ANXIETY
Do you struggle with anxiety following your divorce? I know I did.
It turns out anxiety became a significant part of my life for a couple of decades. For years during my marriage I had anxiety, but I had no idea.
If you’ve had that knot in the pit of your stomach, that uncertainty, the trepidation, you know what I’m talking about. Maybe for you, it’s excessive worrying that disrupts your enjoyment of life or agitation and irritation and you can’t pinpoint the exact cause. It can be exhausting, cause trouble sleeping, and general fatigue. When it becomes chronic, it is a generalized sense of unease.
FEAR
Where does anxiety come from? FEAR. Oftentimes, we mask fear with agitation and irritation. Thinking we’re not adequate and that’s scary. It is easier to be angry than to feel fear. But fear is totally normal, it is a sign that your brain is working properly. Fear helps keep us alive, but it can also work against us. When we are constantly plagued with fearful thoughts, we can become anxious.
When we can understand that anxiety comes from our thoughts, not from the people or circumstances in our lives, we realize that we are the cause of our own suffering. Why is this good news? Because we get to choose which thoughts to believe. Patterns can be hard to retrain, stories can be hard to rewrite, but it is possible. THOUGHTS ARE NOT FACTS.
UNWORTHY
I’m not sure when it started for me. I was always a confident kid, I loved sports, did well in school, and had lots of friends. I know looking back I must have been anxious, I chewed my nails until I was in my 30’s, and had other symptoms that were stress related. I couldn’t handle any sort of confrontation or I would be very uncomfortable. But I also loved to be a leader, a public speaker, and an independent thinker. I didn’t even know what anxiety was back then
When I was 20, I met my ex-husband. A few years in to our marriage I fell in to my pattern of people pleasing and that IS NOT a foundation for a good relationship. I became unsettled, nervous, always trying to anticipate so I could dissipate. It became a way of life. I thought I wasn’t good enough and unworthy of a true connection. I didn’t realize how much anxiety that produced for me. It became a weight that I carried around all the time.
WORRY
Once we divorced, I still had the knot in my stomach, the agitation, the unease. Anxiety was still not a word that entered my vocabulary. I worried about my kids, would they be ok? From the moment I told them that their dad and I were getting a divorce, I worried. I still do. Will I do right by them or totally fail them? I worried about finding a new job, selling our house, and finding a new place to live. This is how we can become exhausted by anxiety. I stopped eating, stopped doing the things that I loved, and just focused on survival. Why was I still struggling so much after divorce? I was ready for the healing to begin! But it wasn’t happening and I couldn’t figure out why. And that’s when coaching entered my life.
