231- A bucket-load of anxieties

Throughout my life, I had defined myself as a worrywart, a chronic worrier. Indeed, I worried about quite a lot of things, especially since I grew up in my dad's religious cult, where
In the past few years, I've learned so much about mental illnesses, recovery, and of the importance of understanding one's own health, as well of openly talking as a tool of self-expression and raising awareness. 


In this entry, I'll concentrate on some of the anxieties I suffer from and start by directing you to this article about anxiety types. 

In short, they are: 
1. GAD (generalized Anxiety Disorder) ; 2. Social phobia ; 3. Panic Disorder ; 4. Agoraphobia ; 5. Phobias ; 6. PTSD or in my case, CPTSD (complex post-traumatic disorder*) and 7. OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). 

* cptsd isn't an official DSM-IV diagnosis, but has been used by many therapists to specify the nature of a prolonged, repeated traumas. 

• Preliminary reading on GAD and Panic Disorder confused me.  I may suffer from one but not the other (they seem mutually-exclusive).  I d shall have to both read about them more in detail, and discuss the topic with my therapist. 

• As you know from multiple entries on this present blog, I'm currently in CBT for my social phobias, which are the proper diagnosis when you suffer from anxieties in social situations, and which I detail again because it's been a very long time since I last copy-pasted them, from post 8 which relates to my phobias :

My social phobias include fear of varied social situations, with different degrees of anxiety in different places, and they can be divided like this 

1. Scocophobia, morbid fear of being stared at... 
2. Glossophobia, fear of public speaking
3. Anthropophobia, this pathological fear of people and their company, which is complicated to live and explain because it is present even with friends, even those I appreciate, but sometimes their presence disorients me ...
4. Gelotophobia: fear of ridicule, or in my case, of appearing ridiculous, which contributes to my social phobias ...

Social phobias manifest for me in several forms. Over the years, and especially since my CBT started at the end of May 2016, I've worked to reduce the levels of anxieties in social events. I'm able to go to the park and read there in increasing duration ; I've invited friends for movies, meals, games and chats which I wasn't able to do for many years. 

In the past, I could't deal with more than 1 person at a time. Now, I can receive a gathering, and even do so in several waves during the same day, something I was totally incapable of before. 

I learned a lot with exposure tasks my therapist set, or those I added for my own challenge ; I can now imagine enough improvement for me in the future to deal with other anxieties, such as travel.

• Indeed, when you suffer from social phobias, it seems quite logical for me to also develop anxieties over all means to reach social events and this includes transportation, and hence, traveling as well. 

I used to be able to take buses to school, or for shopping. That was many years ago, and back then, I actually had very few options. Sometimes I preferred to walk all the way back home from school, but when I was sent to shop at the big market, almost an hour of bus ride away, walking wasn't even a possibility (at least not for the return trip with all the groceries- but I have, on occasion, walked the entire way to avoid the buses...about 7-8 kms)

In the past 2 years, even more basic trips in buses and trams in my smaller city have been difficult. 

Travel plans have all been very rare and systematically planed carefully - with street views, printing maps, directions with public transportation and walks, frequency... the works!

However, all my life, I did my best to avoid any travels, so I stayed home, but in the past 20 or so years, I've learned, very slowly and rarely, to accept the dangers and coaxing or necessities of life, and to go to a few places - though usually not very far. The farthest I've gone were Paris & Lyon, on a few occasions, and other times, much, much closer to home. 

Only recently, with my progress in CBT and getting closer to online friends that I want to meet, I started imagining an improvement enough to actually go, farther for some french friends, and eventually even leave the country for other European and later american friends (it's not for the near-future, mind you, but it's something I can accept could happen- whereas before, even the thought itself would create anxiety reactions, for a perceived possible anxious situation that would occur much later. 

• When people I care about travel (my wife, my relatives, friends), I worry about their well-being, with fears regarding their safety (are they going to get lost ? be attacked ? have an accident, or worse, die from something ?). Reflecting on Hannah Rainey's entry about attachment anxiety that I read a few weeks ago, I realized that I could relate to its content quite a bit. I may compose my own entry about it later on. 
• I suspect I might also suffer  from PTSD of abandonment - topic I shall discuss in my next post. 

Further entries: 
anxiety disorder, 
panic attack, 
cptsd.