Last checked for editing: January 22/2025. None needed. It’s timeless.
I’m always hearing I have to learn to be less anxious. But it’s all wrong. I was born this way. And I can’t unlearn it. So I don’t need to tell myself not to be afraid. That just makes it worse and adds guilt that I failed to stop the fear. Now I’m afraid of being afraid.
And there’s more.
- Whenever I say more than a few words that I really mean,I choke or I feel like crying.
- Or I get angry easily and that makes me want to shake people up or hurt them into seeing my point of view. If I dare show my anger I cry or it goes way further than I felt it in my head. Mostly, I just keep it inside where it argues with the world or myself, and builds, until it comes out so different, so perverted from where it started that it’s not me.
- But the worst part of anxiety is not being able to get things done because I just don’t feel like it. I constantly find myself doing stuff that’s pleasurable or easy, but doesn’t move my life forward.
All of these things drop my mood, overwhelm me, make me feel bad about myself and make me constantly move from one way of being myself to another, like, “hey, who am I?”. Time passes. I don’t get better at getting things done. I miss deadlines that the rest of the world makes: homework done, graduation, making friends, getting a job, getting a love partner, and everything else. I can never make things go right for myself even though I can see them. I just don’t feel like it the way I feel like doing stuff that doesn’t matter.
So what am I to do with this crappy brain I’ve inherited?
- What do I do with its constant fault-finding and solving of the fault, what most people call second-guessing, until I can’t make a decision or even move?
- What do I do about the frequent distractions coming into my head, that make me tense if I don’t act on them?
- What do I do with the worry that others will disapprove of me?
- And the anger, oh, the anger, which I often feel energized by when it first appears, and then always regret showing, even if it felt good to get it out?
With a few exceptions, humankind has spent most of its history opposing anxiety. This has failed. It’s time to try something different: to never solve what I was born with and will forever have, to always go with it.
That’s what the Seeing Sequence gets me to do.
Easier said than done, but still, I find, the easiest way to change.
Next. What the Seeing Sequence is, and isn’t.
I can’t explain how the CBT sessions we had run along these lines, have now benefitted me. I eventually broke many cycles, and started new ones along my framework. Sober and to be married with a growing business. Now the world is in front of me rather than behind me, and I am much more free to go into it as I can see more clearly what I must do to achieve what I will. Hope to keep seeing work here.
Good to hear how you keep trying.
Repetition is the key to building a memory centre that, early into a psr, triggers you to b and c it.
I keep asking myself and others two questions:
1) Is there something specific users would like to see added here?
2) How could the site be constructed to make them want use the site, and thus b and c, more often?
I’m collecting all the answers I can get.
I just want to say hi I still remember all the good things I learned from you I hope you have more resources or book recommendations I am eager to read
Can you explain how the bitch and complain works?
What have you read so far, and what don’t you understand. I need to know, so I don’t repeat what’s on the site and miss what you don’t get.
Hi I need more explanation
At what line in the steps do you need more explanation?
I cant find the post where you gave the distraction and the true response??
Good observation. The posts need more highlights to make the central concepts easy to find. Working on it.
To find what you’re looking for go to “More how to do it”. That’s the definitive copy of the entire sequence.