Have you choked off your true feelings and opinions? Is the risk too great to stand up for yourself? Do you have to a role that you don't like in order to keep a relationship going? Depression can be a very useful mask that covers up your anger, disappointment and resentment. Do your feelings feel like ugly uncontrollable monsters that will jeopardize your relationships? No wonder you need depression to sedate them!

When making and maintaining relationships is a strain, anxiety can be a way of allowing yourself to reach out and be connected to another person. It provides the impetus for you to ask for support, comfort, company and acceptance. So it gives you the opportunity to check if you are lovable, worth being with, and worthy of being taken care of. This may be a learned pattern of attachment from your early years. If you got attention from parents and caregivers when ever you became fretful, anxious and panicked, it is likely that you discovered anxiety to act as a powerful glue to get needed contact from significant others.

One function that anxiety serves is that of protection. By letting you sweat the small stuff, it safeguards you from your big, unmanageable fears. Since anxiety can be so all pervasive it leaves no space for you to contemplate and face larger terrors - like loss, death, failure, being alone, completely responsible, and empty

Anxiety is often the fuel that drives your engine, and enables you to undertake the tasks of daily living and accomplish your goals. In this way anxiety provides you with nervous energy to make something of yourself despite lack of confidence or expectations of failure. It acts as the over ride button when you feel hopeless and cannot see light at the end of the tunnel. It also acts as a positive reinforcer by providing a sense of success when you have completed a set of tasks. The cycle of escalating anxiety followed by action and then an experience of completion is an addiction that is hard to give up.

Are you tired of dieting, exercising and pushing yourself with your fitness trainer? Is your weight yo-yoing all over the place? That may be that you have become addicted to numbing your feelings of anger, hurt, fear and anxiety with tons of comfort food. Emotional constipation is uncomfortable and all the gunky feelings get turned into fat. When you feel good the diets work, when you don't every stuffed feeling turns into fat. Learn how to give up that yo-yo game once and for all.

When Dan got mad at Cherie for not appreciating his efforts, he had to survive an attack on his self image. The best way to bolster his sense of self-worth was to get angry. That made him feel righteous and entitled to deprive her of sex. The need to punish her killed off feelings of sexual desire. When he had recovered from the rejection, Dan’s sexual desires returned. But the sexual circuitry in his body wasn’t ready to risk being vulnerable with the person who had badly wounded him. Danger signals were being sent to his body preventing Dan from having an erection. In four steps Dan can decouple his anger from his sexual performance and have a healthy and enjoyable intimate relationship with his partner.