Reddit reviews Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety

Even more of a reason to get it over with. A big part of anxiety comes from not being comfortable with the ambiguity of what could happen, and then often assuming the worst case scenario and obsessing over it.

I highly recommend this book, it helped me a lot with my anxiety, both social and otherwise - https://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118.

Yes, I have panic disorder and my main symptom is a fear of dying. It is usually brought on by physical symptoms (chest pain is my most common symptom) and at my worst I was having obsessive thoughts almost constantly and developed agoraphobia.

Medication has helped me. So has my mother. She also has panic disorder and its nice to have someone to talk to and relate to. I would not have made it as far as I have without her.

I'm still terrified. I still have obsessive thoughts sometimes, but I'm slowly learning that it means that I need to live my life to its fullest potential. I think what scares me most is how you can be alive one second and dead the next (accident/homicide/etc) and I more fear the absence of my life than actually dying. The fact that I will cease to exist terrifies me.

I think about it a lot when I drive (I'm scared of car accidents) and when I hear tragic stories on the news. I hate myself for it, but I always put myself in the victims shows and try and imagine what happened. Horrid.

I don't know how to cope with it yet. I don't know if anyone truly does. But reading Things Might Go Terribly Horribly Wrong. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1572247118/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

This one and this one are the two that were recommended to me by my therapist.

This is a great self help book for dealing with anxiety.

https://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118

I'm doing ACT. Dunno if it'd help you or not but it feels like the anti-CBT for me. Rather than replacing thoughts, it's about not fusing/identifying with them.

If you're a book kind of person, I'm using Things Might Go Terribly Horribly Wrong (but I'm also seeing a therapist, too -- although I should add that I'm out of crisis now and into rebuilding.)

If nothing else you might find it a nice change from the "fix what's broken" approach. ACT's approach is more "everyone's broken to some extent, here's how to handle brokenness".

The "standard" book for ACT is Get Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Life.

I was just going to post this question! Thank you.

I am reading/completing The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety. You can buy it online, or my library had it. I like it because it has things to work on each week and a section where you can think/reflect on in each chapter.

I also tried Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety. This book is good at explaining how the brain works and why we feel anxious. It's helpful too in getting out of some of our anxious habits.

It sounds like you're letting your predictions of the future desperately hurt your present. I would recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372307706&sr=8-1&keywords=things+might+go+terribly+horribly+wrong

I've been suffering with anxiety on and off the past few years, and this book helped me out immensely. Another great book to read and directly help out your situation would be this one:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451148452

I have the PDF for the second book, let me know if you would like it, and I can PM it to you.

It's understandable to not want to be a burden, and I'm sure there are certain limits on your friend's time and energy given his schedule. It's important to not de-legitimize the pain you're experiencing by saying that you're not deserving of at least some small portion of his time and support. If the friendship you have for your roommate is as strong as you're letting on, you should trust him to want to be there for you in your time of need. On a basic level, that's kind of what friends are for, and while I can completely relate to the impulse to want to withdraw and bottle things up in order to not be a burden, look at it from his perspective: avoiding him might make him feel like the energy he already spends on you is being wasted, or that you somehow don't value it as much as you obviously do. These little blurbs probably does a better job of explaining it than I can:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201107/why-its-so-difficult-love-people-who-dont-love-themselves
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maybe-its-just-me/201008/self-loathing-and-the-paradox-selfless-love

As for your financial situation, that sucks. Life always seems to find a way to pile on the misery in a series of brutal incessant blows, doesn't it? If you don't mind my asking, what kind of therapy were you going through? Personally, I've had some decent success with mine who practices ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy), which doesn't as the name might suggest mean resigning yourself to your current situation. It's an empirically supported therapy method (not all rise to this level), and after reading some of your other posts this may be something that you would at least enjoy reading a little bit about. Some of the pieces on cognitive fusion might be of particular interest to you given your background: it seems you do get that the way things were modeled for you really did not prepare you for life in a healthy way, but that you've still internalized a lot of those rules. Cognitive fusion basically describes our attachment to these kinds of verbal rules we hold, and a very big portion of ACT is learning to loosen our reliance on them. The following books explain this concept better than I can:

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118
http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Commitment-Therapy-Experiential-Approach/dp/1572309555/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310155398&sr=1-6

The first is meant to be a little more accessible to the general public, and the second is meant more for therapists, but it's still pretty easy to follow. They do not read as lame self help books, if that's something you're worried about. ACT also tends to have a quicker turn around rate than some other therapy methods.

