Stress Center Peer Support

Hello Shady Pants,

In response to your statement "for one reason or another it gets too hard to keep up on my coping skills...fall into horrible cycle of scary thoughts and anxiety...". Unmanaged stress always develops into anxiety. Our symptoms of anxiety are injecting seeds of belief in the obscure thoughts of which you described ie."hard time telling myself this is just anxiety......some reason I am having a hard time believing it right now..". Key word in your sentence, BELIEVING. We then Insert question marks where God put periods ie. "monster inside and will act on these thoughts...". We then engage in emotional reasoning; reasoning from how we feel; reinforcing irrational what if's based on the way we feel ie. "awful feeling that I'm a monster inside..." We personalize these thoughts and think these thoughts represent us in some way. Reality is you are incapable of carrying out the thoughts of which you described. It's not in your DNA. Individuals who do are diagnosed as pathological and are nowhere near this website. Your posts clearly indicate that you were born of very sane mind, just reacting irrationally to anxiety due to uneducation.

In response to "having my first child......scary thoughts about harming him.....me not loving him....running away...jail...ect..". When we percieve these thoughts as something other than a very common symptom of anxiety we respond to these thoughts irrationally ie. "awful scenarios in my head....do something awful...ect...". Again, individuals who carry out thoughts of this nature find these thoughts appealling, comforting. Our goal is to perceive these thoughts as reality; old insignificant symptom of anxiety.

In regards to NeverQuit's statement "It's a biochemical thing....". Nothing could be further from the truth. Reality is we thought ourselves into anxiety due to uneducation and lack of effective coping skills. Good news is if we possess the ability to think ourselves into anxiety we possess the ability to think ourselves out. Each growth spurt we encounter in life is an opportunity to learn and apply what we have learned. This is no diffrent. Know that you possess the ability to insignificize these thoughts and re-establish your confidence. Their are so many resources available to help you help yourself attain this goal. God put us on this earth to "thrive" not "survive". God already put the people in place for you to succeed. It's up to us to stay in faith and work towards the solution. Feel free to e-mail me anytime for support. I've been through exactly what you are going through and successfully re-established myself creating an effective continuing care program in the process. You can do the same. God bless and go for it!!!

Just wanted to clarify, when I said it's a biochemical thing, I meant exactly what Coach21 said, which is that we have gotten ourselves in this anxious, fearful rut and cycle by our negative thinking. Just didn't want anyone to interpret that in the wrong way.
Stressful, anxious thoughts create anxiety and adrenaline. Through the continued habit of obsessing, we create a natural reaction in our brain of instead of reacting LOGICALLY to our thoughts and just being able to dismiss them, they are now "stuck" and we have a harder time shutting them off because of the excess stress and adrenaline. I've read a book called, "Change Your Brian, Change Your Life," where they did brain scans of people who are obsessive, and how when people are able to stop that circle of obsessive thinking, certain parts of the brain involved in obsessive thinking actually calm down and don't "light up" on the scans anymore.
I actually think it is a helpful and empowering thing to know that we CAN learn to consciously control and ACTUALLY CHANGE our brain and body chemistry (feelings) just by changing our thinking! Again, we are NOT going to act on these thoughts, because they are just scary, obnoxious thinking, just like coach21 is saying!

Hey Neverquit,

My apologies for the misinterpretation. Your post was right on. love your screen name. God Bless.

