Treating Anxiety And Self-Worth

Treating anxiety and my self-worth walk the same path, as much as I hate to admit it. When it comes to anxiety and panic - I don't want to see it. I don't want to feel it. I do want to fight it, and I do want to help, or at least find the kind of help that helps. But that is far, far easier said than done. When the way I'm treating anxiety fails, my self-worth falters, too.

Treating anxiety takes guts. The kind of deep-down certain knowing, wrong from right, good from bad, up from down knowing one imagines heroes and heroines to have. It's just a lot of days I don't feel like it. I don't feel like treating my anxiety because I don't feel that strong, that self-worthy or that able.

Treating Anxiety Can't Be About Self-Worth -- Can It?

Anxiety is about many things but it isn't about intrinsic worth. In the grand scheme of things I'm just another Jo, and anxiety does bugger all to change that -much as it may have me high as a kite some days, and about as grand as a guttersnipe others. It's those guttersnipe days that pull my self-worth down with anxiety's plan to change me.

Treating anxiety can be about precisely how self-worthy I hold myself to be. How far I'm willing to go to prove to nobody else but me that my emotions are mine. No matter how jumbled up and scared I am inside.

Treating Anxiety and Self-Worth: Does Success Depend on Awareness?

Fear is a human conflict; and in the face of fear, we can feel self-worth faltering. Panic, a type of fear (well, maybe a diagnosis that hangs out with anxiety), messes with my self-worth daily (Anxiety: What Happens When I Don't Know What To Do).

Awareness of my fear isn't always what it seems; likewise, fear is hardly ever what it seems. Getting to the point I can live my life with a whole lot less panic takes a willingness to look at just how much anxiety there is: day to day, week to week, year to year (and those statistics are fearsome to tally). It's easy to get sidetracked because tallying anxiety isn't the same as treating it.

Yes, I need to know my fears. But in the process of coming to know my fears, the last thing I want to do is set myself up to feel that falling on my sword is somehow the point of all this. I don't want to be aware of my fears only to accept that I'll always suffer anxiety and panic. That's a downer for my self-worth.

In my strength, my spirit, I wonder how much I really can do -- what is not only in my power to control but what I am able to change (and what I can't) -- that spirit in me believes in certainty only halfheartedly. But why? Because experience looks like I fall down. A lot.

But the point of all that falling down is getting up (The Importance Of Acknowledging Progress). The path that leads to treating anxiety is more about letting go, than holding on. Awareness is a rollercoaster: it's finding the ways I can stay strapped into my seat, and still unmask blind terror. Realize that it is, in fact, blind; That I am the only one who can stop panic attacks, and PTSD because I'm the only who can see.