1. When you are feeling ‘normal’, meaning you are doing reasonably well with manageable feelings and being able to perform reasonably well chances are you are influenced by beliefs such as: “If I am having difficulty with this task, then this is often the human experience and I am often able to work through this most of the time. 

2. However, what are likely to experience while you are believing " if I am having trouble accomplishing this situation then it means I am doomed, crazy,or  inferior”?   Which set of these “if—then” beliefs will create the best results?  You need to learn how you sabotage yourself “for ‘good’ reasons” by the set of negative beliefs and to keep a log about how you think when you feel normal and the opposite. 

3. Do you have beliefs that it’s in your DNA that you are more dysfunctional and have very negative emotions which might spiral into disability or social rejection?  Many of your beliefs are habits you learned unwittingly, maybe when you were young and these thoughts served to make the ‘best’ of what was going on, but you learned newer beliefs as you grew older.  If you strongly believe things are hopeless then you need to work on this, possibly with a therapist.

I suggest you keep an ‘if……..then‘ log each day to see if you can ‘catch’ yourself  creating evaluations, mostly spontaneously, and often without your conscious knowledge, that are likely to maintain states of anxiety or depression or feeling ‘ok’.  If you feel anxious look for: "If I can’t follow through with these tasks, then I’m going to have something very bad happen." If you feel depressed, the prediction might be: "If I can’t complete this assignment then it means I’m worthless and doomed.

I have purposely taken the extremes of the beliefs you have and you might not be aware of that much negativity but you will notice that at the times you feel really down and out, compared to those you feel ‘ok’ your beliefs are quite different.

I welcome your comments or questions about your own experiences.
 

How might you be keeping yourself from happiness from avoiding painful emotions?

You could be hitting the wall that you can break though.

• The greatest problem I see in my private practice is people like you trying to escape from painful emotions. Read on to learn about a couple of examples of people I treated who were stopped in their tracks from recovery.
• A woman and a man just like you were immobilized because they formed a bad habit, by: trying to block out very painful emotions. They numbed themselves and created lots of pain and fatigue from trying to block out emotional pain. They couldn’t regulate their sleep cycles and zoned out losing several hours of consciousness.
• Do you often distract yourself and block out severe emotional pain because you are afraid you’ll get worse and let yourself believe experiencing the pain will be useless?
• Don’t let yourself be defeated by the fear of painful emotions because with help you can learn to achieve peace by finding solutions from these emotions.
• Facing these powerful and scary emotions is, surprisingly, the way home.
• How can you find out how to fight your depression or anxiety if you don’t allow yourself to experience the emotions and find out the thoughts or memories maintaining the pain?
• You have within you the ability to recovery with tools you can learn if you are willing to let yourself experience the pain and discovering much more about the distorted deep beliefs and pessimistic thoughts you might not even be aware of..
• Pasting happy thoughts in your mind without knowing what your deeply held negative experiences are hasn’t helped you yet, so what are you waiting for?
• Call me to share your experiences for a free 1/2 hour phone conversation or visit me at my website/blog and leave a comment of question.

1. Learn to recognize and record your emotions.  

Emotions (or feelings) are usually one-word descriptions such as sad, hopeless, helpless, defeated, or worthless. Do you draw a blank when trying to write them down?  You might have learned to block out recognizing them due to pain or being afraid of these feelings. It is often helpful, too to record thoughts you are having.

2. Spend time attempting to accomplish assignments your therapist might give you even though you feel helpless to accomplish them.

For example, if asked to keep a record of your emotions and you draw a blank there are good reasons this is difficult and don’t give up. Many people lack confidence when depressed!  You are not alone. If you feel unable to do something that might eventually help you. This information about your difficulty can be very helpful to me to help you no matter what happens.

3. Know that worry about keeping your thoughts and feelings secret from others is common.

You might have strong fears about others finding out about your depressive thoughts, even people close to you. I have worked with lots of people who avoided counseling for a long time because they felt ashamed or afraid of others finding out what was going on inside. Rest assumed that your information will be kept in strict confidence.

4. Even if you don’t have a clear idea how counseling might help, come in or talk to me on the phone.

Patients have told me that when someone referred them to me they didn’t know how depression treatment might help but soon learned that it could help. You might feel as if you are in a fog at this moment but things will clear up.

Would you like to read articles here that specifically helps you with unique solutions for you to start freeing yourself from anxiety or depression?   All you need to do is to take a look at this site and make a confidential comment about 3 problems you would like to improve right now — examples: how to relax, free yourself from painful emotions, or improve relationships.  Just write down now what 3 emotional situations you would like to solve and see if you can find some answers in articles I have already written.

Then, leave a comment about these problems and what you would like to see on this site and you will get a prompt reply.

Experience and Chemistry are the best guides I would use for trying out a counselor. You can verify experience by searching for how long a counselor has been licensed and you can partially evaluate how you feel with a counselor who gives a free phone consultation and read articles on his web site. Whoever you decided to try, then you can gauge for yourself the worth of the sessions by the results you get.

