I work with high school students. Today, I had two students who were having anxiety attacks come to me.
One was able to use the techniques I was giving them as well as some of their own to calm down. That is great!
The other, used various techniques and could not get their breathing to slow down, their tears to stop, or their brain to stop racing. That is okay too.
Sometimes we just have a day(or a lot of days) where we can not quiet our minds. When our hearts continue to race and our thoughts spiral into places we don’t want them to go. And that’s okay.
In the long run, feeling like that is going to have physical consequences for us, but sometimes we just need to feel what we feel. We need to accept the facts of what is happening to us or around us that are making us feel this way. Eventually, if you use techniques that you have found work for you to slow everything down you can get back to normal.
Calming techniques for one person, may not work for another. That’s why it is so important to find what works for you.
Many people in anxiety attacks get upset with themselves for not being able to calm down, or call themselves names for having the attack in the first place. These reactions DO NOT HELP. It’s important to accept that it happened in order to get to a calmer state. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 4% of the world’s population have an anxiety disorder, you are not alone in what you experience. You can also reach out to a therapist for help in gaining techniques and strategies for when it happens and in making your life improve over all.
A friend of mine sent this image to me recently. I have no idea who to credit for it, but it is so true.
I spent most of my life hyper-vigilant, not knowing who I could trust, even myself. I often felt like there was an overwound spring, ready to break free inside of me. The anxiety often threatened to pull me under and drown me. It took a toll on my body as I am still learning to relax my overly tense muscles.
Therapy has helped me tremendously. The first few times I went, I did the work to get through the trauma of the moment. Then because of insurance, or time committment, I would end treatment with new skills and strategies for dealing with the stresses of life.
This time though, I have continued beyond the trauma of the moment and gotten to the base of my mental health issues; feeling worthless, not good enough, abandoned, alone, and dealt with them. Now, instead of always waiting for the next bad thing to happen, I believe that I will find joy.
That is a terrifying, new experience for me. I’m not saying that I haven’t been happy before, but I never trusted it, history had shown me that good times don’t last. You get your heart ripped out of your chest, cut to pieces, and left alone to put it back together again.
As I have been learning to live my authentic self, not making myself fit into a certain mold or expectation of me, I have found people who like me, and all the oddities and nerdiness that go along with me. It’s scary to be vulnerable and honest with yourself and others, but in the process, I am learning how to handle joy in my life. I’m not scared that I have to behave a certain way to keep people likeing me, they just like me.
Therapy taught me that I can be me. As a friend learned in one of her therapy appointments, I’m not for everybody and everybody isn’t for me and that’s okay. As I have embraced who I am, I have learned to find joy in acceptance, peace in solitude, and contentment with others. I no longer feel as though I am a spring ready to break free, now if I could just get my shoulders to realize that they are not responsible for keeping everything inside so they can relax…
If you need someone to talk to, I am now an Associate Marriage Family Therapist working at Share Homes Foster and Adoption Agency in Lodi, Ca. If you are in California, I can work with you. Send a message for more information.
For most of my life, I have lived in survival mode. Everything was difficult when it came to interpersonal relationships. I needed to be loved and accepted and I felt like I had to earn it. I believed that I was not worth love and acceptance just for who I am. That belief has caused extensive grief for myself and unfortunately, there has been collateral damage to those closest to me.
In June 2020, I knew I couldn’t handle living in fight, flight, or freeze mode any longer and reached out to a therapist. At that point I felt like I was barely surviving. Struggling to tread water, to keep from drowning in life. That therapist, and then another one, were the flotation devices that I needed.
On a Saturday afternoon in October 2021, I was laying in bed. Getting out of bed was an unsurmountable obstacle that day. I could feel the darkness of being underwater overwhelming me, I did not have the energy to come up for air. I reached to my bedside table and grabbed my journal that was always there, waiting for me to empty the swirling thoughts in my head.
That day I wrote this in my journal:
“Spinning, swirling
Thought sprials, going nowhere,
Energy zapped, utterly exhausted,
Light evaporating, gray overshadowing,
Growing weary,
suffocating,
drowning.”
I realized I needed more help. I got on antidepressants. I started seeing my therapist weekly. I reached out to friends to hang out and talk and ask for help when I needed it.
This past week I saw my therapist (yes, I have been in therapy for three-and-a-half years.) I told him, that for the first time in my life, I feel like I am thriving. I have many things in my life to be grateful for and a lot of accomplishments, but most of them were done in an attempt to just survive this life. For example, I did well in school because I knew that an education would get me away from my parents.
At the end of January, I finished a master’s degree in psychology. This was something I did, not because it would help me survive, but because it would allow me to help others in survival mode heal so that they can thrive.
The next step for me is applying for my Associate Marriage and Family Therapist certificate, so I can start working with others on their healing journey.
Hopefully, that adorable puppy in the picture will work with me as a therapy dog.
I have spent the past few years learning about myself. The journey truly began in the spring of 2016 with a series of Facebook posts that all started with the phrase, “You might be in an abusive or controlling relationship if…” I was writing them to help a friend who I thought was in a controlling relationship, but also to help all people who might be in that kind of relationship and not realize it. In the process, I ended up helping to finally heal myself from the abusive and controlling relationships that I experienced in my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.
Through my healing journey, I realized that I was a people pleaser. I did not even know what I truly liked in some cases, I just liked what others liked. I really like cheesy rom-com movies where you know exactly how the story is going to end. I really don’t like NASCAR, except the white noise of the engines while I take a nap. I like some sci-fi, but not others and I can’t tell you what makes me like some and not others yet, but I’ll keep watching to figure it out.
I learned that I don’t like fighting. If I think someone is mad at me and is about to start or does start a fight, I will do whatever is necessary to appease them and keep them happy. I will retreat into my shell, and ignore my wants and needs to keep the other person happy. This is not a healthy coping strategy. I am working on this.
I have learned how to say what I am feeling, what I need, and what I want without feeling like I’m asking for too much or being too needy. I learned that just because I was made to feel that asking for my needs to be met as a child was asking for too much, it is not. It is normal and necessary for humans to function.
I learned that it’s okay to ask for help; that relying on yourself from a young age because you cannot trust anyone else to help you in your time of need is not a healthy coping strategy. It means that those who should have been there to take care of you when you were younger weren’t.
I have learned a lot over the past seven years and I will continue to learn more on this healing and growth journey I am on. I will never again settle for a person because they pay attention to me, I am looking for a true partner in my future. Someone who loves me as I am. Someone who I am able to be myself with from the very beginning and able to grow and change with as I learn new things.
I am excited to be at this point in my life. I am content with where I’m at. I have great friends, a good job, and a home that I love and am totally comfortable in.
I grew up doubting myself in everything I did. There were excellent reasons for this, I was conditioned to doubt not just my abilities, but even my own emotions. I was terrified that the upper level of the Bay Bridge heading to San Francisco would collapse onto the lower level, crushing the cars below; I never wanted to go over the bridge.
I told my mom about that fear.
Her response: “That’s completely ridiculous. There is no way the Bay Bridge will collapse.”
On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 pm the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 seconds at a magnitude 6.9. Among the billions of dollars in damage that was caused, the upper level of the Bay Bridge collapsed onto the lower level killing one person.
I wasn’t ridiculous, but I had been dismissed. After the earthquake, my mom continued to dismiss my fear, telling me it was a freak accident, caused by the earthquake and anything else she could think of to not take my fear seriously.
There are too many stories like this from my life, I could go on for pages and pages. (I actually did. The book is called Worthless No More, go check it out under the books tab.)
I have spent the past two years in therapy with an incredible therapist. I have also spent a lot of time learning about myself and seeing what beliefs and behaviors I had that needed to be changed.
The biggest change I needed to make was to believe in myself. To trust that my feelings are valid, that my thoughts are valuable, and that my words have worth.
I have spent years teaching these things to my students, hoping that they’d take it to heart and ignoring it in my own life.
Now, I believe in myself. Now, I trust myself. Now, I know my worth.
For most of my life I felt out of place. Like a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit… and I wanted so bad to fit somewhere, anywhere. I wanted to belong to the beautiful picture that I believed was on the cover of the box of this roller coaster called life.
I felt so close, so many times, like I almost fit. It didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t a perfect fit. It didn’t matter to me that the picture wasn’t perfect. I would force my piece of the puzzle into the pieces around me. The part of the picture I had on my piece fit in close enough with the whole thing that it worked for awhile. I stayed connected to other pieces of the puzzle that weren’t a perfect fit for too long far too often in my life.
Eventually the pressure of being in the wrong place, trying to fit in where I didn’t belong, having the edges of my puzzle piece constantly rubbed the wrong way, effected my mental health. It forced me to make choices that impacted my life. I had to decide what was more important, keeping up a façade of fitting in, which must have been rubbing other people’s edges wrong too, or getting out of that place and finding a place where I truly fit; without rubbing my edges, or anyone else’s, wrong.
There have been a few places and a few people as I have gotten older where I feel like I fit perfectly. When you look at this picture, you can see that the edges fit snugly, with no pressure points. When you find the right people to be with, there won’t be pressure points.
I’m not saying that there will never be disagreements with people that you fit with, there may be, but the discussion or argument will still be respectful. Just because people fit, doesn’t mean they’re exactly the same. It just means that they images on their puzzle pieces work together to make the same big picture.
My puzzle is still incomplete. I haven’t found everybody who fits in my puzzle perfectly. I’m being more careful about it though because I don’t want to ruin the edges of my puzzle piece, or theirs’. In the end I want mine and everyone in my life to have perfect puzzle pieces to create a beautiful image for our life.
I may be getting a late start on it, but hey… better late than never.
I can’t tell you how long I have wanted a little camper van like this one to drive across the country. In the 90s I owned a Volkswagen vanagon for a few months until my first husband wrecked the engine. I never got to take it farther than Santa Cruz, and I never got to camp in it.
I have been a few trips with a travel trailer to Montana, South Dakota, and the Grand Canyon, but not yet from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Coast.
Until now.
After my enlightening, soul strengthening, trip to Iceland last October, my kid asked when we were taking that trip to Ocean City, MD. Inspired quite a few years ago by this sign in South Sacramento, CA.
We started planning. We started saving. We started driving.
It’s our Epic Road Trip. Just us girls before she graduates high school. We’ve gone for a hike to see Native American ruins in Arizona. We went to a nuclear museum in Albuquerque. We ate at a Cracker Barrel restaurant for the very first time in Texas. We’ve been to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where MLK Jr. Was assassinated. We wnt to the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum that honors those lost in the bombing there and reminds us to never forget what happened that day.
This has definitely been a trip we won’t forget and we’re only a few days in. We’ll be posting videos about it on my YouTube channel @mishellwolff3652.
Last year, just before Christmas, one of my very best friends told me that she was sure that I wouldn’t be alone by this Christmas.
Well, guess what…
She was absolutely,
Positively,
In all ways,
Completely,
Without a doubt,
Correct.
While I don’t have a special someone, a significant other if you will, to spend time with this holiday season, I am far from alone. I wasn’t alone last year either.
I have felt alone many times in my life, most of my life actually, even when surrounded by people. I have felt that I had nobody to depend on, nobody to talk to, nobody who understood ME, who I really was.
In an effort to not be alone, I surrounded myself with people that loved me for who they thought I was, so I became that person instead of being me. I hid parts of myself that I knew they wouldn’t approve of. I was ashamed of my flaws. I lost myself in order to feel loved and in the end I was still utterly, completely lonely.
Over the past year, I have realized, that although I felt alone, I was not alone. I did have friends that I could rely on and turn to when I needed them. Those are the same friends that I have in my life this Holiday season that mean I am not alone as I face another “single” Christmas.
I will be visiting with many friends of the holiday break. I will be spending time relaxing at home. I am most definitely not alone this Christmas, she was right.
I have anxiety and it lies to me. It knows every one of my insecurities and fears. It whispers them to me in a steady drone in the back of my head, like constant white noise. Sometimes anxiety chooses one or two of them to pick out and amplify; to scream into my mind until I can’t breath, until I can’t think of anything else, until my heart is racing as if I’m facing a life threatening moment, until I want to run away.
(I take medication that helps. Finally, my doctor and I have found a medication that helps AND now, almost a year later, hasn’t left me wanting to do nothing but sleep which is what every other medication I have tried has left me feeling. I also see a therapist, having a person to talk to has helped tremendously.)
The lies anxiety chooses to amplify focus on two topics that have a huge impact on my life: “You can’t do this.” and “They won’t like you.”
Those two lies have kept me from doing so much in my life. They have kept me hidden. They have kept me invisible, locked inside a prison of my own making. There have been people in my life that fed into the lies along with anxiety, who emotionally, physically, and sexually abused me, but it was the lies anxiety told me, and I believed, that kept me in those relationships far longer than I should have been. I couldn’t leave my parents until I was 18, but I kept them in my life much longer. The boyfriend who raped me and my first husband, I waited until they were physically away from me before I broke up with them.
I believed I couldn’t do it.
This past week, I went on a vacation specifically designed to challenge myself. I was willing to go alone, but a coworker ended up joining me, because it was one of her bucket-list travel destinations. It was amazing getting to know her better, I’m so glad she joined me on all the challenges I chose to do. She even had to do one of them herself, because of health reasons, I wasn’t allowed to participate in it.
I hiked up waterfalls, one of them was 1200 steps! There were many stops… for photos… along the way. It was never because I needed to catch my breath. Where are the photos you ask, ummmmm. I’m pretty sure the film didn’t develop on those… (HAHAHAHA.)
Skogafoss Waterfall, Iceland (the black line to the right are the steps I climbed to the top)
I walked through an ice cave, in a glacier that’s melting, on a volcano, that has never gone more than 100 years between eruptions, until now. It’s been 104 years since the last eruption. I walked over bridges made of 2X6 planks of wood, that have been chewed up by the cramp-ons that people wear on their boots to not slip on the ice with melting glacier water rushing beneath them and nothing to hold on to except the occasional rope hooked into the melting glacier wall.
Katla Ice Cave, Iceland
I met tons of new people, that I actually talked to. I didn’t listen to anxiety telling me that they wouldn’t like me. I just went for it. There I may not have learned everyone’s name, but we all did amazing things together and I will never forget them being there with me. I ate food that I NEVER thought I’d eat and it was DELICIOUS. I hope to find some of it here in California, but some of it I know I won’t. I ate fermented shark and I will never eat it again! EVER! But I did it, I got out of my comfort zone and did it! I can do hard things.
My travel buddy, our driver/guide for two days, and me at Silfra, Iceland (where two continents meet)
The next time anxiety tries to lie to me, I need to remember all the hard things I did on this trip and all the people I met. I can do this and people will like me.
As a little girl, my mom told me that she knew from the moment I was born that I was going to be the independent one, that I wouldn’t need her, that I would be able to take care of myself. I was in Kindergarten the first time she told me that. I thought it made me strong and mature to be able to take care of myself and my siblings from a young age. I didn’t realize I was doing it because I couldn’t depend on anyone else.
In 1980 or so, there were warnings of floods in our area that winter. Our driveway and pastures often flooded so it wasn’t too far fetched for our minds to believe our house would flood. My older sister and I made a plan to save ourselves and siblings if our house flooded. Maybe she made most of the plan, but I definitely remember being in on the conversation; I was 6 years old.
When I was 8 years old, my mom worked during the day and my teenage sister slept in until late, so I had to make sure my siblings had breakfast and lunch. Oftentimes, I also made dinner for the family. I was a genius at making Top Ramen and corn dogs. By the time I was 12, dinner was my responsibility most nights too.
As soon as I got my driver’s license I was doing the grocery shopping for the family as well as driving my siblings and my mom to all of our appointments. I was about 17 before I realized that I didn’t have a childhood.
I grew up to believe I could only depend on myself, that if I needed anything from anybody else they wouldn’t love me, that it would prove that I was weak, imperfect, worthless, and unlovable. I needed to be independent to prove I was worthwhile.
People commented on how hard I worked or how well I worked on my own. I reveled in their acknowledgment. Feeling worthy through their eyes, but never my own. I still felt like a child seeking approval, trying to show that I didn’t need anyone, that I was independent like my mom had told me so long ago.
This past year I needed help with something big. I knew I couldn’t do it alone, I was going to need many people to do it with me. It took so much for me to ask for help. After I did, I cried. One of my friends asked me why it was so hard for me to ask for help when I know they will all be there for me.
My answer, “I never knew I could rely on people before.”
I have a few people in my life I know I can count on, I’ve slept on their couches when I had nowhere else to go, they’ve helped me move, I’ve called or texted them and asked last minute if I can come see them and they say yes. In my life though, they have been the exception, not the norm.
My goal moving forward in life is to surround myself with people who I can rely on. Who when I call and they say I need your help, they say I’m on the way without even asking what they’re helping with.
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