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Originally Posted by winter4me
How long has this been going on? Is it something intermittent? Do you recall something triggering this? When my children were young, I had periods of time like this, and any news story that touched those fears made me cry; using a kind of magical thinking, I thought/felt that if I worried enough about something it wouldn't happen---feeling (not without some small but ultimately irrelevant reason) that only the worst things I "forgot" to worry about happened. I found it helpful sometimes, when able, to imagine myself the "hero" in the situation---I would stop it from happening, I would "be there" to alter the course or to rescue people... This happened less as the children became adults. But, (this seems some part of the same "coin") sometimes I find myself almost wishing for disaster (preferably natural) because I think "I would know what to do then, there wouldn't be many choices...it is down to doing what little you can for as long as you can...(& then I feel guilty when I hear of natural disasters...I should be there helping...or it shouldn't have happened...) sorry for rambling a bit. It sounds like the primary emotion/physiological state is panic/anxiety.
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Your words definitely have a ring to them. There are times, yes, when I have envisioned myself stepping in to take charge of a disaster waiting to happen.
I have no recollection of any disasters happening to those I love. However, I do have memories of them happening to those my loved ones loved. Also, as a young child I had odd unexplainable premonitions of terrible occurrences. One stand out example was from the time I was six years old. I watched a news item about a small plane accident in which the children survived but not the parents. I had a sickening feeling and moments later the phone rang. Even before my mother picked it up I
knew it was someone calling her to notify her that the crash had involved her best friend. While this is an extreme example, this sort of thing happened a lot in my childhood. Occasionally it has happened since I've been an adult. When I woke up on the morning of 9/11 to news that a plane had hit a tower my then husband assumed it was a small aircraft in distress. Nope, I just knew it was what turned out to have happened and I just knew that wasn't the end of it. I
saw it happening before it did. I also have frequent situations of Deja Vu. I realise it is silly but over and over again something happens and I feel I dreamt about it exactly beforehand. And this is why these visions of horrible disasters are so very troublesome for me as, based on prior experience, I expect these things to happen.