Who has experienced delayed strong anxiety after being sober for a while?

ive been sober for a while now, and I have little to no craving for PMO currently. I do still have mental lust and some fantasy if I see skimpy clothing etc...

Yesterday and today I have had almost panic attack moments that I’m afraid that because I’m feeling a little better it is me just lying to myself and ignoring my feelings; escaping from them. And I’m secretly headed down the path towards relapse.

Anyone else who’s been sober share this irrational (or potentially rational) fear of mine??

I’ve been trying to stay sober for 10 years without success so I have a long history of doing some work on myself and regressing.

I’m just so scared that relapse is right around the corner; scared to the point of crying and panicking.

I never want to return to my old self and am so scared that I will...im so scared.

Thanks all for your support and help!!!

 

Thanks. I actually had a relapse dream last night. Contributed to me being so anxious today.

 

So I realized that since recently the depression has gone away (mostly) the anxiety has had room to grow...

So I’m now dealing with the anxiety. Or at least trying to.

For me the depression being the stronger of the two for so long I understood it and could talk about it and journal about it. Depression for me was a sort of one track problem. I would say “I suck, life sucks. The world is doomed, I give up...” this was the same feelings often and always...So when trying to ask myself “what am I feeling now that is making me so sad?” The answer was easy to uncover...especially when a huge portion of the pain came from my PMO acting out guilt and shame.

For years I ran from this depression and didn’t face it by using PMO and other things. So in recovery I faced it head on and am dealing with it. And to not run from it was simpler than anxiety cuz I could recognize the feeling and journal about it specifically or bring it to my therapist.

But with anxiety its more complex. It seems that everything from a bad hair day to a new pair of jeans, to an email from a potential job opportunity, to wondering if therapy will help my wife or open up old wounds and harm her...etc...everything can and is triggering the anxiety.

And somehow without me even aware of it for the past two days I’ve been running and hiding from these anxious feelings. With recovery I decided to be rigorously honest and it has kept me sober. And I wasn’t that way with depressives thoughts. But somehow with anxiety it is more sneaky.

For the last two days my journal writing is a jumbled mess with no clear answers to why I feel this way. Since this is so unfamiliar I’m just shooting in the dark. And the result is me being so uncomfortable that I’ve been running from my feelings. Nothing horrible, just when someone asked how I’m doing (a loved one or friend) I say “good!” When in fact it don’t. And I think I’ve been doing things like tv or isolation or internet to distract myself from the feelings and run from them.

Also, it’s hard for me to know how I feel, cuz before I was depressed so it’s easy to rate my mood as low. But now if I feel really anxious but also not sad, then rating is my mood??

For the last 2 nights I’ve had anxiety filled relapse dreams. Last night was the worst. It involved me failing at a business (which I’ve done in real life), not being cool and people not liking me (which I’m scared of always irl), a women (from real life) hooking up with me even though her sister and my wife didn’t approve, and me and her trying to be sneaky about it which made it worse. Also, this women is real life someone I had a crush on and is friends with my wife so more anxiety about that in the dream. And in the dream when she asked me to meet her in her bed, I kept having things go wrong like my car was stolen and all sorts of stuff, so I couldn’t keep my word and I was going to lose her (probably a parallel to my wife leaving me 100 days ago).

So my whole dream was so chaotic. And when I woke up I didn’t want to do my morning routine. I just wanted to stay in bed and go on YouTube. But since my depression is lower, it didn’t feel so sad to do that, but it isn’t healthy at all for me to run from the anxiety and ignore my feelings.

This whole thing is crazy.. and I really hope my next stage of recovery I can deal with this...

Because this type of problems will cause me so discomfort that I will need to PMO in order to feel better and I don’t want to do that so I need to get through it in a healthy and honest way instead.

 

So I’m doing CBT therapy with my therapist and she had me buy this workbook. I was doing the depression section but switched over to the anxiety part because it’s soooo strong... and fear runs my life.

Well, it turns out there’s no way to fix anxiety without facing it.

I was hoping I could work on it at home in private and then be ready to face the world. But it’s the opposite. We do two main things to protect ourselves from anxiety.

1. We avlid the anxious moments
2. We develop unhealthy habits to help us deal with the situations.

For example, going to social events, I will either not go due to the anxiety or if I do go I will use my phone as a protection mechanism, I’ll avoid eye contact to prevent conversation or ill only go if I’m with a friend or loved one so I can hide by their side.

The above behaviors create instant relief from the anxiety but they prolong the anxiety and also strengthen it over time.

Facing the anxiety head on starts to break down these wallls and soon we are convinced through real life proof that the scary things aren’t as scary as we thought and we can slowly tear down the walls of isolation and fear that keep us from being who we are and keep us from fully enjoying life.

For years I would only do things that didn’t provoke anxiety and therefore I have been living a lie. For example, do I like dancing? Well....I don’t know!! Cuz my answer has always been no to dancing out of anxiety. So I just assumed I didn’t like it because if I thought of doing it I had a negative feeling, therefore i must not like it. But now I’m finding out that I really have no idea if I do or don’t like it, because if I remove the fear (which I can’t yet) then my answer might change.

Being like this for over 20+ years of my life and basing all of my decisions on how anxious I would feel, means I’m not who I’m suppose to be. I’m an altered version of myself.

And according to the CBT work, the only way to truly find out who I am is to force myself into the situations that scare me over and over again until the fear is at an appropriate level, not exaggerated because of anxiety.

So today I walked around ikea, I made eye contact with people and smiled, I forced myself to not use my phone as a wall, and pretend I was importantly checking emails. In the checkout line I talked to the people surrounding me. Then I went to Home Depot too!

doing these things every day to challenge the anxiety in the same way that I challenge my addiction by doing daily practices will hopefully slowly chip away at the anxiety.

Here’s to all of us suffering from this and hope for change!!

 

Any ideas of how to overcome anxiety? Any daily work that can be done to kill it?