Breaking the cycle:

of Worry, Dread, and the Hamster Wheel of Anxiety & Doomsday Scenarios

“Most of what we’re afraid of has already happened in some way, shape or form. What we’re really afraid of is that it’s going to happen again. However, nothing ever repeats itself in life. Only emotion is repetitive. And if you can learn to not fear the emotion behind the event, then you won’t have to fear any event.”

~Emily Maroutian, the Empowered

I have been thinking about how relevant the above quote could be to framing and understanding trauma for someone who has PTSD...

This quote resonates with me and how—after the deaths of all my family members as well as my own experiences with depression and anxiety, that the common denominator, the underlying current of them all was the fear, the dread, that it would all happen again, continue to happen, in a loop, endlessly, on repeat. That would get stuck there and never move beyond. Like a broken record. That I would end up like my mother, miserable, victimized and destroyed by life’s circumstances.

It has been a struggle to fight against this for me. I don’t want to have fear, dread, worry, hopelessness for the future. My mother did that. And the mindset further destroyed her and kept her imprisoned.

I remember as a young girl, still optimistic and hopeful, with energy and limited life experiences, being so discouraged and sad for my mom, at points with her, nothing is going to work out, the worst possible thing that could happen WILL happen. At other moments, I was frustrated and even angry, to a degree, because of the negativity and pessimism it cast over her view of life. Especially from her, my person, the one who was my stability and security.

I have a different outlook on it now, with age and life experience, and I consider all that she went through and how she arrived at that place. What she said to me at one point really resonates with me—”You don’t think that I used to have hopes and dreams too?” But at some point along the way, after perpetual disappointment and hardships, she lost that. She embraced hopelessness and victim state. I know this is due to depression, trauma and her undeniable embodied life experiences.

I also recall that one of the only times that I ever saw my mom deeply fearful, where she looked scared, was after learning about the law of attraction—the secret. She learned from the book (on Oprah, of course, which she loved), that the universe doesn’t hear the negation. Therefore, if you are striving for and putting all of your energy into something that you don’t want to happen, it’ll have the same resounding effects as if you wanted it and were directing all of your energies there.

Her eyes looked alarmed, deeply fearful, with this idea that she had manifested/created this reality for her life and her kids’ upbringing that was precisely what she sought to avoid.

I probed further with her then, trying to understand.

I asked her if she ever thought about what she DID want for her life and for us.

She replied, “I just kept thinking to myself, I didn’t want my kids to have—”

That included: instability, financial uncertainty, dysfunction. alcoholism. etc.

And sadly, ironically, tragically, that was exactly where she ended up and the environment we had in our household growing up.

She was shaken to her very core with the notion that she had created this for us.

I think about this often, the power of our energy and mindset to direct our paths. I don’t think this is the only factor at play, the law of attraction, as some people do. But I DO think that our energy and where we direct our thoughts have unspeakable effects on how we take action, the stories that we tell ourselves that become reality.

However, I also hold space for how mental illness, trauma, lack of balance with hormones can deeply affect our abilities to hold positive or optimistic thoughts. We are products also of our embodied experiences and we cannot deny them. (My friend recently told me—it’s easier for some people to embrace the law of attraction, especially if they haven’t had trauma and and they don’t have mental illness like depression and anxiety.) For my mother, things had always gone so wrong and for so long, that it deeply clouded her ability to see any change or positive, forward motion.

I sit with these contradictory truths—how do you validate your lived, embodied experiences, and work toward better mental health when you might be working with a mental illness that stems from various causes? While also not re-creating and re-playing, thereby re-enacting the nightmare, telling yourself horrendous stories of how life will suck and then find that they always come to fruition?

It’s a hard balance. I cannot know the depths of my mother’ pain and trauma, but I do think I share a similar genetic/intergenerational trauma and therefore, am predisposed to depression, trauma & PTSD, anxiety, and insomnia/sleep disorder. Which is to say that I know what it feels like to struggle to get out of bed, to bathe, to have suicide ideation and major depressive episodes.

I am very grateful to not be there anymore, but I do have perspective, because I vividly remember what it is like. This is why I work so try to advocate for mental health and to de-stigmatize mental illness. I know what it is like to be at war with your mind and to know in your deepest being that there is something wrong, that you’re not weak, but others don’t get it, they can’t. They’re not in your body. When your body doesn’t have enough serotonin and dopamine and oxytocin and, because of that, people immensely struggle to think even neutrally, say nothing about positivity. Being at war with your mind is a unique kind of struggle and living hell. And if you simply can’t get that and have never experienced that, simply be grateful but don’t strive to de-legitimize or invalidate others experiences who have. Yes, we all have hard stuff that happens to us, but mental balance helps significantly when enduring those times.

I had many conversations with my EMDR therapist about my own struggles with this. I told her—I can’t operate like…believing it’s going to be all sunshine and rainbows, I am just striving for neutrality.

These are part of the reason why I get it, to a degree, with her…why it was so very hard for her to think positively or have any hope or belief that her situation could be different or improve. She was afraid of hope and the anticipation that it would get better and then did not, probably cut deep. She wanted to protect herself from further pain and disappointment. (This is a false sense and doesn’t work, I don’t believe, but I get that you want to try…to help.)

I can only imagine the pain she carried and embodied from being so deeply hurt and disappointed in life, abandoned by her mother, then to have hope in marrying my father who came from a stable, good family, only to experience his alcoholism and verbal, emotional and psychological abuse, selfishness and narcissism, unwillingness to work beyond a certain profession which led to financial distress.

Those fears, those emotions, from trauma and past experiences are so very real, so very terrifying for so many of us. Especially when we thought it was bad, but there was some rest in the knowledge that THIS was finally the worst, but then, it somehow managed to get even worse.

I once asked my best friend, “You said I was in the toilet before after my divorce, but what am I in now?” This was after my father’s suicide, then my brother’s.

She replied: “Oh, Dans. You’re down in the sewer now.”

She meant I got even lower and had more literal and figurative shit swirling around me.

I’ll be honest, I still have residual issues of my own with this. It’s a process and depends on the day and my mood.

But—I am in such a better place mentally, after all the work done—therapy, supplements, medication, maintenance of gut health, the healing power of time, my writing, emotional and social support, life changes like exercise and nutrition, etc. But, I do sometimes take solace in that horrible, unimaginable things have happened to me by proximity to my family members, and it kind of makes me think/realize—

As my therapist reminded me, you’ve survived all of this. You’re still alive and functioning. You’re survived the worst and you have shown that you have strength and fortitude, so you could survive more, more tragedies and death and what-ifs, again, if you had to. So you don’t need to dwell on them and anticipate them. You’ve got this.

I take comfort in that, the survivor status, when/if life throws me more curveballs. That is what I choose to hold on to, rather than the inevitable shitstorms on the horizon that I cannot see. They may be there, they may be not.

But this chronic worrier is learning and making the conscious choice to choosing to spend less time dwelling on that, because my mental energy and the exhaustion of worrying about it will not change it from happening.

I’ll deal when it gets here. I always have. I always will.

That is what is meant to be a survivor, and to harness the power of let go of some of this fear.

And, to come full circle, in how I started this post, with the quote—

I decide that those emotions of grief and fear and anxiety, are real, but they are fleeting, as are the clusterfucks and shitstorms of life. Therefore, I will feel the pain and emotions from them or fear or worry, but then I will allow it to move through me. In that way, I do not repress, but also do not let it control me.