Anyone else have this kind of issue, where your normal day to day moment by moment experience of yourself and the world is that of permanent fear? Or anxiety, whichever label fits I don’t know, I just call it fear because that’s what it feels like to me.
I’ve sort of known that the biggest issue I have is this fear stuff but it’s so terrifying that I can barely think about living in such a state of fear all the time without it really freaking me out. If there’s one feeling I cannot deal with, it’s fear
. It informs and infuses everything about me, my every perception, my every thought, my world view and my view of myself. Needless to say I experience everything in a profoundly negative way, especially the automatic and spontaneous thoughts that come at me from the back of my mind, they’re all so negative and it feels like my god surely it’s not me thinking that, but there’s only me in here so it must be what I think and I just can’t tolerate living with myself knowing that all this negative anti-me frightening threatening stuff is coming at me every moment of the day with every perception and thought from inside my own head.
See having this constant stream of negative fear based perceptions (I defend against it by staying up here in my cognitive rational intellectual think-about-everything mode) is like having a permanent toxic entity inside my head, there’s no safety and no way I can even begin to try and think well of myself or self soothe in any way – such things that would help me counter the extreme negativity of what goes on in my head if the toxic entity didn’t always know what I was up to and made sure I don’t get to have anything soothing or calming or safe or good
. Think of the idea of an inner critic but imagine it as having as its sole purpose, to destroy all and any sense of my self I might have as good or innocent or even just plain ok, to attack every single thought and perception and feeling I have as bad and wrong . I’ve struggled with this most of my life, it came from a psychotic episode I experienced when I was a teenager, and I’ve managed to survive with it in my head by not being in my own mind properly, always having to doubt my own perceptions, always living in other people’s reality. Which is not the safest place to be but a damn sight safer than my own head.
What I’ve been having to face recently is the fact that nothing I do either in therapy or by myself changes my negative set up one little bit, and that until and unless I find a way of dealing with this global fear nothing will change either. I can’t actually control this fear and the more I’m trying to live around it, the stronger and more pathological it gets. Somehow I’m going to have to get in there and try and deal head on with it
. My latest grasping at straws idea is that maybe the fear has invaded my head and my perceptions and my thoughts precisely because I’ve jumped into the intellectual cognitive mode as a means of defence against it, instead of being able to deal with it as ‘just’ a feeling, in my body. I tend never to live in the moment, I’m always off in my head either in the past or the future or thinking about what’s happening in the present (as opposed to just BEING in the present.)
I know there are people here who’ve done somatic therapy work, and maybe there are others who also deal with extreme fear/anxiety. I really wanted to know how you deal with it, what you do that helps, what sorts of ways there are of understanding how to deal with intolerable levels of fear? Any comments very much appreciated, especially as I know I’ve written a mega post and it takes a lot to plough through it.
LL
p.s. I’m sorry if this post comes across as whiney or self pitying. It’s serious to me and right now I’m having a hard time dealing with anything negative or critical, let alone with having criticisms levelled directly at me about my fears and feelings and way of seeing the world. So if what I’m saying has irritated or annoyed anyone, could I ask that you not tell me so, just ignore the whole thread.
And sorry for having to write this p.s. at all, it’s a measure of how paranoid I’m feeling
. If I start poking and prodding at the fear, who knows how it will turn out.
) turned out to be erroneous 99% of the time. Honestly it has been massive, like discovering the mistaken-ness of the certainty that i had about myself and my inability to cope. 
because it is pretty fool proof. There is no way out and you keep looping around the fear. So that is the first thing, to see the circle and know that that is what is happening.
I was away from home in a very rainy place and my umbrella broke in the wind. I wasn't able to replace it for a few days and worked myself up into an absolute state that i was going to get wet and sick and i was really quite upset. So i did an expermiment 30 days without an umbrella to see what happened, to see whether i was making valid assumptions or not. The result I got slightly wet once out of 30 times. It was fascinating.