If you've managed to lose 45 pounds while struggling with some pretty systemic depression, you have a lot to be proud of. That shit isn't easy in the first place, let alone with all the bullshit that comes from being depressed, and you're still committed to working at it. Don't diminish the real importance of what you've already accomplished, and keep up the good work!

Hey OP, sorry to hear you've had negative experiences with doctors and worries about seeking out therapy. I really do encourage you to try and find a therapist you can connect with. Facing this sort of stuff alone is overwhelming - a good therapist can be an immense amount of support in your journey to recovery. And not every therapist is going to be a good fit! It might take a few tries, you might get lucky with the first one - but if you're gonna build trust with someone, it should be someone you connect with, damn it.

I've struggled with anxiety that has been absolutely paralyzing for a major chunk of my life. Part of my efforts to change has been developing an awareness about the nature of my fears.

Here's the thing about anxiety: it only thrives in the experiences of our past and future. Once the thing we fear comes into our present experience, anxiety cannot exist. When we actually experience our worries we might feel rejection, pain, anger, or even relief. But in that moment, the immense amount of fear we've been building around it comes crashing down.

In light of that, the personal hells we create for ourselves from such extreme levels of fear are NOWHERE close to whatever suffering our worries could actually cause us. We put ourselves through a huge amount of torture and pain before the things we fear can even happen to us.

We fear pain and negative experiences. And in life, they might come true. However, when we avoid painful things due to anxiety, we are trading the possibility of experiencing pain for the GUARANTEED negativity of fear and failure.

I'm not much into self-help literature, but I HIGHLY recommend giving this a read: Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong
It's not full of cheesy, feel-good bullshit. It doesn't parade as a cure, but gives some pretty cool insight on how you can start re-framing your mind into accepting anxiety without it becoming our motive for our choices and behaviors.

This book does an excellent job of deconstructing anxiety as a means of redirecting your focus toward values instead of thoughts. There's no magic formulas but it helps to be able to recognize your behaviors.

> What happens when someone you thought was a friend just says that they let you lean on them because you're needy and you were having a rough time?

I don't quite understand what you're saying: that's sort of what friends are supposed to do (let you lean on them when times are rough). Are you worried that they're only listening to you out of pity? That may be true, but you could also be selling them a bit short. If perhaps they feel you are leaning on them too much, it might be wise to cut back with that one particular friend and rely on someone else as well to talk to, but it is important to talk to someone.

If you're getting stuck in these vicious cycles and circular thinking, you should really see a therapist, because that's what they shine at untangling. The only way to break a vicious cycle is to throw a wrench in the whole thing and go from there. If you find that you're dealing with your depression by talking to the same person, and you say the same thing, in the same way, at the same time after having eaten the same sandwhich for lunch, and that he rolls his eyes at you the same way he did the 14 other times he heard you say exactly the same thing, maybe it's time to try something different. To go back to my being in a hole analogy, maybe that means that you stop trying to dig yourself out of the hole by doing exactly the same thing you've been doing for so long. After all, it hasn't gotten you out. And that's all beating yourself up as done: keep you in exactly the same place.

I had a lot of success with ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). It has a strong focus on mindfulness activities, and has a strong body of empirical research (which isn't as common as you might think) to back up its use. I also ripped my analogy straight from an ACT text, so if you didn't think it was the most retarded thing you've ever heard you might want to check out the following books.

A quick ACT primer:
http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/090208p36.shtml


The ACT "Bible". This one is more of a clinical manual but it is fairly accessible.

ACT Made Simple The content of the above made for non clinicians.

Things might go terribly, horribly wrong. This one is meant for clients, and isn't really a self help book. There's a big focus on dealing with anxiety, which may not apply so much too you but the strategies for cognitive defusion are kind of the same as what I think an ACT therapist would recommend for you to do.

Find an ACT therapist:
http://contextualpsychology.org/civicrm/profile?gid=17&reset=1&force=1
or
www.psychologytoday.com "Find a therapist"

I would recommend "Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong". It is a book that really made a difference for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118

This book called Things Might Go Terribly Horribly Wrong has a lot of good activities to work through anxiety. You can probably find it at your local library if you don't want to buy it! Good luck.

https://www.amazon.com/Things-Might-Terribly-Horribly-Wrong/dp/1572247118/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484153440&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=everything+night+go+terribly+wrong