Would someone with anxiety be a deal breaker for you?

[rtg]

OP: He could have been more understanding. It doesn't mean he's a bad person, he just probably has no idea how to handle a person with anxiety. I have anxiety and have dated people with it as well. There has to be a base level of understanding for things to work. Unfortunately in your situation, he wasn't able to face the issue and chose to ignore your messages. A person like that is best to let them go. You probably need another person like those you've dated who is willing to listen and is sympathetic. For some, this is a deal breaker. And those are the people you shouldn't seek validation from. Know that you deserve understanding and if this guy wasn't willing or able to give it to you, it doesn't mean someone else won't.

Thank you so much

 

[Anyjoe]

Come on people. It is 2016!
Welbutrin is a 20 yr old. anti anxiety med. that is proven.
Why suffer???

 

[rtg]

Come on people. It is 2016!
Welbutrin is a 20 yr old. anti anxiety med. that is proven.
Why suffer???

Wow are you kidding me? There are many different anxiety and depression medications but they are all different and work differently on everyone. Yes, I am on medication but there is no magic pill! Cognitive training, coupled with medication, does help of course. But there is no simple fix... It's hard work.

 

[Phil Ayesho]

I agree that there are ways to ease anxiety through learning coping skills and the like. I am very familiar with all of this after living with anxiety for almost 15 years. I also practise yoga and meditation and know first hand how much these can help. I have a condition also that puts me at risk of diabetes and manage this through diet so yes I agree with you about that too.

I was specifically referring to the concept of simply pretending you don't have anxiety. That is not something that is possible. If I'm having an anxiety attack, pretending I'm not having one does not make it go away. But if I do have effective coping strategies (like what you discussed) then of course that helps mitigate it. But the pure will to change it, without effective training, cannot just change it... If that was the case, then I would already be cured.

Well that is a semantic issue.

Wanting is not willing.

Pure will is not pure will if it is not evidenced in actions.
By doing meditation, you are taking action, and you admit it has an effect.
That is you willing a different reality into being.

And, yes, if you practice at pretending, you literally CAN stop anxiety attacks in their tracks.

You can tell yourself it is unreasonable, and remind yourself it is illusory and tell yourself that you can divorce your mind from your bodies physical response to perceived threat ( which is what anxiety actually is )
And the thing is the conscious mind is really the master of the body. It takes repetition and the strong belief that you really can master your mind... but you can practice discounting the physical reactions as merely physical... and this way of thinking actually does calm the body's physiological reactions.

I was in a bad car accident once. And it gave me real insight into PTSD- which is an anxiety disorder.
A white truck crossed the center line and hit us head on. No one was seriously hurt, thankfully, but two vehicles were totaled.

But I noticed that I would feel anxious whenever I drove down that same road... and so I started paying closer attention to my feelings and it amazed me... The accident had not made me anxious about driving in general. I saw oncoming cars all the time with no reaction... But if I was going down that same stretch of road, the anxiety was there.
And if there happened to be a white car or truck in the opposite lane... then I suddenly would feel this rush of panic.

I noticed, that I could be driving the same stretch of road, in the OTHER direction, with no anxiety at all. And that is when it hit me.

I was not actually anxious at all. Intellectually, I knew there was no threat. But my BODY didn't know that. The trauma of the accident had burned into my brain the image and feel of that stretch road, and that oncoming white vehicle, as IMPORTANT and THREATENING... and whenever my brain detected that same visual and physical impression, it automatically and without my permission flooded my body with adrenaline, because your body has the unconscious ability to Learn what to fear from past trauma, regardless of what you THINK about it.

PTSD, i realized, is just making the mistake of thinking your physiological reaction is how you actually FEEL about something... rather than just the knee jerk response of your sophisticated threat assessment system that evolved way before you evolved the ability for higher self consciousness.

Once I came to this realization... I still felt the panic when driving down that stretch of road... but I did not INVEST that panic with any belief that it was what I really felt. I was aware, internally, that it was just a physiological reaction to the SCENE of a trauma that my body tenses up whenever it detects that same scene.

And that awareness... that willingness suffer the panic but NOT embrace it as 'me' actually made the panic recede. Over the course of a month, the anxiety became less and less with each time I drove that road... until now, I don't feel the slightest bit of anxiety... even when a white truck is in the opposite lane.


I literally trained my own brain to separate the actual me... what I truly think and feel and will, from my physiological response... how my BODY feels. And my brain used that different model to impose my actual will on my body and re-write that memory as NOT requiring preparing me for a trauma with adrenaline.

