Anxiety. I have lived a life without it until now at 53. What the hell!?
“Genetic disposition”. “Genetic loading”. “It’s in your genes”.
These are a few phrases I’ve heard recently when I’ve talked about anxiety.
Whilst it would be easy for me to nod and simply agree, I’m not so quick to start blaming my parents just yet for this one!
My specific type of anxiety is health anxiety. What a weird thing! I wrote about it here and for some reason, it wasn’t only popular, it was a boosted story (for which I’m deeply grateful) which tells me that there is more anxiety out there than I could ever have imagined.
Apparently, health anxiety can surface for different reasons, and one of those reasons is childhood trauma in terms of getting sick or having other health issues.
I have Osteogenesis Imperfecta (aka ‘brittle bones’) and am type 1 which is very mild, so I’m one of the lucky ones who have it.
I passed it on to my son unfortunately, as there is a 50% chance of passing it on to offspring. We knew this and rolled the dice anyway, but as luck would have it, we didn’t ‘roll 7’ and he got it.
I hope you’ll take a moment to read why we both smile a lot despite having it in the below story called ‘Breaking into a Smile’.
I promise it will make you smile ☺!
So we both live with the condition, and to be honest I would say that it’s only a small cross to bear I see others have to deal with.
The fact that my son has two broken arms in casts right now as I write this is just another non-subtle reminder that it’s something we need to be conscious of in our lives and simply to be extra careful.
So if health anxiety started because of some childhood health trauma, then I guess I can trace mine back to this.
But I’ve only broken about 12–13 bones and nothing that caused me mental trauma that I’m aware of… but it has made me more conscious of having to avoid situations and contact sports during my life so perhaps that’s a contributing factor.
Or, perhaps the Health Anxiety was brought on by an incident I had as an adult about 15 years ago…
I was living in Japan at the time, and a customer had visited us from the US.
We took them to dinner at a local Japanese restaurant but on the way, the older of the two (he was only about 55 though) said he had a headache, so we stopped at a drugstore for some medicine for it.
We proceeded to the restaurant and he seemed quiet, but OK and just as our appetizer was placed in front of us, he quite literally fell forward facefirst into the plate of food presented.
The waitress recoiled back quickly but it was so quick we didn’t realise what had happened and I thought he was joking with an ‘I’m so hungry I can’t wait!’ kind of action…
Alas, it was no joke. It turned out he had a massive heart attack and he died on the spot.
We laid him on the restaurant floor and called the Ambulance. They came quickly and took him away, and we followed him to the hospital.
I thought I was OK but my therapist recently told me that it’s likely PTSD that I have carried all these years.
He also said that trauma like this doesn’t impact the mind, but the body, and in my case, it started with sharp pains in my chest which was simply my body reliving what I had seen.
Of course, I got fully checked out as I mentioned in the above story about Managing My Anxiety but I was fascinated to learn this is how anxiety manifests.
So what’s the point of this story?
Well, I want to learn more about anxiety and I couldn’t think of a better bunch of people than my fellow Mediumians to ask and talk about it. I know it’s not a chat forum, but I encourage you to leave a comment and talk about your own. Share it with us, please.
Do you have anxiety? Have you in the past? What kind of anxiety do you have and what do you do to manage it?
Learning what I have recently has been deeply helpful, and the more we know the better we can manage it. Talking about it helps tremendously and ‘normalizing’ what we experience is equally so.
Here’s to sharing our experiences, our learning, our support of each other and to improving the Quality of our lives.
