Gratitude Lounge

Dear Erich,

What I am going to write is coming from someone who has been dealing with anxiety issues since late 2016 as well. I do not know if any of this will resonate with you as your experience may be quite different. Take what fits, and pitch the rest. 😉 Here goes:

I, too, went through a numer of major life stressor events over a span of years that could objectively produce an anxious condition. Sometimes life stuff just happens that way. I say that so as not to diminish the reality of the fearful things in any way. This is not all in your head, so to speak,.

However, the brain’s fear producing mechanism is one sneaky little booger. When we manage to get past one fear, it pulls out another like a rabbit from a magician’s hat. Thus, job loss and mortgage is replaced by wildfires which is supplanted by climate change…and so on.

It might be something quite legitimate, something smaller that is catastrophized, or maybe even something off the wall. There are times it seems it does not matter much. It is as if the brain WANTS to stay afraid for some reason.

There can be many reasons for this happening. Here are two that I have seen in operation in my own life over the years:

One is distraction. When my system wanted to distract me from the truth of my life (for me this was regarding a very dysfunctional and abusive family that I kept right on trying to please) it produced pain and lots of it. Then it added on anxiety about pain and fear of fear of pain…you get the picture. All of it was quite effective at taking the attention from what was really going on underneath and the fact that changes needed to be made.

Second is the phenomenon that occurs when we finally reach a place in our lives where we are safe enough to allow anything that was repressed or disassociated to be felt. This can come up like a tsunami of emotion until almost anything feels like a trigger.

Without going too far into detail. this was the situation in the end of 2016 for me.

What followed was a plunge into profound depression and anxiety issues. As the depression improved, I got stronger, and I found that, for the first time in my life, I was finally safe enough that the old stuff I had disassociated for years came up to be processed.

There is a Far Side cartoon that really spoke to me about what I was going through. It is a drawing of a man who is tied into an anxious knot, arms and legs all over, eyes wide with fright. He is standing in front of the snake cage at the zoo. The caption says something like, “After twenty years as janitor in the reptile house, Harold has a cumulative attack of the heebie jeebies.” (my paraphrase) That was basically me.

I felt like a complete nutjob a lot of the time as the fear and anxiety I was experiencing had absolutely no basis in the reality of my current situation. I could be sitting quietly in my home surrounded by my dogs, peace abounding, and I would still be a quaking mess, terrified of whatever my brain presented to me.

This was all very hard for me because I have always been a person who was able to hold it all together, controlling myself almost mercilessly. I learned early on that controlling my emotions, making them into what was allowed, and controlling my actions to conform to what was considered acceptable was necessary to keep things on as safe a footing as possible. And yet, suddenly, all of my control barriers broke on me, and anxiety ruled without my being able to reel it back in and hide it anymore.

In the end, this loss of control has been a good thing, for it has taught me that while control was my coping mechanism, it was also my prison. Now I am learning to be just a normal flawed human being, and it is a wonderful relief!

All that to say, my first heartfelt suggestion would be to find yourself a counselor who is trained in doing EMDR. With what you have described, my guess is that there is something deeper, some splinter in your heart, if you will, that is pushing its way to the surface. That is why symptoms keep being produced — something needs compassionate attention. A good counselor with EMDR as a tool will be able to help that come up and out with the least amount of trauma possibilty. EMDR is also relaxing to the system, so it can help your pistons stop hyper firing, thus tamping down anxiety.

If you are not doing meditation practice regularly, that would be my next suggestion. Check out Headspace.com. They may still have a special on. He guides you through the exercises so seemlessly that it really makes the learning and doing much easier. Plus, as a sop to my inner Vice Principal, it tracks how long I have meditated and what my run streak of the moment is. 😉

I know you feel like a churned up compost heap at present, but I will leave you with this. Having this come up is a healing threshold for you, a call to a more peacefilled, less anxious life to come. That is part of how gratitude works into anxiety and pain, because in time we will look back and be thankful for the call to peace and calm.

If your system saw no problem with the way things are, it would not be trying to get your attention. Healing is simply answering our own cry for help.

I don’t know where you stand spiritually, but I will pray for you. I hope that is okay.

Learning how to be self-compassionate and understanding as you navigate your way through this, if you will, wildfire of anxiety will move you towards that miraculous regrowth that happens in the forest after the fire is over. Hang in there. It can get far far better than you might ever imagine possible right now.