The key to mastering your own anxiety is to start with the fundamental realization that an unconscious portion of your brain processes incoming sensory data looking for patterns it associates with trauma. Before you even consciously know what you are seeing, or smelling, or reading, this limbic portion of your brain is flooding your physiology with chemicals that create anxiety or panic because it has been triggered by some memory matrix over which you felt injured.

It is there to perceive threats faster than you can consciously process them and speed your reaction time.

But it is NOT really how you feel. Its a part of the brain that works on full auto- without conscious volition-
But we are so used to feeling what we think in our body, that we mistake a feeling in our body for what we must think.

They are not the same. You can consciously tell yourself, when suffering anxiety, that this is not really how you feel about this thing.
That this is in your body, only. And you KNOW it is not a real threat.

And your conscious mind DOES have the capacity to rewrite your memories to remove that "threat" flag that triggers that preconscious physiological response. It takes time and repetition to overwhelm the strong synaptic links created by traumatic experience, but it can be done.

Most effective non-drug therapies for anxiety take the form of nothing more than immersing the patient in an anxiety inducing environment, and having nothing bad at all happen, for no other purpose than to build a library of non threatening experiences that are similar. This is literally trying to water down the strength of the traumatic memory.

But the problem with anxiety is that it is self reinforcing. Unlike PTSD- where I Did not suffer more trauma every time I drove down that road.
But anxiety creates its own trauma, reinforcing the trigger effect of the pattern your brain is recognizing and responding to. This is how PTSD can escalate into a debilitating anxiety... the anxiety itself becomes the trauma.
It is especially important to train your own brain into the habit of divorcing your true conscious self from the autonomic survive mode that is unthinking yet still has the ability to send your body into fight or flight mode.

 

[svrocks]

You may have closed in on him a little too much there, but I can understand that your anxiety played its part in this whole situation. It's good that you were honest about it though. I don't think every guy will react in the exact same way if they found themselves in his shoes but different people are differently attuned to other people's conditions.

Anxiety can be unpleasant to handle when you are at the receiving end of it but if the person is interested enough he or she will probably be more accommodating, especially after you have admitted to having anxiety. Personally it will get to me if someone constantly apologises for something. It's good to be able to apologise when you're wrong but not so good if you constantly shoulder everything that goes wrong.

I know it's easier said than done, and you probably did what you did because you cared, but you'll have to learn to accept things for what they are every now and then. Not everything that goes wrong, even if it involves you, is your fault and that sometimes some things are just not meant to be.

Be strong.

 

[KennF]

Has this happened in other budding romances? Is it a pattern?

I can tell you this... it used to be a girl went out with a guy and fretted if he didn't call within the next few days...
Then with email... it became an issue if he didn't respond within the day.
But with the advent of cellphones where you KNOW he has it on him at all times, and you KNOW it makes a noise or buzz when your text comes in, women these days start to freak out if someone doesn't answer IMMEDIATELY.

I have had my woman get upset with me because she sent me a text, or called me... and I didn't answer because of crappy coverage and my phone not even ringing nor text popping up.
I have had situations where my woman was sending me like 8 or 10 texts over about 15 minutes, and for some reason known only to AT&T all those texts came in at once, 2 hours after she sent them. I literally had to SHOW her the text thread on my phone to prove that they came in when I said they did.
And I have had my woman get upset at me for not replying or answering immediately because my phone had run out of power and shut down.

She actually represented to me that I had NO excuse for my battery dying, because i should have charged it when it got low.
Even tho I explained that it was in my pocket since I got up, and that I had no idea it was shut down, because it didn't ring or beep, I never looked at it.

This is unreasonable behavior. Its controlling. That woman had severe anxiety issues, too. But I did not have a problem with her anxiety. I understood it. What became the problem, was that her response to that anxiety was to blame ME for not being immediately available at any hour of the day or night. ( and yet, though she Often did not respond immediately to texts or phone calls... I never assumed I was being ignored, but that she was busy, sleeping, or her phone had run out of juice )

And no matter how understanding I was, this anger and blame ultimately led to her no longer caring as much for me and she asked me to leave.

Because of Her need to control things beyond anyone's control.

So- to answer your question, although I understood her anxieties when we got together, I had not anticipated that her anxieties could poison HER opinion of ME. It just didn't matter how understanding and patient I was with her. She was allowed to be an anxious mess, and I was not allowed any error whatsoever.

Now that I have been thru that with her... I find that I am very sensitive to any woman I date acting insecure and anxious about contact.

