Poppies and Thistles

Anxious Mind Vs Rational Mind

17 Mar 2012 4 Comments

by poppythistle in counselling theory thoughts

Wow, it seems I connected with quite a few people with my last post about anxiety and my journey in getting more comfortable applying that label to myself.

So. I thought I’ll continue and post again on anxiety as I am just a tart for the attention… *cough* … hoping that through explaining how it is for me, it might help some other people either not feel so alone, or understand a loved one better.

I’m also procrastinating writing an essay for my PTLLS course and if I procrastinate by writing an anxiety post, well, that’s almost work isn’t it….

Writing this is helping me clarify my own process as I try and turn it into coherent sentences. Which makes me feel better if no one reads this! The next thing I wanted to ponder and write about was the split I feel between the anxious and non-anxious me. But as irony would have it, I’ve been too anxious since the last post to write properly! Work is just a bit mad at the moment, I have far more responsibility and pressure than I signed up for and have been navigating my way through anxious waters. However, what I’m interested in writing about and exploring here is how I change when moving between rational and anxious mindsets.

There are two versions of me (at least!). This is something that was said many years ago, a friend’s experience of me in the late 1990′s was that I possessed two personalities – so much so that she actually wondered for a time whether I did have a multiple personality disorder! At the time I was at Drama School in London and suffering so badly with anxiety and paranoia that to this day I wonder how the hell I made it through. Stubbornness obviously has a lot to answer for!

And you know… she wasn’t actually far wrong in her assessment of me. While I don’t suffer from MPD or anything remotely close, there are two me’s where my anxiety is concerned and when I am in one state, it is very difficult for me to understand or be empathic toward the other state – or even accept that the other state exists! I wanted to experiment in this post and write from both states of mind. So far, (as far as I can tell!!) I’m writing from my rational state. However, whenever I tried to write from my anxious self… well, maybe I’ll expose that at some point, but not here. Each anxious word makes me cringe and second guess and I have to delete it.

There is the rational me, the me I like to be, the me I aspire to be as much as I can. Rational me isn’t unemotional or possessed of Spock-type logic, just able to understand and deal with the world better. Take things in my stride, not let setbacks put me on my arse, and generally keep on keeping on. This is what I tend to think of (these days at least) as the usual me, the normal me, the me I should be (as much as I detest the word ‘should’). It’s just occurred to me that the fact I see this as my usual and normal self speaks volumes about the journey I’ve been on. Five years ago, I’m not sure this was the case.

Then there is the anxious me, the me that worries, that sees the potential dangers in everything, that will find a ‘but’ to every helpful suggestion you make, the me that can’t cope that isn’t strong enough, the me I feel ashamed of, the me I have hated and despised for so many years, the me I failed to keep hidden and secret from the world no matter how much I tried, the me that made a mahoosive crisis out of the tiniest drop of spilt milk.

Blimey – even in writing that I can’t help but judge the anxious me… look at that… the anxious me, a drama queen, making a fuss, being a crybaby… that’s how it feels. That’s how my rational self judges my anxious self.

Even now, having just come out of an anxious state, I find it difficult to empathise with the emotions I felt while there. It’s been a tough week for me, and several times I came home from work drained and upset and in tears, my ever-supportive hubby there to be the sounding board for all my anxious thoughts and fears. I confided in him that I felt just rational enough to recognise that I wasn’t being rational at that point. I didn’t know which, if any, of my thoughts and reactions and emotions were a reasonable response to the situation and which were a product of my anxiety triggers curling round and piling up on themselves. A voice in my head wants to insist that maybe I was overtired, overreacting (a word I heard so often growing up), and I’m what… 48 hours out of that state? It’s really hard to maintain empathy for the anxious state – and I experience it! What must it be like for someone who doesn’t experience anxiety to maintain empathy for a loved one that does?

I know I struggle hugely to maintain empathy with myself (and others at times), the temptation to snap “will you just snap out of it and get a grip!” is unbearable at times!

