High level of anxiety

[Mumtothreeandadog]

It is DDs birthday today, I should be feeling happy. But instead my anxiety is through the roof. I worry about DD a lot because I had suffered with emotional and sexual abuse as a young child and young adult. I am paranoid history is going to repeat itself. I have daily flashbacks and find it really hard to cope. She has now gone passed the age when I suffered the worse of my abuse so I am trying to breathe a sigh of relief. Tried talking to DH but he does not worry about anything which is good but doesn't really help. My DM has anxiety and she turned to alcohol to control hers so that is my new anxiety that i will follow the same path. I am already on antidepressants

It might help to understand why you are feeling anxious following the abuse and why you are getting flashbacks.

When something bad happens, a part of our mind takes on the job of working out why it happened, so we can avoid it happening again in the future. Abuse is usually unexpected so we had no chance to foresee and prevent it, and always undeserved, so it's really important to understand we didn’t do anything wrong to cause it and certainly couldn’t have avoided it.

The need to make some sort of sense of the experience can often lock us into that moment. A part of our subconscious becomes unable to move on until we can fully understand it and put it to rest in our mind. It becomes like a jigsaw puzzle with some vital pieces missing - the answers from the time and/or the people involved that will never be available to us.

If we had a jigsaw puzzle that we knew had several of the pieces missing we would stop trying to solve it - our mind only engages with things it thinks it has the possibility of achieving.

Does this make sense to you? If you can accept there's no answer - other than it was something you had no power over and no responsibility for - you might find some relief.