Healing your inner child The idea that each one of us has an inner child has been the butt of jokes in recent years, and yet its a concept that is useful in understanding ourselves.

When you are lying awake, are you troubled by anxious thoughts and/or physical symptoms of Anxiety? I had a good childhood. This can cause unpleasant, and possibly dangerous, physical symptoms including convulsions. Breathe out. I have to see the teacher for ten minutes on Tuesday but I cant go because Ill have a panic attack. Once I started recording it over the next few days it got much worse and I was up to checking 8 by 8 times. Now repeat your goal - because you have done it before your physical Anxiety will be lower, and you will be able to pay attention to your thoughts. The problem with avoidance is that it means you never test out your belief that you will be anxious if you enter the situation or engage with the behaviour. Yes, because I was the youngest and I couldnt compete with the others. Typical thoughts are: She ignored me, she must hate me. Hes staring at me, I must be doing something odd. If someone you know passes you without speaking, your intuition, coloured by Anxiety, might well lead you to assume they were angry with you for some reason. Heres an example for an agoraphobic who wants to get back to work: Travel on the bus. This is why it can sometimes seem that an Anxiety sufferer gets some benefit from their illness. And yet these problems are extremely common, so there must be thousands of people with similar records who are now leading happy and fulfilled lives. Dont be concerned if this haps to you, its only a sign that anxiety was making you very tired. I also tell myself how much time I can sd on something, and that helps me to stop and walk away from it. Its easy for any of us to develop the habit of using the expression what if? This is where we need to change our habits and replace this expression with the words so what! Consider the following question. Instead of dreading the bolt from the blue, you can now look back and see how your Anxiety developed in the first place. Some of them are already fully recovered, and some of them are able to help others by working as volunteers with one of the charities in the field. But at some point you will probably ask the question why me? You may think something along the lines of look at Mrs Jones down the road, shes had plenty of stress and she doesnt panic. If you think that your panic attack is actually a heart attack, or that panic will damage your heart, you will retreat to the armchair and behave like an invalid. Or look at it another way: Why does jaunty music make us want to tap our toes?