If you read any self-esteem building book, you will find that the focus is on how you believe that there is something wrong with you, and if you change that assessment of yourself then your self-esteem will be bolstered. And to get there, ‘they’ focus you on positive self-affirmations, and looking at the messages that you received growing up and changing those so that they are more empowering.
That’s cool, except that what do you do if every time you feel any negative emotion you think there is something wrong with you irrespective of what that negative feeling was in response to?
Did you realise that because of anxiety, success is harder to achieve, so even if you are the head of your department, run your own business, been in a committed relationship for over 20 years, if you had never had anxiety, you would be even more successful, and found a route to success both easier and faster?
There are so many awful things about living with anxiety from how it affects your level of happiness, to how much you can earn, to how healthy you can be, to even how many friends you can have, but for me and most of my clients, it’s the belief that we don’t have it within us to get on with things, to be like other people who are ‘normal’, to just get on with it.
In the poem, Maud Miller written by John Greenleaf Whittier, he featured the words “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!” and sums up nicely one of the downsides of conquering your anxiety.
No I’m not referring to Schizophrenia, a very serious condition, I’m talking about all those inner voices we hear when anxiety, worry, fear are at home, and what to do about them.
Have you ever been to a fortune teller? And they told you the same things that they tell everyone, but at the time you thought, well it might be true, so I’d better keep it in mind just in case?