Yes, You Can Recover

I met a friend during my early days of anxiety recovery. We ended up frequenting some of the same blogs and resources. Places like Paul David's blog, and the Panic End forum, which at the time was very popular and remains one of the few places I would tell someone to visit for good information online.

I say that carefully, because as I wrote about in the book, most online meeting places that deal with anxiety and panic offer mixed results at best. If you do not have experience parsing what is real and what is not, they can set you back. They foster fear, bad information, and an endless outpouring of detail about new symptoms and medications.

So I go back a long way with this friend. We will call him Mike. Figuratively, we started in the same place. Both of us were struggling and looking for answers. We knew we had the right ideas, and at times I think both of us knew we could apply them correctly. Sometimes we even saw improvements.

It went on like this for a while. We traded links and quotes back and forth. Either one of us could slip into complaining about symptoms, but the foundation was there.

Progress is always personal

Time went on, and for whatever reason, and I really cannot say exactly why, my progress started to accelerate. There were a few turning points that helped me shift my mindset, and I write about them in the book. But it was not one thing. It was a series of small beliefs I had transformed, mixed with a few major aha moments that helped me turn the corner.

That was many years ago. We all recover at a different pace, and Mike and I were both very stubborn. When you are stubborn, changes like this take time.

The changes were not coming as fast for him. He kept struggling to apply the concepts to himself. Not with the idea that they might be true, but that they might be true for him. You got the sense he thought he just might be different. I know that thought well. It kept me stuck for a long time.

He was a smart guy. Very smart. As I have said before, that is common at the disorder level. Thinkers, doers, strategizers, feelers, and in my opinion genuinely good people. There are reasons for that, and we can save them for another blog.

The friction of changing habits

Mike lives overseas, and he stayed in touch over the years, mostly when things got murky. I would not hear from him for a while, then a message would come in, sometimes with a joke attached. You probably know why I am writing. And I did, and I never minded.

I had made progress by then. Not full recovery, but I was well on the way. If there was one thing I learned during my own journey, it was that once I got to a good place, I was never pulling the ladder up behind me. The people who helped me most were regular people who had done it themselves and were kind enough to share the information.

So I helped any time he reached out. I would remind him that I still got symptoms and still had tricky stretches, and I tried to focus on how I was handling them now compared to early on. But this was a stubborn guy, and I was not used to dealing with someone more stubborn than me, because I was not sure that was possible.

The months went on and I watched him move back and forth between believing and disbelieving, hope and frustration. I did not have a magic phrase to offer, or one exact thing that had turned the tide for me. I just knew that I had changed my agreement with the entire process.

My mindset was not the same anymore. I had signed a new contract with all of it and ripped up the old one.

At one point I remember thinking that I could envision him recovering, but I was not sure he was ready. I know that may raise a few eyebrows, since it seems like everyone would be ready to recover. I believe it is more complex than that, and I wrote a whole blog about it, Anxiety Recovery. Are You Really Ready?

Some of what he sent was venting, some of it was looking for reassurance, and I had done plenty of both in my own harder days. But my advice often landed on deaf ears, because I truly think he was not convinced any of it applied to him.

Something in the tone changed

Somewhere around a year ago, I started to detect a change in tonality when he wrote me. He did not love going through the storms, and nobody does. But the tenor of the underlying message felt different. There was a kind of resignation starting to develop.

That word usually shows up in a negative context. When it comes to a sensitized nervous system, resignation is close to exactly what we want to see.

I tried not to point it out. I did not want him turning his thoughts further inward. I just hoped it would keep heading in that direction. Many months later, I am beyond pleased to report that it did.

The message

The genesis for this article was one message he sent recently. He had read the book and had very kind things to say, which made me happy. Then he told me he no longer felt like he needed it. He did not feel like he needed the resources at all, and the topic had become no longer interesting to him. That made me happier.

He went on to explain that he still has bad days, and a storm still comes around once in a while. But when it does, instead of diving into analysis, he simply finds something else to do. He was not only describing a massive jump in his relationship with recovery, he was seeing the flaws in his own past, and recognizing what keeps the people around him stuck.

I almost had to do a double take. The funny part was the delivery. He said it with such confidence that I had to chuckle. Here was a guy as stubborn and resistant to these concepts as they come, and believe me, that describes me too. And there he was, telling me it is just not interesting anymore.

If you doubt you can do this

That took me back to my early days, when I used to wonder if I was one of those people who does not have it in him to recover. Most of us start out believing we can do it. One of my mistakes early on was constantly setting time frames. I need to recover by summer. I need to be better by Christmas. That gave way to doubt, and I lived in a long stretch where I did not know if I would ever feel like myself again.

So Mike's message was a joyful moment for me. Not that I did anything. This was his hard work. We had the same information and he had to apply it on his own timeline. These changes happen when we decide we are ready for them.

If you are in a place where you doubt your ability to recover, I would tell you to check that thought. Hold on, not so fast.

Mike is not the only one. I have watched people recover who are as stubborn as you will ever find, people who fought tooth and nail against these concepts, convinced they had something neurological, anything you can imagine. Even the most defiant people reach the right conclusion about this condition, and find peace.

So if that is you, think about it differently. Being strong willed, even defiant or rebellious, can work in your favor here. Once you sign that new contract, that same mental strength and will is working for you. Add in the improvements you are going to see, and you are never going back.

You could still have a hard day or a rough spell. That is just life, and you will have a new outlook on that as well. One that affords yourself some imperfection and accepts the inevitable fact that life is full of ups and downs.

That acceptance calms and steadies the body. It heals the nerves. It grows our confidence. And it leads us back to a balanced and rewarding life.

Dr. Claire Weekes opened one of her early recordings with a line I have never forgotten. No matter how long you may have suffered, you can recover.

That was true back then, and it is true for you today.

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