How Anxiety Feels

So I find myself in the middle of a mental health crisis and want to try to describe the feelings. This in the hope that reading about my experience can help someone better identify or even put into words what they are feeling if they are struggling to. It may also give a few people that feeling that someone else feels similarly to them to maybe make them feel less freaked out and take a bit of the stigma out of these mental health blips a little.

For background, I have had two big stressors recently.  My (just turned) 12-year-old has had pretty full-on anxiety for a number of years. Intermingled has been emetophobia (fear or vomiting himself or witnessing others doing so) and misophonia (super-sensitivity  and aversion to loud or unpleasant noises). It has gradually got worse rather than better and reached a really horrific crescendo once he started secondary school this last September. So hard to sum up but seeing him so very distressed, punching himself and begging me to let him die etc has been horrific.  

The second is the death of my father a couple of weeks ago which is a big thing in itself but there is also so much other horrible stuff wrapped up in regarding his widow and her family that the agony has just been intensified with all the slander of me as a person, manipulation and just complete twisting of the truth.

I have also had anxiety of some kind from pretty much as early as I can remember but it has waxed and waned in my nearly 50 years and morphed into different types.  I've had a phobia of fainting that is almost gone now really although it choked me for a few years, inhibiting social anxieties and then the most horrible which I have heard called 'catastrophising' which is imagining the absolute worst and fearing it uncontrollably.  This really came to a head postnatally when I could not even look forward to stuff because I feared so much that my babies were going to die. My brain was telling me that and even a little bit positive might result in my having the worse happen to punish me for my cockiness.  Wow, that's pretty messed up I know but I really couldn't shake it and couldn't really speak of it for years, let alone write a blog post on the subject!

I drew the above picture to try and show that the sufferer can be quite a bright and joyful person like the woman in the purple top with the clear eyes but this anxiety entity is telling her things like those in the speech bubble so much that it becomes her internal monologue and then becomes intrusive and obsessive thoughts...all the way to beliefs. The hand on the throat is the beginning of all the physical symptoms like tight throat and shallow breathing etc. which accompany it but hopefully the picture shows that it is imposing, intentional and impossible to ignore when it is in full flow.