A disorder is a more serious mental or emotional problem which significantly interferes with major life skills such as work and relationships and can only be diagnosed by a licensed mental health specialist. Simply feeling anxiety (nervousness, fear) is a normal and universal experience that can be brief but might provide painful discomfort. Following are some common types of anxiety disorders.

What is the Most Common Anxiety Disorder?

Generalized Anxiety Disorder  (GAD) is the most common type and involves worry about more than one type of situation.  People diagnosed with the disorder are habitual chronic worriers that continue to worry even about common problems that most people don’t worry about. They have strong beliefs that worry is necessary to prevent problems and often also believe worry is dangerous to mental health.

What is a Panic Disorder?

Panic disorder involves having dread about repeating episodes of  intense anxiety, often called ‘attacks’, in which a variety of fearful symptoms occur such as shortness of breath, rapid heart beat, sweat not brought on by heat, muscle tension and rapid breathing. 

Common fears include dying or being out of mental control and often suffers fear public embarrassment when experiencing these symptoms.  Panic episodes (or ‘attacks’ are fairly common and are experience by about 1 in 5 people in a year period. However, people with the disorder often are more disabled because their dread and belief that they of panic episodes that often seem to come ‘out of the blue’. 

Commonly people with the disorder develop avoidance of any situation in which they might have these symptoms. Even though people with the disorder often feel hopeless about ever overcoming this scary problem, effective methods have been devised and used for more than 20 years and can be relatively brief.

What is Agoraphobia?

Agoraphobia is not a disorder in the common sense but often occurs as a consequence of panic disorder and is commonly described as a fear of being in places where they might be embarrassed with symptoms of a panic episode.  Often they fear that if in public they might need medical or mental health aids to prevent the dire consequences they fear.

This condition, if untreated along with panic disorder can have devastating effects on the quality of life since people often have great difficulty leaving their homes or places of comfort and very often crave the support of a companion that might soothe anxiety and help out.

What is Social Anxiety Disorder?

Social anxiety ranges from simply being shy to experiencing such anxiety that the person with this disorder can be seriously impaired and avoiding social contact as much as possible.

In my experience I see many people who are employed in occupations which require minimal social contact using skills such as engineering or computer programming but run into trouble when they are asked to manage others or give presentations.  Also, I have worked with others who need to make marketing calls. 

However, people with high social anxiety generally have problems in social situations because these are triggers for challenging their self-esteem and they learn to focus inside which almost inevitably turns to negative self evaluations, including the fear of failure or being seen as inferior.

So deeply held are these beliefs that it is not uncommon for people seeking treatment to fear that I would judge them as harshly as they judge themselves. They tend to predict social failure before events and even if there is no objective evidence of being rejected or slighted they agonize over the negative possibilities of social events after they are again alone.  Thus, their minds are often very active and self focused on their inadequacies. Often, in addition to running into problems of social performance on the job they lead lonely lives outside of their families.

I will add additional Anxiety Disorders in future articles.

Some situations that are common stressors for many people include financial uncertainty, troublesome relationships and health concerns.  Herbert Benson, M.D. has researched and published a list of stressors (such as marriage, divorce, deaths in the family), and given them scores, the higher the more likely they are to be troublesome. You can find many references to this scale by using Major Life Event Stress Scale in a search engine to evaluate your stressors and how serious they are to your health. I will continue to write about common ways to manage these kinds of situations.

But many stressed people either don’t know what exactly stresses them or, on the other hand, almost everything seems stressful.  Per Anxiety Association of America’s  email to me:

“This holiday season is particularly challenging. Whether you’re worried about your job, college tuition, retirement savings, or buying gifts, few of us have been unscathed by our turbulent economy. Even so, most of you recognize that your anxiety is normal and you’re able to carry on with daily activities.

But for some people, anxiety isn’t just a consequence of distressing news. It is persistent, severe, unprovoked, and irrational, and it makes even the most mundane tasks — driving kids to school, standing in line at the store, meeting a friend for lunch seem overwhelming, if not impossible."

Are you feeling stressed? Take advantage of my offer for a free ½ hour telephone consultation NOW to greatly reduce anxiety by learning scientifically proven methods that will help you with your unique problems, or learn more about my approach to stress management. What have you got to lose except your suffering?

References: Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress. A Harvard Medical School Special Health Report.

2. Celebrate some even small successes to challenges and add small increases over time.

This quiz is derived from Marti Olsen Laney’s The Introvert Advantage.

Have you ever instantly started to feel anxious and insecure and you didn’t even deserve to live or to have any pleasure or security? You think this will never get any better even though you’ve been through these feelings before, maybe many times before. Maybe you were feeling ok until you got a critical message or a triggering event that you think might not affect the average person that way. Maybe a key person was gone for awhile or wasn’t as supportive. 

You are not alone and might be surprised how many people suffer these painful feelings that few people might know that you have. 

Help is available now. I have worked with many people who suffer these problems and have helped them to learn to manage these feelings and improve their lives. Don’t wait out the rest of your life thinking you are doomed because you are not. You deserve to live a happier life, and you can.

I welcome your comments or questions. If they are situations that would benefit other to learn from I will post and reply to your comments.