I Want to Be Different, But My Anxiety is Paralyzing Me
Reader’s Question
I am a 24-year-old male in the USA. I went to a psychiatrist for about a year about two years ago. I was treated for anxiety and PTSD. I was put on a small dosage of Lexapro (10 mg per day). I went off of it after about 9 months. I don’t know if it really helped any. That’s a very quick background. But my main question is a bit different from what I was treated for before.
I never brought up my main concern during my past treatment because I was too embarrassed to talk about it. The issue is that for some reason I experience extreme anxiety in specific situations. One situation is when I am in an unfamiliar location with people other than my immediate family and have to spend the night there. I feel like something medically or life-threatening will happen to me (as it has in the past) and that people other than my family won’t help me or will see me as “weak” and discount the seriousness of my problem. I also fear that I wouldn’t know a strange environment well enough to know how to get help for myself. This has caused me to lose jobs in which I would have had to travel. It’s also restricted my educational choices: I go to college in my home town primarily because I feel secure with my family close by. This anxiety about being in unfamiliar places or away from my family has been with me since elementary school. I thought I would grow out of it but I never did. Anytime I know that I am going to have to spend the night outside of my “comfort area” I do everything I can to get out of the situation. I don’t like living like that — it’s frustrating. But the second I know I don’t have to, I feel immediate relief.
Another situation that causes me intense anxiety is being intimate with a girl. As soon as I feel the possibility of our spending the night together I become very anxious. I feel as though I would be letting my parents down if they knew about it. I also feel like it’s wrong. I have only had one girlfriend — the rest I was able to run from when it got to that point. In actuality my parents want me to date and wouldn’t be disappointed in me if I were intimate with a girl. Still, I worry about things like if I got an STD and then might regret that particular night for the rest of my life. With these thoughts I don’t feel like a normal guy, and it certainly doesn’t seem like sex is ever going to happen. I don’t think normal guys get anxiety over this stuff as bad as I do. All these thoughts race through my head at once, uncontrollably. I fall into the thoughts and dwell on the them, making them worse and worse. Even though I want to be with her, I again try to get away from the situation and as soon as I know I am, I feel instant relief.
My anxiety consists of severe incapacitating stomach aches. I feel as if I need to throw up. My jaw muscle tingle, and my mouth waters uncontrollably. I begin to worry excessively about the negative possibilities of the situations. It mostly happens at evening/night.
What can I do? I want to be different, but my anxiety is paralyzing me.
Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply
There’s some good news and bad news. The good news is that anxiety can be very effectively treated, and there is no need for you to suffer as you appear to have for much of your life. The bad news is that anxiety sufferers are often their own worst enemy, engaging in habitual, “automatic” thinking patterns and behaviors that only solidify their fears and make their symptoms worse.
Fortunately, the kinds of thinking and patterns of behavior that perpetuate severe anxiety can be changed, and a former anxiety sufferer can lead a “normal,” productive life. I’ve posted several prior articles on this topic, such as Taking Xanax, and My Anxiety is Worse than Ever. The most important things to remember are that medication alone is not the long-term solution, and despite the embarrassment and distress of dealing with your symptoms, they can be overcome.
Even before you enter therapy with a qualified expert in the treatment of anxiety disorders, you can begin to make some positive changes and reduce your symptoms. A casual review of your complaint reveals that you tend to use certain kinds of words in your “self-talk” such as “incapacitating,” “uncontrollable,” and “paralyzing.” Such words reinforce the notion that you cannot control your symptoms and also fuel the vicious cycle of anxious panic. So, one straightforward thing you can do (it’s simple and straightforward but not always “easy”) is to drop such words from your inner vocabulary and replace them with less extreme words such as “distressing,” “uncomfortable,” and “unnerving,” and to engage in some positive self-talk on top of that (e.g., “I can still function, even when I’m distressed, uncertain, or confused.”).
Once anxiety symptoms have become deeply ingrained over time and have escalated to an intense level, they seem to take on a life of their own and in many ways take control of the sufferer’s life. But all that can change with the right intervention. So, as embarrassing as it might be, seek out a competent practitioner and tell them the entire story. In addition to symptomatic relief, you might even be able to explore some of the personality and environmental factors that contributed to your problems and work through those issues as well.
So, don’t delay, and take heart! A more “normal” life awaits you.
