My Journey with Anxiety

There is a problem in thinking that you are supposed to be advancing in your practice all the time. You don’t have to constantly be on the road. If you have a flat tire, that is also part of the journey. – Chogyam Trungpa My healing process after my breakdown has seemed pretty smooth, even if it has taken some time, the need to discover and use several new “tools” and, most of all, quite a huge effort. In these months I’ve been reading and listening to hundreds of opinions about how non-linear the healing process usually is, about how the line that describes the way we feel day after day is more of a tangled curve, rather than a smooth segment. I had even been briefed about it by my therapist, who sketched a simple diagram for me on a block, during our last session. Nevertheless, I was starting to think that non-linearity was not going to apply to my case. I was wrong. After having decreased the paroxetine daily dose from 20 mg to 10 mg and stayed with that for two months, I was confident that the rest of the journey was going to be as easy as it had been up to then. Well, not really. At the beginning of March I took a new step in the reduction, going from 10 mg per day to 10 mg every other day. I began experiencing some mild discomfort since day one, but managed to carry on for three weeks. By the last week of March, when the day of my last dose was approaching, anxiety struck again. Let me be clear: It feels bad every time. There are some differences when ...
Source: Psych Central - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Anxiety Disorders General Medications Personal Stories Psychotherapy anxious thoughts Chögyam Trungpa recovery Source Type: news