My anx­i­ety is now under con­trol¹, so my ther­a­pist and I have moved onto oth­er issues.

It’s fun­ny that I start­ed going to ther­a­py for my anx­i­ety attacks, but he keeps dig­ging up issues I nev­er knew that I had.

Not that any of it is as debil­i­tat­ing the way the anx­i­ety attacks were, but it’s made me real­ize that they have affect­ed my qual­i­ty of life. All of it stems from my par­ents (as opposed to being teased, some kind of inci­dent, etc.). Once again, I say that I don’t like to blame them, but the glar­ing fact is that I can now trace every issue back to my child­hood.

The idea of a self-destruc­tive pat­tern where­by we repeat the pain of our child­hoods is called a life­trap. They’re cat­e­go­rized dif­fer­ent­ly, depend­ing on the school of psy­chol­o­gy one pre­scribes to, but my most sig­nif­i­cant ones (i.e. rat­ed “very high”) are emo­tion­al depri­va­tion, depen­dence, unre­lent­ing stan­dards, and puni­tive­ness. When I first start­ed, I also had pes­simism, but this has most­ly gone with my anx­i­ety.

I’ll touch on two of them now:

Emotional Deprivation

• One of the things that sparked the real­iza­tion that I did­n’t have a reg­u­lar child­hood was when I was asked to fill out a diag­nos­tic ques­tion­naire. I was told to rate how strong­ly I felt about the state­ment “I have not had some­one to nur­ture me, share him/herself with me, or care deeply about what hap­pens to me”. I thought to myself, “That’s nor­mal? People have that?”.
• This is why I feel alone and detached from the world. It’s not quite as clean-cut as this, as there are a bunch of oth­er issues that fac­tor into the issue, but it’s an over­all feel­ing.
• Until that point, I nev­er con­sid­ered the idea that such peo­ple exist. I assume the par­ents are sup­posed to fill this role, and even­tu­al­ly a spouse.
• In many peo­ple with emo­tion­al depri­va­tion, the life­trap man­i­fests itself in rela­tion­ships where they remain emo­tion­al­ly dis­tant. For me, it’s more of a dif­fi­cul­ty com­mu­ni­cat­ing to my girl­friends about my needs, and then feel­ing dis­ap­point­ed when my needs aren’t met.
  • This makes me won­der how cer­tain rela­tion­ships would have worked out if I was a dif­fer­ent per­son and did­n’t keep break­ing up with my girl­friends
  • Unfortunately, I could write a book on this.

Unrelenting Standards

• I’ve real­ized that I’m still being too hard on myself. This stems from the expec­ta­tions put on me as a child, or sim­ply the fact that I think being unsat­is­fied with stag­nan­cy is healthy because self-improve­ment makes me a bet­ter per­son. Most like­ly, a bit of both.
  • Sometimes I have to com­pare myself to some­one like Pat to give myself per­spec­tive on this issue. He’s a per­son who has­n’t “achieved” much when eval­u­at­ed by my stan­dards, but he’s hap­py and that’s what mat­ters. It makes me ques­tion what I’m try­ing so hard to achieve. I think of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin says, “It’s hard to argue with some­one who looks so hap­py”
  • I under­stand that it’s the pur­suit of great­ness, not great­ness itself, that should make life worth liv­ing, so when I have this self-destruc­tive­ness as a result, it does­n’t quite make sense. I’m work­ing on this. It helps me to keep a quote by Charlotte Cushman in mind: “To try to be bet­ter is to be bet­ter”.
  • A side effect is that I’m too hard on oth­er peo­ple because I project my unre­lent­ing stan­dards on them as well.
  • A lot of peo­ple tell me that I would­n’t have had so much pres­sure to be the best and per­form well if I was­n’t an only child.

1. I don’t say solved because I don’t think one can com­plete­ly elim­i­nate anx­i­ety [↩]