For example, being self employed... I take advantage of the fact that I can choose when I go out or take time off and prefer to go to dinner or the beach or other things when they are less crowded.
A woman I was dating recently texted me to tell me she felt I must not want to be seen with her since I never took her out on a Saturday... which everyone knows is date night.
That She suspected that I must be seeing someone else on Saturdays ( I wasn't, i was working on the weekend like I always do )...

so this is her, reading all kinds of motives, and intentions into MY actions... looking to paint me guilty, already, for the anxiety she creates all on her own.

She apologized when I explained to her about just wanting to avoid the crowds and traffic, but she then said she was really upset because she hadn't seen me for a week.
And I had to point out that I had asked her out just two nights before, but that she couldn't make it. And how was that any different than the fact that some days I am busy?

So, again, her apology was just another accusation of my not doing as she wanted me to do...

So, you tell me... Say you're looking for love and the person you think is adorable starts behaving like this.... after you have been burned before by such controlling behaviors... Would you stick it out, hoping that it will get better?
Or assume this is an early warning sign of someone who will forever be feeling hurt and blaming you because they are imagining things to worry over that you have no real culpability in?

Do not judge him too harshly, You do not know what injuries he may have suffered in prior relationships.

But for men with much experience in anxious women, understand that they learn that THEIR being understanding and accepting of your anxiety does not make things any better. The most understanding guy in the world, you will still get upset over not doing exactly what you expect him to do. And that never leads anywhere positive.


Your anxiousness is a flag of the deep need to control the world around you. You will have to deal with that, or find a man who Wants to pat your hand consolingly thru your self created crises.

But yes... for any guy who's been thru it with a woman they loved, anxiety like that can be a heart breaking deal killer.

Love the story and glad you shared it.

One thing I would add, it isn't always the women that reads too much into things. I've dated plenty of guys that did the same thing. And I'm guilty, from time to time, of trying to read extra meaning into things.

You've hit on one my pet peeves... The expectation of both immediacy and perpetual availability. It used to be ok for a few days to go by between encounters. Then, it became daily was the expectation. Then, with pagers, it became within a few hours. Email shortened that to an hour. And cellphone text and IM's reduced that to immediate.

I do not enjoy, want, nor accept that my personal time belongs to anyone except me. Not my husband, sister, mother nor job have any right to claim my personal time. There are many times I purposefully do not respond, so that there isn't an expectation on the sender's part that I'm always immediately available.

Call me selfish, if you want. I just value my personal time, space and privacy.

 

[Phil Ayesho]

Love the story and glad you shared it.

One thing I would add, it isn't always the women that reads too much into things. I've dated plenty of guys that did the same thing. And I'm guilty, from time to time, of trying to read extra meaning into things.

You've hit on one my pet peeves... The expectation of both immediacy and perpetual availability. It used to be ok for a few days to go by between encounters. Then, it became daily was the expectation. Then, with pagers, it became within a few hours. Email shortened that to an hour. And cellphone text and IM's reduced that to immediate.

I do not enjoy, want, nor accept that my personal time belongs to anyone except me. Not my husband, sister, mother nor job have any right to claim my personal time. There are many times I purposefully do not respond, so that there isn't an expectation on the sender's part that I'm always immediately available.

Call me selfish, if you want. I just value my personal time, space and privacy.

Right... Did not mean to suggest or imply that this is a 'female' issue. Just a control issue.

Although not all controlling behavoir is in the form of anxiety... Sometimes it takes the form of aggression, either active or passive.
And as discussed, not all anxiety issues center around control.

 

[798686]

Well that is a semantic issue.

Wanting is not willing.

Pure will is not pure will if it is not evidenced in actions.
By doing meditation, you are taking action, and you admit it has an effect.
That is you willing a different reality into being.

And, yes, if you practice at pretending, you literally CAN stop anxiety attacks in their tracks.

You can tell yourself it is unreasonable, and remind yourself it is illusory and tell yourself that you can divorce your mind from your bodies physical response to perceived threat ( which is what anxiety actually is )
And the thing is the conscious mind is really the master of the body. It takes repetition and the strong belief that you really can master your mind... but you can practice discounting the physical reactions as merely physical... and this way of thinking actually does calm the body's physiological reactions.

I was in a bad car accident once. And it gave me real insight into PTSD- which is an anxiety disorder.
A white truck crossed the center line and hit us head on. No one was seriously hurt, thankfully, but two vehicles were totaled.

But I noticed that I would feel anxious whenever I drove down that same road... and so I started paying closer attention to my feelings and it amazed me... The accident had not made me anxious about driving in general. I saw oncoming cars all the time with no reaction... But if I was going down that same stretch of road, the anxiety was there.
And if there happened to be a white car or truck in the opposite lane... then I suddenly would feel this rush of panic.

