Originally Posted by
FarFromTheFells
Hi Mr B
I'm rubbish at the whole empathy and understanding people thing, so I won't pretend to know how you feel - I can just give you some insights into my similar experiences and I hope you can draw something useful from them.
I suffered from Generalised Anxiety Disorder for a long time until my behaviour around my family (especially) was getting out of control. I felt very stressesed most of the time (usually by work,) felt negative towards work colleagues, had low self-esteem and took my temper out on my wife and kids (although never physically). I was known as 'Grumpy Dad'. The worst thing was that I wasn't really aware of how I was affecting others - although I could see that my relationships were suffering and I needed to do something.
I saw my GP who referred me on to a course of CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy). I was sceptical at first, but I had around 12 1 hour sessions, and the therapist really helped me turn things around.
The therapy itself is talking therapy (no pills !) and for me the aims were to help me understand what it is that triggers my behaviour, to understand how to spot these triggers early, to learn to avoid the behaviour and understand that it doesn't actually achieve any good to continue the behaviour, to get a better understanding of what others think of me (this was astonishing and was so much more positive than my own perception of myself), and to develop my own self-esteem and assertiveness skills (as opposed to aggression).
Well, I'm still no angel, but I can more easily sense when I'm going downhill and can apply the techniques to stop myself spiralling further. Sometimes it also takes my wife to help me spot the signs (I taught her how to let me know without getting my back up further). I structure my activities so that there are clear cut-offs between my work-day and my home life, I try to spend more quality time with the family, remind myself that ruminating over things that stress me out isn't going to help any, believe in myself more, and of course value going climbing and running with my friends.
The therapy's not easy and does take a mind-set shift, and I'm a better person for it (ask my wife and kids) and generally feel less stressed and aggressive.
The CBT itself was very practical, not much psycho-babble crap, just proper down to earth talking and coping strategies.
I hope you can see that bottling stuff up just causes it to come to the surface anyway and usually in an uncontrolled rage, and you're not really aware of it happening until it's too late. See if you can get yourself some CBT, it helped me enormously.
Cheers
Chris
(FFTF)
