Dear Kodi

All beings want happiness and the freedom from suffering is the fundamental Buddhist teaching and the 8 fold path is the journey we can take to get us there.  The Aryuvedic system of medicine looks at the person as a whole and seeks to balance our systems that is in harmony with our dosha stlye.

I wonder what kinds of narrative runs thru your conscious and do you believe everything you think?

If possible can you expound what a horrible person feels like to you ie heavy hot tight.

Adding guilt about the things that are good in your life is like drinking poison, where as, appreciation is like ingesting a  healthy tonic. it is your choice which bottle you choose to drink from, as you become more mindful of things moment to moment seeing that you do have choice will be easier to see & that in itself is empowering.

So I am guessing that an introverted empath needs to be around quieter, gentler,  joyful people and a slower more natural lifestyle to help them flourish?

Hi Kodi

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced anxiety and depression for your whole life. It seems that it running in the family might be a reason why you feel this way, I think that’s enough of a reason.

I’m glad that you have many good things in your life. I doubt that you are terrible person. You sound like you have a lot of care and empathy for others. That means that you are a good person. You deserve to have good things in your life! ❤️

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Wishing you all the best! 🙏

Hi Kodi,

yes, it is perfectly okay to want to be happy, even if there is so much suffering out there in the world. It’s a natural drive of each person, but sometimes this drive is blocked. One reason is that we feel guilty if we’re happy, because e.g. our parents weren’t happy and we felt sorry for them and their suffering.

You said anxiety and depression run in your family, which is a quite possible reason why you’re suffering from it too. For example, if we have a depressed mother, we naturally want to make her happy and do everything in our power to help her. But we inevitably fail, because it’s a problem that we didn’t cause and that we as a child cannot solve. And because we fail to make our depressed parent happy, we start feeling bad about ourselves, because we believe we’re not good enough or worthy enough – again, blaming ourselves for our parent’s condition.

Also, if our parent is anxious, they can’t give us proper emotional regulation and soothing. For example, they may get worried easily over each little child’s disease we have, and this makes things much worse because if our parent worries, we feel totally helpless and in terror. Perhaps that’s why you have the tendency to worry about your health excessively, because you’ve learned the pattern of excessive worry and there was no one there to calm you down and tell you that everything’s going to be fine?

I wonder if you’ve experienced something like this in your childhood/youth?

Dear Kodi,

You are spot on about learning to worry about about health issues from a parent.

Yeah, if our parents (or one of them) is a worrier, they can’t calm us down, but make us even more anxious. Because we as children are helpless and totally dependent on our parents. And so if our parent is worried and anxious, our anxiety goes through the roof. There is no way we can calm ourselves down – since we need them to do that for us.

And this stays as a pattern, not just the mental pattern of catastrophizing and thinking the worst will happen, but also as hypervigilance in our autonomic nervous system. Our amygdala constantly firing and ringing the alarm bell, even if there is no danger at all.

I very much relate to this, because my mother is a worrier too, not so much about health but about everything else, always thinking in negative terms. So I’ve learned to worry too, nowadays it’s primarily about my health, because I do have some health issues which objectively make my life difficult. But I see how sometimes I start catastrophizing over the slightest little pain that I have, and it fills me with terror. In those moments I feel like a helpless little child, believing that something terrible is going to happen and I will be doomed.

Maybe you feel something similar when you start worrying about your son’s illness:

Whenever my son gets a fever I freak out and am afraid he’s going to die. … I’m utterly exhausted from all the fear, frustration, anger, depression, irritability, guilt – basically every negative emotion you can have.

Maybe when your son gets a fever, you start catastrophizing, and the alarm system in your brain (amygdala) starts going in overdrive and it spirals out of control. What helps me is to soothe myself in those moments, to tell myself that it’s going to be okay.

Because what I’ve noticed is that I have 2 parts active in those moments: one is the anxious voice, who is thinking the worst thoughts and believing that the pain I am having means something serious and potentially irreversible. That’s the internalized voice of my anxious mother, telling me that I should be worrying. The other part is my inner child, who is listening to this anxious voice and is freaking out, because the child is helpless and depends on the mother’s protection. If the mother is worried and anxious, then of course the child is in utter terror. And that’s how I really feel in those moments, when the worry gets out of control.

I’ve recently become aware of this mechanism, and so now when something happens, I tell myself that it’s going to be fine and not to worry. I am trying to soothe my inner child and be the calm, soothing parent to my inner child, rather than the anxious, catastrophizing parent. With that I am hopefully interrupting that automatic loop in my brain that activates the amygdala and gets me in the state of terror.

Perhaps you could try something similar? Of course, various relaxation techniques might be helpful too. As well as creating that safe, calm space within your home, as Roberta suggested.

Your mother-in-law (who you said is very calm and loving and loves to laugh) can be an anchor point for you as well, in the sense that not only you visit her regularly, but also, when you start worrying, you can imagine her telling you it’s going to be fine. So perhaps she can serve as that calming, soothing parental voice inside of your head, when your fear gets triggered.