Living with worry and fear day in and day out is exhausting and yet keeps you up at night rolling back and forth in bed. The worry is relentless, tagging along with you everywhere you go. You long to feel relaxed and connected again but you end up more anxious than ever, the shame gremlin whispering in your ear “What is wrong with you?” there are so many ‘what if’s” perfectly stacked but looming over, wobbling, almost out of control like a game of Jenga right before it topples everywhere. The fear of being found out, that we are an imposter carrying our “normal” mask as best we can always is just a breath away.
We tell ourselves to keep that mask up and we try so very hard to do this at a very big cost. We start to avoid all the places these sensations come, wrap us in terror of being found out, and leave us behind like yesterday’s mail, exhausted, battered, humiliated, and shamed while we pull back from everything we love and need to do to try to manage the fear and tsunami of emotions they may cast at us at any time. Our biggest fear is being found out as we erroneously believe that if people knew this about us they would reject us and cast us aside, not understanding that those who really matter will be our biggest support.
There is a really good reason that fighting this worry hasn’t helped. Fighting isn’t the right tool. It is like diving into the problem and expecting to see the solution. That was me many years ago. I knew I was part of the problem but I couldn’t find the right answer.
I was buying into beliefs about myself, so many lies around not being enough and of being found out, of fighting the thoughts and sensations when the real path to healing had been with me all the time.
Comments