I can relate to you 100%. I too suffered intrusive thoughts like this. At my highest anxiety point I thought about hurting my husband and at times got scared because I was saw a show where this woman slit her husband's throat and there it went. I starting thinking I was going to do it and I could not get the thought out of my head. I was so full of anxiety that I would cry for hours and finally went to a counselor and begged her to admit me just to get me away from him. She told me that the fact that I was anxious shows that it is not an intention I would follow through with. Did that help me? Absolutely not, I was still scared. I would not touch knives, cook or anything else that involved getting near sharp objects. What finally worked for me, if you are willing to try this, I sat my husband down in my counseling session and I looked him in the face and told him all of my intrusive thoughts? I was sure he was going to run out of there and never look back. He looked at me and said, you do know this is not possible and they are just thoughts right? I started to cry my eyes out. He knew and trusted me and I thought why I didn’t trust myself. Then my counselor explained to me that I need to face the fear and I needed to change it to something more positive. I needed to replace the though. You see, we pull the thoughts in. We go searching for them because they scare us and keep us occupied away from what we really do not want to deal with. They do the trick. I started changing my thought. Every time the intrusive thought came to my head I changed it and I would imagine myself with one of those noodles your play with in the pool and I imagined myself killing my anxiety. I would start laughing and saying I am killing this anxiety. And I would beat it with the noodle. Before you know it my thoughts subsided and went away. I will also tell you what not one but many doctors and counselors have said to me, Prozac and other meds like that do not work for this. The thing that stopped mine dead in its tracks was ativan. 1/4 of a pill and your mind stops racing and things become clear. You have to believe in yourself and you need to talk to her and let her show you she has faith in you as well. I promise you that I have had all the thoughts. I know what works and you need to take a little ativan and then you need to cognitively replace the thoughts. Acknowledge them but then replace them. If you think of killing her and even if you go into details in your mind you can replace this thought with a happier thought. Instead of imagining hurting her, imagine tickling her and making her laugh. Then you can imagine the two of you destroying this anxiety as a team. It works. I know it sounds like a lot of work but just think of how much work you are putting into pulling those scary thoughts forward time after time after time. It is exhausting. Also, take a stress vitamin B tab daily. It truly helps so much. Please keep in touch and let me know how this works for you. I am here if you need to talk.

Reading the various replies in this posting have been very helpful for me. Also, I wanted to address ShandyPants. Although it's been over a year from your posting, I really wanted to address the fear you were going through after the birth of your first child. I think, for me at least, I would be much more vulnerable to anxiety after such a huge life-changing event. And the life-changing event itself is so scary and so new that it is easy to fall into the fearful thought rut. I know myself well enough to know that one of the triggers for me to fall into depression and anxiety is change. In fact, I'm so aware of this that in preparation for having my first child, I got established with a therapist. I wasn't currently in a depressive/anxious state but I was being proactive. A few months later, I found out I was pregnant and as sure as day turns into night, my repetitive, analytical thoughts kicked in which gave way to the anxiety and depression I've tangoed with on and off for years. The simple life change was enough to trigger it. A few months later I had a miscarriage, but the depression and anxiety remained. All I need was that trigger to fall back into the rut. For me, the life-change hadn't come yet, but it was already alarming. And this helped me learn about myself even more and to understand that when I do have a child, I will need to be especially understanding and on-guard for fearful thoughts and depression because I know it will be an extremely vulnerable time. If fact, I think I will have a plan of action and a team behind me to help with the transition.

Also, in your case, you had a huge cocktail of hormones pulsing though your body. I think this contributes to feeling off balance and vulnerable to anxiety. It is for this reason that I am an advocate of medicine in addition to therapy because sometimes we are trying our hardest to use our tools but the biochemical cocktail in our brains is making this task extremely difficult (like swimming upstream).

I hope that you quickly recovered from the anxiety you experienced after the birth of your first child and are doing fabulously!

I wanted to write a couple things for you as well - I have had similar thoughts about hurting my kids, or if i love my husband - the worst possible things that could ever be. you not wanting to talk to your gf right now is your avoidance due to your anxiety that you are having about her. so common to want to avoid what's bothering you. i was afraid to be left home alone with our new baby when we were first home because i was afraid i was going to do something. I recently went on zoloft after not being on any medication for 5 years and I am a whole new person. You talked about constantly being on edge and extremely irritable which is exactly like I was. As much as you don't want to be on meds I really hope that it helps you take the edge off. It has helped me immensely. my husband has noticed a huge difference as I have in sooooo many aspects in my life. I am so much happier and when i get the crazy thoughts I do not dwell like I used to. I also have an awesome therapist who has helped so much. Good luck to you - I hope that things turn around for you soon.