Escape

I just typed an entire post and lost it erggg! Maybe I was not on the right track with my writing. I woke up this morning first thing with anxiety that has lasted the entire day. So it is going on about 8 hours of what I call a tornado of irrationality. Can you imagine a real tornado lasting 8 hours and the destruction that would be left in the wake? That is how I feel. Exhausted, beaten down, broken, and destroyed. So after a valiant attempt at handling my anxiety, replacing the irrational with rational, and working through and praying through my anxiety...today I am done. I do not have anymore fight in me and it is just easier to give in than to battle something with the force of a tornado.
I feel like anxiety threatens my family, my marriage, my friendships and relationships, and just my own sanity. If I seem angry...I am, I am angry that I have no control over this chaos. If I seem unattached...I am, I am unattached because it doesn't hurt as much as being attached. If I seem unmotivated...I am, I am too tired to do anything except battle these demons. If I seem controlling...I am, because I need to control something because I cannot control this anxiety which seems to do as it pleases.
For the most part I have been working very hard to deal with the anxiety as it comes and replace irrationality with rational thoughts, rely on prayer, and talk my way through the panic. Today I am done. I am exhausted. I just want to scream uncle and have it stop! I have begun to second guess myself and question whether I am not worthy to be free from this once and for all. I am wondering if I am not praying hard enough.
I took an anxiety assessment a couple days ago. This test was designed to give your therapist or psychiatrist a score for your anxiety symptoms and then they can determine if your treatment is successful. I scored the very highest score allowed on the test...25 was the highest and I scored a 25 which I guess is-hopeless.
I don't know who I can talk to about this because honestly who really wants to deal with my drama all the time. So I isolate and I get angry and this leaves more questions than answers in the minds of those around me and it leaves me feeling alone again. I am resentful that nobody cares but I think that if I could escape me...I probably would. 

emotions lie!

I would have to say that the last week has been a little more manageable and though it seems like our family has had to deal with quite a lot the last two weeks I have been working really hard to just talk through the situations and use some cognitive behavioral techniques in addition to prayer to not allow myself to become overwhelmed. Tonight is a different story. Something very simple has taken its foothold and allowed the anxiety to run rampant. More than anything it is just so frustrating to allow something so minor to turn into something so huge. We have promised Shawn's girls that we would take them floating this weekend with some of our friends and then stay the weekend at another friend's house. Well apparently, we didn't have this planned too well because at the last minute we realized we needed to find a place to board our dog. Any other weekend this failure to plan on our part wouldn't have been a big deal but since it is Labor day weekend, all the boarding places are full. So the negative thoughts begin about breaking promises, breaking plans, etc. Then those negative thoughts cascade into physiological anxiety responses like the shaking, heart racing, dizziness, tingly arms and legs, and racing thoughts. I then begin to think about all the things that I dealt with for the last 2 weeks that didn't send me into shear panic and now they take root and grow into huge issues...and some of them are pretty significant but not at all helped by this panic I feel about them. I start to have thoughts of my unworthiness as a parent, how I could've done better or different and how I have really screwed things up. I start to think that our friends will be mad if we cancel and that they won't want to be friends anymore because I am not a good friend (much smaller in the whole scheme of things than the other issues we have been dealing with in our family but still made huge by the monster named anxiety). And then the kicker...I tell Shawn that I am having really bad anxiety but he doesn't respond in the way I think he should so I feel angry that he doesn't care and doesn't love me and will never understand (I have said before that a lot of times my anxiety translates into anger because anger is a much easier emotion for me to handle than the anxiety and panic). So...once again 3 steps forward and 2 steps back only this time I only allowed it to affect me and not everyone around me because I made the choice not to fight with Shawn about not caring which would only make my anxiety worse. I want this to be gone. I don't want to deal with it and the mental and emotional exertion it takes to "deal" with it even in productive ways is exhausting. I am sitting here talking through these lies that anxiety tells me and doing my "anxiety homework" and once again find myself attempting to turn the tornado of thoughts into something tangible. I feel that by giving anxiety a voice, I can somehow quiet the screaming in my mind and heart.
What I want most is to be able to wake up with no anxiety but the reality of that is that I will probably in some way deal with this for the rest of my life. Something interesting and new happened tonight in that I began to experience anxiety about having anxiety...crazy huh? I actually found myself becoming increasingly anxious at the thought that I might wake up anxious tomorrow which grew into living everyday feeling this way.
So am I really any better than I was when this all began? I'm not sure...I want to say yes but my anxiety tells me that I am not better and I will never be better. I pray that this is also a lie. Satan seeks to destroy families, destroy lives, and destroy all that is good in this world. My family has taken some hits recently and I want to believe that we will be stronger but I don't feel that way. So I will leave you with this thought...maybe I will never "feel" strong but emotions lie and only actions can be measured. I pray that my actions will tell a different story than the emotions that I experience...even if anxiety never leaves me.