Help me explain my anxiety.

Post date: 2019-10-28 08:15:35

I have always been an anxious person, and it is only quite recently that I've twigged onto the fact that not everyone lives life tensely waiting for the next bad thing to happen. I finally started therapy after resisting it a while. I did not expect to magically feel better immediately, but I do think that perhaps I'm not communicating well enough with my therapist about how debilitating my anxiety can be. How do I do that better? Details below.

One of the things they focus on is how functional I can be - and this part is mostly true. I hold down a very high pressure job with fickle top management, manage a remarkably horrible commute, live alone , do a good deal of caretaking for family members (including a ton of logistical heavy lifting), and I generally sound quite sorted. I think what's happening is that I'm not really showing them how much all of this costs - I've started having crying jags at work (this is a new and utterly horrible phenomenon), I find it increasingly hard to pretend that the commute isn't soul-destroying, or that I'm starved of companionship and meaningful interactions outside of workplace (workplace itself has gone from reasonable to really toxic in the last one year with no hope of improvement in the short term and no concrete exit plan yet, what with all the overwhelming stress and anxiety), and whatever pitifully little downtime I have is eaten up by worry and stress and physical discomfort from the stress. Unfortunately, I think I approach even therapy as something that I should have my game face on for, and I constantly qualify everything that is hard or emotionally exhausting or saddening with that perhaps I'm overthinking it. Or being extra sensitive. Or I joke about it. They don't agree with my characterization of the situations, but they do think I'm very functional (I think the words 'surprisingly so' were mentioned more than once) and have a healthy set of coping mechanisms (primarily because I'm eliding over the less healthy stuff like the crying and obsessively rechecking work and really really bad panic attacks). I find myself wanting them to think I'm competent, which is basically ridiculous because I am excluding myself from the help I need.
How do I make this work better for me? How do I communicate my issues more clearly? I like them and I do not really want the additional anxiety (heh) of shopping for a change yet. Even general advice for dealing with this would be very welcome, thank you. I'm very tired.

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