Extreme Anxiety about a lie I told!!!!

[Lolgal5566771]

Hello. So the lie that I told is a huge one. I started this lie in the 6th grade, and now I’m a high school senior. My mom and dad were married in 6th grade and my dad was living at home with us for the first time since I was 6. Things got very bad between them and they decided to split. My dad attempted to kill my mom which I don’t wanna go into detail about. When I went to school other people knew about it and thus began my lie. I started telling people that he wasn’t my real dad. I came up with a very believable story as well. I told them that he wasn’t my biological father but he had adopted me when he married my mom. I have an older brother who he actually did adopt. He is not my brother’s real dad. Our mom is Hispanic and mine and my younger sister’s dad is white. My brother’s dad is like Italian or something so technically he isn’t half-white like us. He’s never met his real dad. I was so embarrassed of what my dad had done that I lied to people about him not being my dad. No one questioned my story because no one had met him. He had always been in and out of our lives. Anyways, anytime someone asks me something about my dad I don’t answer. But when a friend asked I always told them the lie about my real dad being my stepdad. All my close friends think that my dad isn’t my real father, and a lot of them think that I’m not half white. My dad hasn’t really been in my life since my parents got divorced so none of my high school friends have ever seen him. I’ve recently started feeling extremely guilty about this lie and thinking about it non stop. I haven’t told the lie in a long time but I am
So afraid it will come back to bite me. I’ve been thinking about it every second of the day lately. It is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I want to tell everyone the truth but I’m scared and don’t know how. I told the truth to my best friend and he said he completely understood why I did that and he didn’t judge me at all. He said that I don’t have to tell anyone the truth because it is no one else’s business and he thinks that people probably also don’t care.. which I agree. I don’t think anyone would care that I didn’t tell the truth and I doubt anyone has even thought about it after I told them but I have such bad anxiety about it. I should have just been honest. I was so embarrassed and disgusted by my father that I didn’t want anyone to think that that man had anything to do with me. I didn’t want people to think that I’m a part of him. I have total peace about it now and I am no longer affected by my father. But I am very affected by my stupid and immature lie. I feel like if people found out that I’ve been saying I’m just Hispanic and that my “stepdad” is my real dad everyone would think I’m fake and a liar.

[al]

Hi there lolgal,

I'm sorry to hear about your dad. That sounds incredibly stressful, and if I were you, I would definitely have trouble living with the fact that the person that did that was my biological father.
You mentioned that you agree with your friend - that you don't think that anyone has really thought about it, and don't think they would care if you told them the truth. Why do you think this brings up so much anxiety for you?

Have you talked to anyone else in your family about it? What about other trusted adults, like someone at school or a counselor?

[Lolgal5566771]

Honestly no, I’ve never told anyone else in my family. My mother would probably understand why I did it but she would also be upset with me for lying. My little sister still keeps in contact with our father and she still has a decent phone call-only relationship with him since we never see him. She would honestly probably be mad at me if I told her about it. And I feel as if my brain constantly has to worry about something. This week I’ve been worried about my lie. Last week I spent two hours reading my old Facebook posts from middle school that had curse words in them and I deleted everything and spent a week worrying about if anyone has seen them. And before that I worried all week about something else, and something else before that and so on. I’m always worried about something to the point that I can’t breathe and this week it’s my Dad lie. I will say that this is the most practical thing I’ve worried about and I feel very guilty about it. I wish I could talk to every person I lied about it to and tell them “this man actually is my father and I’m half white and I’ve been lying because this and this”. But my friend said that I don’t owe anyone any bit of my personal life. I think that when I move away to college next year it will be a completely new slate for me and I will tell people the truth when they ask about my family. I will not live a lie anymore. But I wish I had never lied because I think about it every second now.

[Jacob]

Hi Lolgal!

I think your friend is very correct, that this particular thing wouldn't seem bad to most people. Plenty of people say "they're not my dad" about a person who has done them and their loved ones harm. If it felt like one small thing that would help you survive, then I'm glad you had it! I don't think it was immature either. In extreme situations we grasp for whatever strategy we can and creating any sort of distance between you and your father in your mind will likely have helped you at the time.

I do want to say though, I really hear you about the anxiety and worry, and the constantly shifting focus of that anxiety. Your childhood, and surviving the presence of violence in your home probably didn't help that feeling which is experienced many of us who struggle with anxiety - the feeling that "something bad" is going to come for us "sooner or later".

There's even an explanation relating to neurochemicals, where our anxious brains experience a stream of chemicals which are supposed to communicate danger, even when there's no danger, and so our body and parts of our brain act like there IS a danger. When our intellectual thinking-mind looks around and recognises that there's no fire, and no wolves and no bears to hide from we start filling in the gaps with whatever we can. The feeling won't go away and we want to solve the problem so we need an explanation. That's where this digging through the archives of our past actions and regrets comes in.

When this happens to me I get really scared and 'stuck' on a particular problem until something lets me breathe.

If I tell someone I'm anxious and they ask "what are you anxious about?" I say, that for me my anxiety doesn't have something that it's 'about'. Sometimes it is just the feeling of anxiety having a field day inside me... and it can help me a lot if I feel less guilty about not solving it.

This is probably not 100% accurate because honestly it's beyond the edges of my understanding of neurobiology and also probably beyond what science can say given the complexity of the brain, but it helps me a little to explain it to myself.

What do you think for yourself? Do you think it's possible that feeling of fear and dread is there on its own? Without a good reason?