How I was Diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder

Mental health is so confusing There are going to be a lot of acronyms flying around in this post, so please try to bear with me. So I had booked my lunchtime appointment with the CBT therapist (cognitive behavioural therapist) I was nervous and wasn’t sure what to expect. I had only told my boyfriend and the friend who had told me about CBT, I didn’t want anyone to know, I was quite embarrassed, I wasn’t mentally stable! The session was in an old fashioned building, hidden down a little side street in the City of London, I had to climb about 100 stairs, I was out of breath by the time I got to the first floor and all hot and flustered. I sat in the waiting area, half of me eager to rid myself of the craziness, the other half wanting to run out of the door and hide from it all. Then my therapist came out, she was lovely and put me at ease straight away. I explained that I thought I had OCD and why I thought that, I explained my temperament, the constant worrying and she told me that what I had was actually, General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) I’d never even heard of it, GAD didn’t even sound like a nice word, it sounds like some sort of STD, can I have something that sounds better, please? In the firstsession, she went over the basics. What was going on in my life? “Well I have been separated from my ex-husband for several years and in the process of starting divorced proceedings, I live with my boyfriend who has children with an ex-partner, I don’t want children myself and sometimes struggle with the situation as it’s all still very new and I am not quite sure where I fit in. I know that my behaviour isn’t normal and I don’t like feeling like this” Wow, I didn’t even know all of that was swimming around in my head and she got it out of me in 15 minutes, I felt relieved and also quite alarmed, how was I going to resolve this? However, I can honestly say that after that session, I felt a little lighter, she gave me some homework to do, nothing heavy just basically to monitor my anxiety and report back. I had a one-hour session every week for 10 weeks, my life didn’t change but my thinking did, which is what CBT is all about. I still had anxiety and some panic attacks but I deal with them a lot better, because I now have a better understanding of what is going on. I found that meditating helped, I started using the Calm app on my phone, and I liked it so much that I went and paid for the full version. I love reading, so I did some reading on the subject. I highly recommend The Chimp Paradox The author describes the human brain as having 3 sections, you, a computer and a chimp. He tells you to name your chimp, mine was called “Barry” and this lightened some of the darker moments for me & my boyfriend as he would say stuff like “Tell Barry to piss off” or I would say “It wasn’t me it was Barry” It did help me to understand how the brain works and how to train Barry into behaving differently. This was only my first trip on the mental health express…….