My anxiety had gotten worse.
Thing had happened around me and to me that had caused me fear. And I always thought I was not like that.
I’ve been desperate for a solution when the anxiety turns on from out of nowhere and I can’t seem to shut it off even when I know with my brain that everything is OK even just writing about the feeling makes the feeling try to come again but I was so desperate for a solution that I found something that helps.
I found something that helps. It’s a realization and a remembrance. It is one of the good things that has come out of my son’s injury in the spring. When I saw him in the emergency room on that stretcher
and they couldn’t tell me he was going to live –
the actual experience of that moment couldn’t hold a candle to what I had felt in my imagination all the times I had worried about it happening.
This was what my desperation finally led me to discover: my imagination was conjuring up all kinds of calamity for me and that if any of the events were to actually happen, it would not be as bad as what my imagination had created and had caused me to feel.
I knew this because I had lived it. I had lived the worst – my son, broken and battered and hanging in the balance of a vortex of horrible possibilities – and in the reality of that I had been strong.
I had this realization right in the middle of an anxiety attack, and immediately all the power of the anxiety was drained out just like someone had opened a tap. I actually felt the anxiety leaving my body. It can never be as bad as what I have imagined.
I had to stop believing the lies that my imagination was feeding me.
When I realized how much better I could feel immediately if I would just stop believing my imagination, I started applying that mantra every day, any time anxious thoughts would come up
It can never be as bad as what I have imagined.
And when I started noticing those emotions created by my imagination I realized how often they were there. say the mantra How often my mind was creating an imaginary reality for me say the mantra and how I just stepped into it as though it were real.
So much of my life experience had been an imaginary construction of emotions. Powerful emotions from a vivid and creative imagination.
I had been living a life that was almost completely imaginary.
What could I do after this realization?
*the image shows my son’s shoe lying in the middle of the road after he’d been hit by a Toyota Tundra on May 24, 2019