. Or put it away from now and consider it later, in a few years or so.

Is this something doable for you, what I suggested here?

anita