Hi Gil Warrior,
I'm in agreement with many of the posters here. It sounds like you need professional help. There's no shame in seeking help for mental health issues. A psychiatrist can take your entire history and come to a conclusion about what you are suffering from. Perhaps you may need medication to help you through this difficult time in your life. I would advise taking one day at a time. Try not to sweat the small stuff. Try not to beat yourself up over supposed failures in your life. Everyone goes through ups and downs in life, that's normal. Remember Gil Warrior, your worth is not dependent on externals. In other words, what a person has achieved materially. You are a good person that happens to have hit a rough spot in your life. Don't give up. There are people that care about you. There is hope that soon you will feel better and your outlook on life will brighten.
I have a list that discusses TEN RULES FOR COPING WITH PANIC, I hope this will be of some help to you.
1. Remember that feelings of anxiety and panic are nothing more than an exaggeration of normal bodily reactions to stress.
2. They are not harmful or dangerous, just unpleasant. Nothing worse will happen to you.
3. Stop adding to panic with frightening thoughts about what is happening and where it might lead. Stop "awfulizing."
4. Notice what is really happening in your body when you feel panicky, not what might happen.
5. Wait and give the fear the time to pass without fighting it or running away. Just accept it.
6. Notice that once you stop adding to the fear with frightening thoughts, it starts to fade away.
7. Remember that the whole point of practice is learning how to cope with fear-without avoiding it. This is an opportunity to make progress.
8. Think about the progress you have made despite all of the difficulties, and how pleased you will be when you succeed this time.
9. When you begin to feel better, look around and plan what to do next.
10. When you are ready to go on, start off in an easy, relaxed way-without effort or hurrying.
In order to maximize your benefits from doing this exercise, it would be helpful to write down some notes or thoughts about how thinking about the rules helped or did not help during a panic attack.
Also Gil Warrior there is a book written by Doc Childre entitled "Freeze Frame," in which he gives a technique for overcoming stress. In the book he tells of some that suffered from severe depression that were helped to minimize their depression by using his techniques. Here are five steps that may help you to cope until you seek professional help.
1. Recognize the stressful feeling and FREEZE-FRAME it! Take a time out.
2. Make a sincere effort to shift your focus away from the racing mind or disturbed emotions to the area around your heart. Pretend you're breathing through your heart to help focus your energy in this area. Keep your focus there for 10 seconds or more.
3. Recall a positive, fun feeling or time you've had in life and attempt to reexperience it.
4.Now, using your intuition, common sense and sincerity, ask your heart-what would be a more efficient response to the situation, one that will minimize future stress?
5.Listen to what your heart says in answer to your question.
Also Gil Warrior, there are some signs of major depression that you need to watch out for.
1. Overwhelming hopelessness, feeling of worthlessness, destructive guilt and self-blame,find no pleasure,no longer care
2. Thoughts of suicide, hard to concentrate,
3. Prolonged duration (two weeks or more)
4. Constant fatigue; unexplained aches, changes in eating and sleeping habits, inability to sit still, pacing, handwringing,slowed speech or body motions.
Also, Gil Warrior, sometimes we torment ourselves with a distorted thinking pattern.
1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black -and- white categories. If your performance falls short of perfection, you see yourself as a total failure.
2.Overgeneralization: You see a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. For instance, after an argument with a friend, you may conclude: "I'm losing all my friends. Nothing turns out right for me."
3. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting that they don't count or "I'm not worthy of such." By dwelling on a single negative detail, your whole world darkens.
4. Jumping to conclusions: You arbitrarily conclude that someone doesn't like you, and you don't bother to check this out. Or you are absolutely convinced that things will always turn out badly.
5. Magnification or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your own mistake or someone else's achievement) or play down things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections) You make nightmarish disasters out of commonplace negative events.
6. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event that, in fact, you were not primarily responsible for.
So, I hope that this information has been of some help to you. Please tell us how things have worked out. We all care. The Shakita family sends our love and support. God bless you.
Mr. Shakita
