anxiety and not get taken seriously help

[hereagainalways]

I have suffered with crippling anxiety all my life, usually in the form of worrying about loved ones and also more recently dreadful health anxiety. I am 32 weeks pregnant and this is making the anxiety worse.

To fellow anxiety sufferers - do you find your anxiety means you feel you don't get taken seriously by friends and family? for instance I recently went to hospital to get baby checked out for reduced movement and family members immediate reaction was 'you don't need to do that really, you know you are just anxious' and 'in my day we never monitored baby's movements etc etc'. It's the same with anything - I just get dismissed. DP tries his best and is very supportive but he still doesn't really get it.

Just because I do suffer health anxiety doesn't mean some of my concerns aren't valid and I just feel like not saying anything ever because everything thinks I am a nuisance.

Does anyone else get this? How do you deal with it?

[Xilvey]

I don't have any children yet but my anxiety is the only thing stopping me. I know how you feel I think I'd be exactly the same when I'm pregnant. But with my on health I constantly need reassurance im okay and although my family understand, because they've dealt with my panic attacks my whole life, my friends are not so understanding. A lot of them poke fun or have said some very nasty things when I've asked them for help or advice. If anything you being anxious and constantly getting baby checked is better!! I'd much rather have everything checked and be told its fine than brush it off and put it down to my anxiety only to find out something is wrong!!

[AnxiousMunchkin]

I have severe anxiety, but honestly I wouldn't necrssarily think those people were dismissing you, they could have been trying to reassure you, however clumsily they did it.

The whole issue with anxiety is that we are worrying about things we shouldn't need to worry about, so it seems fair enough really for that to be pointed out to us, it doesn't mean that people aren't taking our worries seriously because they stem from anxiety rather than a 'genuine' issue (for want of a better word, that's a really bad way to put it but I hope you see what I mean). My boyfriend often makes bad jokes about things I'm obsessing over, they generally don't go down well but I can see what he's trying to do. Of course a non-sufferer can't quite have perfect insight into what's going on in our head, same as we can't understand any other health condition we have no direct experience of.

So I deal with people saying this kind of thing by trying to rationalise it, I guess, and working on improving my anxiety overall.