Let me be completely honest with you. I can only share this from my own experience, but I’ve had three very dark episodes in my life when it comes to fear and anxiety.
As mentioned in my first post, the first one was in my early 20s, which was social anxiety. I somehow managed to cope with it using different compulsions, avoidances, and workarounds. I didn’t worry too much about it because I had a feeling that I could manage it, even when it was very difficult. I wanted to ignore it as much as I could, and somehow it disappeared in my mid 20’s by itself.
In my early 30s, I experienced my first rock bottom with a major nervous breakdown, which took me 2/3 years to recover from. When I finally recovered, I was happy and felt powerful for taking my life back. However, I always noticed or felt like I wasn’t 100% like before—maybe more like 70/80%, which is more than good enough when you come from a really dark place.
Now, years later, I started therapy again, and this time I’m really addressing all my demons in my life.
I can now say that there is a root cause. In my case, anxiety didn’t just become anxiety; it developed because I had a lot of deep emotional issues that I didn’t know how to cope with. I grew up with family members (dad, granddad and uncles) who were all mentally strong, never complained, and never talked about difficult emotions. Very Stoic minded. So, that became my standard for myself. When I experienced difficult emotions, I automatically suppressed them, and I never knew better.
I noticed this works well with short term emotions or experiences. But what if you have some long term issues that you bury on a day to day base?
As life unfolded, I experienced various difficult emotions and phases—from guilt and shame to anger and sadness—all deeply suppressed in me. I truly believe these are the root causes/sources feeding the anxiety.
Depending on your nervous system you can battle or ignore them for months or years, but one day your nerves will be starting to get sensitized. And now your stress tolerance gets lower every day. So the day came that I noticed the first weird bodily symptoms and I got scared by it. Now, I noticed anxiety and responded with fear to it. Now my body really told me loud and clear that there is an issue.
This is when I started my reoovery with the Acceptance (Dr. Claire Weekes’) method, and with hard work, the symptoms disappeared when the months passed by while accepting my sensations and thoughts 24/7.
However, the first fear was still there, deep inside me. It just didn’t harm me in my day-to-day life. But now, in my late 30s, I’m at a point where I HAVE to address it; otherwise, I’ll be a victim of my own emotions my whole life.
So, my advice to people with anxiety:
Yes, you will recover from anxiety when you only work with the Acceptance method. This is enough because there are people where the root cause is also sourced from health symptoms, so your first and second fears are basically the same.
But there are also people like me, where they probably know or feel that deep inside them, there are some unresolved emotions that they have not dealt with. My advice is to take action on these, as Dr. Claire Weekes recommends in her book.
Go to therapy to work on finding peace with them. This will truly set you free. Otherwise, there is a chance you will just feel somehow like there is still something not okay even after your recovery.
