I wrote this piece awhile back, but since it applies to financial anxiety, too, I thought I’d republish it.
Last visit to my therapist, I told her about an unsettling dream I’ve been having once or twice a week.
“I’m either anxious about something,” I told her, “or I’m watching too much ‘Star Wars.’”
“Describe it,” she said.
“My kids and I are having a fun picnic at the park, or at the pool, or sometimes we are gardening (Definitely a dream since I haven’t used my green thumb in years!). At any rate, I feel content and happy. But then a few spaceships fly over, hovering, in this foreboding way. I realize our country is about to go to war, that a country (or planet?) is attacking us, and terrible times are ahead. Every time a ship flies over us, my stomach turns, filling me with anxiety.

“‘What’s the matter, Mom?’ the kids ask me. And I don’t know how to describe war, or if I should warn them that we will have to find a cellar somewhere to live, maybe for a couple of years, and the life that they know is over.
“You know ….” I said to my therapist, “your basic anxiety dream….A different version of the “I’m one short of the number of credits I need to graduate” dream, or “I can’t find my school ID and am not allowed in the cafeteria” dream, or the “nauseating SAT scores” dream. Wait, the last one was real.
I didn’t need a dream analyzer to know what my dream means: Things are going well for me right now, for the most part. SO IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THE SKY–OR ITS FLOCK OF BIRDS–DROPS ON ME. I BETTER PREPARE MYSELF.

Like the typical depressive, my anxiety is triggered by plenty of sources: whenever the stock market crashes and investors make dire predictions of a depressed economy (LIKE RIGHT NOW); whenever I get a voicemail from St. Mary’s Elementary school, saying that I need to call the office as soon as possible; when I’ve brought an elderly priest-friend bagels and cream cheese but he doesn’t answer the door, even though his car is in the driveway (“Oh God, no, I don’t want to be the one!”); and when my page view numbers for Beyond Blue drop from the preceding month.

All of these things provoke this response from me: “THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END!”
I liked what my therapist suggested as a tool against this spaceship kind of anxiety: to find my safe spot.
“Where do you feel most secure?” she asked me. “What areas of your life are more stable than others–where things don’t change as much.”
I thought back to that afternoon I snuck out of the psych ward in Baltimore, when Eric and I strolled around the inner harbor and he told me that it didn’t matter to him if I wrote another word, that he’d still love me. And how my friend Mike had said the same thing earlier that day.
“Those are two people from whom I feel unconditional love,” I explained to my therapist.
Just thinking about that day–and how those two men in my life loved me at one of my ugliest moments–made the spaceship seem smaller and less menacing already.

“And prayer,” I said. “Now that I’ve begun to start each day with prayer, I miss it on the days that I don’t, and I don’t feel as grounded or centered.
“Prayer provides a buoy for me on those days that my boat is stolen, and I’m left out to sea just sort of drifting. I guess I’m a tad less affected–just a tiny, weeny–by all the external stuff (the page views the nice/mean comments from readers, the school phone calls, the plummeting economy) when I start out with God.”
I’ve been thinking more about that safe spot ever since she asked me about it. I want to expand it–give it a slight renovation (maybe marble countertops?) in case I’m living in there for a healthy chunk of time in my future (WHEN THE SKY DROPS). But, for now, it feels good to have a small sanctuary where I can go when I feel the spaceships flying overhead.
To read more Beyond Blue, go to www.beliefnet.com/beyondblue, and to get to Group Beyond Blue, a support group at Beliefnet Community, click here.