Finding our way to the trigger....

[Bunnah]

Hi all,

Having been in therapy for a number of years, some things have come up in the last 2 years ( 9 years on the couch so far! ) that have triggered GAD. I don’t see therapy as a cure related practice, because I don’t see myself as sick, so please don’t feel disheartened after you have read my therapy experience. I am also in transactional analysis, and this is a longer term approach to therapy.

I am working on my triggers with my therapist, and trying to mind map them. It is of course exhausting, because I don’t have much energy in the first place. Does anyone else have any creative ideas around working on what triggers anxiety for them? Not exactly what your triggers are, but how you got to source of what triggers you? How do you get through the maze? Mind maps? Writing? Talking?

Interested to hear your thoughts. :flowers:

Bx x x x

[Bill]

I don't feel it's too difficult to uncover the sources to our anxiety because to me, it's like taking a step back in time at a time.

For instance, the way I think would be like this....

I really hate my own company and in the past I felt very anxious whenever I was alone in the house. So then I thought back into my past to try and find out why. The first memory I thought of was when I used to come home from school in my teens to an empty house. At school I was very quiet and bullied. I then realised that by the time I was 12 both my brothers and sister had left home so from that age I had felt like an only child. I then asked my mother how I was as a toddler and baby and she told me I followed her everywhere and in the pram I would scream if she wasn't in sight.

I then realised I had been born with "insecurity" and when my brothers/sister had left, I had felt abandoned. I had also never built any confidence in my own abilities.

It all fit into place why I feared being alone so much.

That's just a brief example but I always believe that symptoms in the present Always have a cause based in the past and that with a little delving it's always possible to uncover the reasons.

However, once the causes have been identified, I feel the important thing then is to work on thinking in the present and moving forward so that past memories and experiences don't rule our lives in the future.:hugs: