I am 28 yr old female., smart confident but I am suffering too much due to my anxiety. I thought earlier that I am optimistic and positive person, but I do not know what’s wrong with me . Everything going fine in my life nowadays. I am getting what a lucky person can get , but due to my painful past always bad thoughts come to my mind . In my early twenties I got a very cruel shock 1st time in my life and my life was shattered but by God grace I could overcome that period and proved myself a strong woman . I also suffered a lot due to lots of unexpected reality bites last few years. Nowadays everything seems good in my life I am getting married within a month and my fiance is very nice man but I am afraid always by negative thinking. Negative thoughts just haunted me some time. , very much scare about all the uncertainty of our life . How can I help myself? please suggest.
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You don’t say what happened to you in the past to change you, but something troubling did happen to you, apparently. It is not uncommon for people who have been through troubling experiences to have difficulty trusting the world after the fact. The idea that the world is unchanging or even kind is removed (some say ripped away), and the knowledge that bad things can happen can start to poison even good things that are happening. You may feel lucky today, and in a happy period of life (getting married, etc.) but you are perhaps today aware all the time of the fragility of such happiness; the ease with which things can come apart.
There are essentially two directions you can go when you learn about the capricious nature of the world. You can go into fear and negativity and spend your life so worried about what you might lose that you fail to allow yourself to connect to good things again, or you can go into a more positive direction wherein the fragility of your experience helps you better savor what is good and what you can create in the limited opportunities you have available to you. A summer tomato tastes even better when you know that you can only have it in August and thereafter it will be unavailable. Similarly, a romance can become even more romantic and lovely and intense when you know that you cannot count on it indefinitely. Knowing that you cannot count on the world being a safe or good place all the time can help you make better choices. You can become less willing to put up with abusive relationships, for example, because you know that you have limited time and energy to spend – you become more motivated to maximize what opportunities you have for happiness.
Obviously, the positive direction I’ve attempted to describe above is preferable to the negative one, but it can be very difficult to know how to go in that positive direction when you are afraid. You need to develop a sort of courage – to learn how to say yes to things you want and no to things you don’t want in every moment to be able to pull it off. Such courage is not lack of fear, mind you, but rather stems from your knowledge that your every moment is precious and needs to not be wasted. I don’t have nearly enough space to describe how to become less afraid about engaging life here, but I can refer you to the Emotional Resilience topic center on this website for further information. Emotional resilience is all about learning to spring back from trouble and to reengage life. I can also refer you to the relaxation portions of our self-help book. It is harder to be fearful when you are relaxed, so practicing relaxation actively can help you to become less afraid. Good luck.
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