I noticed, that I could be driving the same stretch of road, in the OTHER direction, with no anxiety at all. And that is when it hit me.

I was not actually anxious at all. Intellectually, I knew there was no threat. But my BODY didn't know that. The trauma of the accident had burned into my brain the image and feel of that stretch road, and that oncoming white vehicle, as IMPORTANT and THREATENING... and whenever my brain detected that same visual and physical impression, it automatically and without my permission flooded my body with adrenaline, because your body has the unconscious ability to Learn what to fear from past trauma, regardless of what you THINK about it.

PTSD, i realized, is just making the mistake of thinking your physiological reaction is how you actually FEEL about something... rather than just the knee jerk response of your sophisticated threat assessment system that evolved way before you evolved the ability for higher self consciousness.

Once I came to this realization... I still felt the panic when driving down that stretch of road... but I did not INVEST that panic with any belief that it was what I really felt. I was aware, internally, that it was just a physiological reaction to the SCENE of a trauma that my body tenses up whenever it detects that same scene.

And that awareness... that willingness suffer the panic but NOT embrace it as 'me' actually made the panic recede. Over the course of a month, the anxiety became less and less with each time I drove that road... until now, I don't feel the slightest bit of anxiety... even when a white truck is in the opposite lane.


I literally trained my own brain to separate the actual me... what I truly think and feel and will, from my physiological response... how my BODY feels. And my brain used that different model to impose my actual will on my body and re-write that memory as NOT requiring preparing me for a trauma with adrenaline.

The key to mastering your own anxiety is to start with the fundamental realization that an unconscious portion of your brain processes incoming sensory data looking for patterns it associates with trauma. Before you even consciously know what you are seeing, or smelling, or reading, this limbic portion of your brain is flooding your physiology with chemicals that create anxiety or panic because it has been triggered by some memory matrix over which you felt injured.

It is there to perceive threats faster than you can consciously process them and speed your reaction time.

But it is NOT really how you feel. Its a part of the brain that works on full auto- without conscious volition-
But we are so used to feeling what we think in our body, that we mistake a feeling in our body for what we must think.

They are not the same. You can consciously tell yourself, when suffering anxiety, that this is not really how you feel about this thing.
That this is in your body, only. And you KNOW it is not a real threat.

And your conscious mind DOES have the capacity to rewrite your memories to remove that "threat" flag that triggers that preconscious physiological response. It takes time and repetition to overwhelm the strong synaptic links created by traumatic experience, but it can be done.

Most effective non-drug therapies for anxiety take the form of nothing more than immersing the patient in an anxiety inducing environment, and having nothing bad at all happen, for no other purpose than to build a library of non threatening experiences that are similar. This is literally trying to water down the strength of the traumatic memory.

But the problem with anxiety is that it is self reinforcing. Unlike PTSD- where I Did not suffer more trauma every time I drove down that road.
But anxiety creates its own trauma, reinforcing the trigger effect of the pattern your brain is recognizing and responding to. This is how PTSD can escalate into a debilitating anxiety... the anxiety itself becomes the trauma.
It is especially important to train your own brain into the habit of divorcing your true conscious self from the autonomic survive mode that is unthinking yet still has the ability to send your body into fight or flight mode.

Bingo.

Excellent - if slightly long-winded explanation. Spot-on.

 

[950483]

Anxiety would not be a problem for me. "Anxiety", as a euphemism for all kinds of other shit like personality disorders or abusive behaviour would be though.

Expecting people to pander to your "anxiety", or accommodate it is unreasonable. Someone suggested that maybe your lack of self-control was an issue, but I think the problem here, (and from other posts I've read) is that you have an issue with boundaries.

 

[Crimsonlurker]

Ok it might be pretty random of me here but well getting advice on the internet can kind of suck. Second thing, this book might help some things. It's never too late to begin again by Julia Cameron. ok bye bye.

 

[twoton]

One thing I do believe is that dwelling on a problem like anxiety does NOT make it better. I have a friend with anxiety who is obsessed with posting every tidbit of their life, including all the details of the episodes of anxiety, on social media. Frankly, I think the constant need to splurge everything online actually makes the anxiety worse, not better.

 

[950483]

After a few years of kicking around this place (the world I mean, not LPSG) we all have our baggage, our quirks, our difficulties. Turning it into a hobby or an all-purpose excuse or explanation just ain't healthy.

 

[bigbull29]

After a few years of kicking around this place (the world I mean, not LPSG) we all have our baggage, our quirks, our difficulties. Turning it into a hobby or an all-purpose excuse or explanation just ain't healthy.

Absolutely!

Some of us think our ass is a gold mine. BUT - we are all very flawed - that's part of the human experience.