Personal Narrative: A Sense Of Anxiety

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A troubled life full of traumatic events and indelible wounds at the hands of those who should love and protect us from the harshness of the world led me to search desperately for a safe shelter where to find relief. Initially, my research was focused on the outside, looking for someone or something that would soothe the pain that was becoming every day more and more unbearable. After years of fruitless searching, one day I met a yoga teacher who has lit a path up until then unknown to me. I finally found an art that would be my greatest ally in the frantic struggle to free myself from the ghosts of a past of fear and despair: the art of meditation.
Driven by an insatiable curiosity, together with an indomitable restlessness I started a path
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Overwhelmed by a wave of hope stirred by a gust of anguish, I decide to conduct further researches. A sense of anxiety grew dramatically also due to problems in the office when I'm working for about a month. The support of the therapist that I see once a week allowed me to not fall into a depressive state in which I usually freeze my emotions in an attempt to erect a wall between me and the outside world. In this regard, Seligman during classical conditioning experiments on dogs discovered a phenomenon he called learned helplessness, which refers to a state of inability to escape a dangerous unpleasant or even dangerous situation due to past repeated failures (Ciccarelli & White, 2012, p. 207). I finally gave a name to a state of chronic defeatism that haunts me for decades. Furthermore, the reading of the study about Pavlov’ classical conditioning offered a different key for reading my emotional reactions, often so …show more content…
27). MBSR seems to be effective in reducing the ruminative thinking and regulating the emotional response, mechanisms contrasting depressive phenomena (Kimbrough, Magyari, Langenberg, Chesney, and Berman, 2010, p. 28). According to this study the practice of MSBR (based on focus in the present moment) helps to reduce the mechanism of avoidance, which consist in a copy strategy to escape from painful thoughts and memories (Kimbrough, Magyari, Langenberg, Chesney, and Berman, 2010, p. 29). For my personal experience, I can confirm that the practise of mindfulness together with the psychological therapy effectively reduces anxiety and excessive emotional responses. A question arises spontaneously: how long will last the benefits of this therapy? During my life I have tried so many different therapies that I lost the count. Despite the evident beneficial effects obtained in the beginning, inevitably I relapsed in the usual dynamics of avoidance and ruminating to end up in a depression that seemed even