Mental Health: The Silent Battle

When people talk about addiction, they often focus on the substances. What they don’t always talk about is the pain that drives you to them. For me, that pain had a name: anxiety. PTSD. A mind that was always running, always on high alert. It wasn’t just about escaping reality through drugs and alcohol... it was about quieting the noise in my head. A noise that felt like it was always too loud, too harsh, too impossible to ignore.

In the early days of my recovery, I was told that addiction was a disease of the mind. I heard it. I understood it on some level. But it wasn’t until I had to sit with my own thoughts,  the very ones I spent so many years trying to drown, that I understood just how deep that disease went. It wasn’t just about numbing the pain in my body; it was about escaping the chaos in my mind.

I had lived with anxiety for as long as I could remember. It had been my shadow, lurking in the background, always there but never fully acknowledged. It wasn’t until I started therapy that I realized how much it had shaped my life, my choices, my relationships. It was the anxiety that made me feel small, like I was walking through life with my shoulders hunched, as if I was always bracing for something bad to happen. It was that tightness in my chest, the knots in my stomach, the way I never truly felt safe,  not in the world, not in my own body.

And then there was the PTSD... that silent ghost that haunted me long after the traumatic events had passed. The fear, the flashbacks, the sense of dread that something terrible was always just around the corner. I carried the weight of my father’s rejection, the grief of losing my mom, the shame of my past decisions... all of it packed into this little container inside me that I never quite knew how to unpack.

Therapy gave me tools. It helped me understand why I felt the way I did, why my body reacted the way it did to stress, why I would get stuck in cycles of overthinking, hypervigilance, and panic. But what therapy couldn’t prepare me for was what life demanded I learn on my own.

Therapy taught me to breathe through the anxiety, to ground myself, to be gentle with my thoughts. It taught me to sit with the discomfort without rushing to escape it. It taught me that I didn’t have to react to every feeling I had. But life, life was a whole different beast. Life demanded I actually feel those feelings.

It was in recovery, in the moments where I was alone and had no choice but to face the storms inside me, that I learned the real work was to sit with my pain, not run from it. Therapy taught me the skills, but life showed me how to apply them in the raw, messy moments of everyday life.

There were days when the anxiety would hit, and I would feel like I was drowning. My mind would race, and I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t focus. But I had to sit with it. I had to remind myself that it was just a feeling, not my truth. That was something therapy taught me, but it was life; those moments when I thought I couldn’t handle the pressure, but somehow did, that proved it to me.

And PTSD? Oh, PTSD was a whole other level of hard. I would catch myself flinching at loud noises, feeling the panic rise when I was in unfamiliar situations, or when I thought I saw a shadow of something that reminded me of the past. Therapy had helped me process some of the trauma, but the real work came when I had to trust myself enough to walk into situations where I felt unsafe and choose to be present. The healing didn’t come with an apology from my past. It came from me forgiving myself and choosing to live, despite the fear that still sometimes crept in.

There were moments when the walls felt like they were closing in. When the weight of everything,  the grief, the shame, the anxiety, the PTSD, felt like it would crush me. But through it all, I learned to trust my own strength, even when I didn’t fully believe it was there. And I realized: healing wasn’t a one-time event. It wasn’t a checklist to tick off. It was a continuous process of choosing to show up for myself,  even when the fear felt bigger than the hope.

What therapy taught me was the art of managing the storm. What life taught me was how to dance in the rain.