My anxious state finds it impossible to believe that this will end. Even last week I was constantly having to remind myself that (as the saying goes) “this too will pass”. Even retaining rational thoughts through the anxiety, it was a struggle to keep my rational thoughts placed above the anxious ones, while still giving the anxiety the space it needed to be acknowledged, accepted and moved through – even if there’s not a rational basis, the anxiety is still there and trying to push it away will just cause it to push back harder.

The anxious thoughts were so much shinier! So much louder and brighter and easier to believe and give in to! I could give any amount of “evidence” to the anxiety. I was pretty much having to accept the rational thoughts on faith… It was almost an experiment…

Now of course… I clearly see the rational thoughts as absolutely true, they have been backed up by my colleagues and boss and proven by a number of means. The anxious thoughts now hide, ashamed, in my head. Did I really think that, feel that? Really? What… me? Good old organised control freak me?

And I need to remind myself that I did. I need to remember the struggle so that when this switch happens again, I can hang on to those rational thoughts again. This time, there will be evidence instead of pure faith. I will remember having done this, and being an experiential learner, next time will be easier.

It’s my hope that like muscles, this gets easier and stronger with practise. It’s only through practise that we get better. Sorry to any who wish this, but there is nothing that will *bing* make it all better forever without you having to do any more work.

It’s always a process, a continuum through which we move, hopefully mostly forward, but usually quite erratically. Nature isn’t that keen on straight lines, and I try and remember that as my path curves and twists!

I guess then, maybe what I’m ultimately hoping for is a synthesis between my rational and anxious states? To have both exist at the same time rather than this light on/light off business. Or at least to maintain an awareness of both, instead of constantly having an argument in my head like an anxious/rational version of a believer/atheist. One knows it exists and sees no evidence for the other. I think, cautiously and optimistically, that I’m starting to get this now after 20 years.

I’ve pondered on this split state that I feel between my rational and anxious selves. It’s like… a light being turned on and off in a room. With the difference that you cannot conceive that the light could be any different, you cannot remember what the room looked like when lit – because to that state, it was never lit – when the light is off, well it was never on, it just pretended to be on to lie to you, to lead you to the middle of the room and then strand you there while darkness fell. When the light is on, well… what’s all the fuss about, you can see everything, you can see where the door is to leave… what on earth is there to be worried about?!

And never shall the two states meet.

It’s like a train. Rumbling down it’s tracks until somehow a switch gets thrown and the train shunts onto a different set of tracks… and the original ones vanish in the dust…. were they ever there?

I’m still not completely clear on what causes this switch. Sometimes, like my recent situation at work, it’s fairly obvious and clear. Sometimes, it’s sudden and unexpected and I flounder in the dark until my eyes get used to it. Sometimes I don’t realise that my state has changed and I try and carry on as normal until I realise I’m completely lost. Sometimes, it’s slow and sly and creeps up on me in tiny increments you can’t see until weeks later I look around and wonder how the hell I missed the signs that lead me here!

The anxious me feels like a much younger part of me, sometimes even down to a little toddler screaming the house down coz their mum just left the room to get their sandwich… It’s as strong, as earth shattering and as irrational as Separation Anxiety.

Actually, that’s a very good analogy. To a baby going through separation anxiety, all they know is their mum just walked away from them. They don’t know you’re back in a minute with a snack, they don’t know the other side of the door is just as it’s always been and not transformed into a pit of lava. The world is a strange place with confusing rules to a child, rules that sometimes change just as they think they’ve understood them. The world as we get older withdraws it’s treats from us more and more. Babies get (hopefully) everything they need – their tummy’s feel hurty, they cry, they get warm milk in their mouths. As we get older we are taught patience, delayed gratification, to tolerate the world not giving us what we demand. We have to learn that we don’t get everything we want as soon as we want it. This is a vital lesson, but a very painful one.

