Anxiety’s Tricks

If anxiety has its way, it will keep you from doing anything on your own behalf. It wants to keep you from reaching out for help, it wants to keep you isolated and alone, it…

As we’ve been going through this series on Anxiety’s Tricks, it’s my goal to always try to relate each lie of anxiety, to how it feels to an abuse survivor.  This latest trick is a…

I’m hard pressed to think of something more invalidating and disheartening than the thought of anxiety being one with me, one in the same. Anxiety in Disguise, is the next trick, the next lie that we…

This next trick of anxiety, aka lie of anxiety, is where it tries to do it’s best to confuse you. Let’s explore some ways that this can happen, so we can be aware of this…

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’m not worthy” or “I’m not good enough”? How about, not smart enough, strong enough, or just simply “don’t have what it takes”? As survivors of abuse, these feelings…

Something that anxiety loves to try to do, is make us feel like we can’t trust ourselves; to drive home that feeling that we are incapable of making good decisions. For that matter, that we…

As survivors, we often talk about how being vulnerable is scary. Opening up to someone, even a person that is trustworthy, is far from an easy task when we’ve experienced the trauma of abuse. This…

Next up in this series of Anxiety’s Tricks; Anxiety makes you think that you will go crazy, or that you are in the midst of going crazy! What a self-defeating, completely invalidating mindset. It doesn’t…

No matter what situation we find ourselves in, if its even remotely stressful in any way, or possibly could be stressful, anxiety will take that and run with it. We have to be constantly on…

Continuing with our series on the Tricks of Anxiety, let’s talk about how it threatens us with the idea that “it’s going to be awful”. Catastrophizing* every situation as inevitably going horribly wrong. The threat of something…