Tried therapy for years and it didn’t help. Just put a dent in my wallet. I advocate for therapy but also recognize it just doesn’t work for some people. I think I may be one of those people.

Tried medication in the past but they also don’t work for me. The only medication that helped with my anxiety was beta blockers, and they only put me on that because I was having a heart issue. Any other anxiety meds just put me to sleep for like 14 hours at a time.

Recent significant trauma has given me PTSD and made my anxiety so much worse, like it’s on steroids. I talked to family and we kind of agreed I could try to get back on those beta blockers. But the truth is, with inflation and these gas prices, I’m back to living paycheck-to-paycheck. I do have an HSA but I am currently using that to pay off hospital bills from a car wreck in February. I also have an EAP and used all my free sessions to help combat this PTSD, which admittedly did help in relieving some of the more significant physical responses but not the underlying emotional ones.

I’m currently watching my dad’s dog and not sleeping at all because I’m scared she’s going to get sick (stress from fireworks). Part of me is kicking myself because “it’s just anxiety” but another part of me really does think she’s sick (she hasn’t gone outside to relieve herself since early afternoon, she heard a couple stray fireworks and has just been scared ever since). It’s like I’ve been going through so much the past 7-8 months that I’m due for the next awful thing, which would be my dad’s dog getting sick and dying under my care. (I had a dog who lived to 14 years old, which is really old for her breed, and she had congestive heart failure. She was diagnosed a year before she passed, so really I kept her alive for a year, but I still feel responsible for her death. This was a huge topic in therapy and it just didn’t help.)

What do you do when it’s getting worse, and you have no money for treatment or experience on what helps?