Why I Was Diagnosed With Anxiety And Learning To Understand My Monkey Mind

Mental health is so confusing.

There are going to be a lot of acronyms flying around in this post, so please try to bear with me.

So I had booked my lunchtime appointment with the CBT therapist (cognitive behavioural therapist) I was nervous and wasn’t sure what to expect. I had only told my boyfriend and the friend who had told me about CBT, I didn’t want anyone to know, I was quite embarrassed, I wasn’t mentally stable!

The session was in an old fashioned building, hidden down a little side street in the City of London, I had to climb about 100 stairs, I was out of breath by the time I got to the first floor and all hot and flustered.

I sat in the waiting area, half of me eager to rid myself of the craziness, the other half wanting to run out of the door and hide from it all. Then my therapist came out, she was lovely and put me at ease straight away.

I explained that I thought I had OCD and why I thought that, I explained my temperament, the constant worrying and she told me that what I had was actually, General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) I’d never even heard of it, GAD didn’t even sound like a nice word, it sounds like some sort of STD, can I have something that sounds better, please?

In the firstsession, she went over the basics. What was going on in my life?