Okay but more on that post about emotions. I spent three years of therapy dealing with almost exclusively this with regard to anxiety. I was in grad school and working a second job with a boss/owner who was a jerk. He would harass you on your days off and early in the morning about anything he could find out of place in the shop. And it was always accusatory. And so I was afraid to leave the shop at night without being completely certain that everything was exactly as it needed to be.
It got so bad over the course of almost a year that I would be so nervous about the door being locked or sign taken in (even though I’d checked four times and taken pictures to prove it to myself) that I would get off the last bus home so that I could check the door for the eighth time. I would obsess over it every morning on my way into work. I’d be worried about it at dinner. I would go in on my days off to make sure things were okay and I hadn’t screwed something up.
Humans have a fight-or-flight response still. And anxiety is part of that. It is our brain telling itself and our body to avoid danger. But sometimes that alarm that goes off is so disproportionately out of whack. I shouldn’t have been as scared of not cleaning thoroughly enough or not finishing one last task as I was. But I was that scared. And every time I acted on that fear, I validated it. And it came back just as strong or stronger the next time. By doing what I thought was attending to my emotions the best, I was actually making my anxiety worse. I was making myself more miserable, contributing to future panic attacks, and just displacing the problem to tomorrow.
I started my recovery by not getting off of the bus or doubling back to check the door one more time (even if I had the time), by not going in extra early to try to finish anything that might have gotten away from me during the day. Not by letting it control my life. And I was still anxious, and I still had panic attacks on the bus for a while. But over time, the alarm got quieter. It still went off, but I could ignore it, or at least try to. And each success made the next one a little easier, but each success was still hard.
Doing what your emotions tell you to isn’t always bad, but in cases like this - in cases of avoidance - it often is. Our emotions are trying to tell us helpful things. They just don’t always do it well. Or at the right magnitude. Telling the difference is hard. And it doesn’t really stop being hard.
For anyone who has ever looked at or reblogged this awful post: turns out this is not atypical of OCD, which I was diagnosed with earlier this year. If this sounds like you (obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, among other things), maybe talk to someone. It’s worth it. And treatable. It gets better, but not really on its own.
