Anxiety can look different for each of us.
You might be dealing with nagging health issues like chronic IBS or migraines. Or maybe you have an impulsive need to manage others or your environment in order to feel okay. It can be people-pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking. Anxiety might also have sharpened into panic, terrible episodes where you feel a sense of impending doom, sometimes so debilitating that you're afraid to leave home or enter into any situation which you cannot control.
It gets better. Anxiety therapy can help you:
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Know and anticipate your triggers
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Explore the roots of your anxiety and gently process through them
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Identify your cognitive distortions, or thoughts that lead you down the wrong path (i.e., catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, jumping to conclusions) and how to course correct
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Ground yourself in the present to stop you from spiraling
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Regulate your nervous system - turn "fight or flight" to "rest and digest"
Codependency says: I need you to be okay.
"If you're okay, I'm okay" is a mantra that you've internalized. You address your own feelings of overwhelm by trying to control other people and circumstances. Maybe you don't know that you're doing it. But you realize you have a hard time saying no, even when you're spread too thin. You violate your own boundaries in order to meet someone else's needs. You apologize even when someone else is in the wrong, just to get the conflict to go away. You question yourself constantly, especially when confronted with disapproval. You fear the loss of relationship and harmony, so much so that you've lost your sense of self apart from others' opinions.
Codependency has roots in our upbringing, a survival instinct that many of us learn as children in order to maintain some semblance of peace in a troubled or chaotic home environment.
Treatment for codependency can help you:
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Gain freedom by learning to establish and maintain healthy boundaries
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Learn healthy and realistic detachment from things you can't control
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Regulate your own anxiety rather than controlling and manipulating others
