 Dr. Dale Atkins understands your wedding woes and has the perfect sanity-saving solutions for emotional issues, family questions, and fears about the engagement, wedding planning, and future.
 | This may be a very silly question or I may not even make sense, but here it goes: I am absolutely the most nervous person in the world and I worry constantly. I get so nervous just going to my fiancé's parents’ house that I sometimes make myself sick over it. I am so afraid that I am going to worry myself sick on my wedding day, thinking about the 100 or so people that will be looking at me, and just worrying that I'll do something stupid. Do you think when the day comes that I'll still be worrying, or will my thoughts be elsewhere? I don't want to be walking down the aisle and get so sick that I have to turn around and go to the bathroom. I do get excited about my wedding and the wedding dress that I ordered (it is gorgeous!), and I know that I'm marrying the right guy, but I just worry that I'll make myself sick the day of the wedding. Any advice would help. |  |  | Worry is something that takes an enormous amount of effort, time and energy, and it doesn’t help the person who is worrying or the situation creating the worry. If you can do something about the situation, then do it and you don’t have to worry. If you cannot do anything about the situation, worrying will not help. My sense is that you worry because you feel you are being judged and that somehow you will come up short. There is no such thing as perfection, and although each of us strives to be the best we can be, worrying about "not making the grade" robs us of the opportunity to enjoy life’s moments as we experience them. Imagine that each of the 100 people at your wedding is sending you messages of love and good fortune, that they are looking at you admiringly, and enjoying the fact that you have found the man you want to spend the rest of your life with. Imagine that your in-laws want to get to know you better, AS YOU ARE, and that they open their hearts to you and look forward to getting to know the woman their son wants to marry. You see, we can chose to look at the world in a variety of ways. Anxiety about not being good enough deprives us of a full life experience. | | 
Dr. Dale Atkins is a professional psychologist and frequent media expert specializing in couple and family relationships. Dr. Dale is also an author with five books to her credit: Sisters; Families and Their Hearing Impaired Children; From the Heart (co-author); I'm OK, You're My Parents; and the most recently published, Wedding Sanity Savers (co-author). Currently living in Connecticut with her husband and dog, Dr. Dale has two grown sons and a private practice in New York City. | |
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