Am I the only child who thought that if I just stared hard enough at the toy in the display cabinet, someone would see and buy it for me? I think for years I stared at a me without anxiety, but no one bought it for me.

I don’t know if everyone who feels anxiety experiences this split state thing? Is it common? Is it just me?

I didn’t even know I did this until my counselling training brought awareness to the process, helped by the observations of a trusted friend who pretty much saw my brain switch from one state to the next to back again over the course of 48 hours due to some situation or other that I using to bolster that “I’m really a crap excuse for a human being” belief.

As another trusted friend continues to tell me when I need it – your brain lies to you. And it does. The trick is remembering which brain you’re in at the time.

Owning my Anxiety

11 Feb 2012 9 Comments

by poppythistle in counselling theory thoughts

In a way, this post has been over 20 years in the writing.

That’s how long I’ve experienced the physiological and emotional effects of anxiety in my life. That’s how long it’s taken me to get to this point, where I freely admit to having an anxiety disorder to anyone who cares to know. I’ve let my workplace know (I’m lucky that I work for a “Mindful Employer” with a commitment to supporting those with mental health issues) and am getting more and more comfortable with identifying myself this way. Whether my anxiety is predisposed or inbuilt into my genetic make up or purely a reaction to the environmental factors around me isn’t important to me any more.

It’s not easy… I’d rather not stick this label on myself, but dealing and living with my anxiety symptoms has become steadily easier the more comfy I get with this label. Some think (and I don’t disagree) that labels are confining to people, but I’ve found this one has freed me. At least so far. I guess it depends on how the label is used. If I start waving that label in people’s faces and using it as a reason to not engage with life, to not challenge myself and push back the boundaries of my comfort zone, then it is confining. Not only that, but I’d be betraying all those who live with anxiety and don’t use it as a reason not to try. So far, I’ve used this label to ask for the help and support that I need to function at my best. It’s allowed me to recognise my limits, to accept that I’m human, not super-human, and to counter the decades old voice in my mind that still judges me for my anxiety.

For twenty years, I’ve surfed the waves of anxiety. It’s not a constant condition, it’s not (often) a severe condition, although there have been at least 4 times that I can easily bring to mind where my anxiety stopped me functioning pretty much altogether and it took a lot of effort from a lot of friends to start me moving again. Consider that those 4 times would have had at least a year of chronic anxiety and stress to get me to that point and took at least a year to recover from each time, and that there were many times where the anxiety lingered but didn’t get severe enough to stall me so I limped along best I could not accepting that I was in need of help because, well, “it wasn’t that bad”. I hope you can start to get a sense of how much of my life has been spent in this state. In some ways it became normal…  and it’s only years later looking back that I realise it wasn’t normal to spend so much of my life in that way.

This made it easy to see it just as me being weak, failing, not being strong enough, not coping with things that other people find easy. With that attitude toward myself I fell into the old traps of being harsh on myself, expecting even more of myself and berating myself terribly when I just couldn’t cope. I couldn’t accept these emotions that I didn’t want, I relied heavily on my husband to accept them for me, and I fought as hard as I possibly could to push these feelings away. Of course that didn’t work, and they just fell on me when, exhausted, I could finally fight no more.

My first breakdown at 17 created a critical voice in my head that through psychosynthesis therapy I labelled Horrible Harry. HH would drip poison in my ear, telling me my anxiety was a sign of the bad person that I really was inside. The bad person that I hid from the world, but that everyone would see if they just scratched deep enough. The bad person that would get out if I wasn’t careful enough, if I let myself slip up somehow. My friends would stop being my friends if they only knew the real person below the “act”. I wasn’t anxious, I was lazy, this was just my way of getting out of things I didn’t really want to do.

My fearful and negative thoughts were the real ones, the strong ones, and they drowned out the thoughts that told me how hard I was working, how much I was overcoming, how deserving I was of love. How deserving I was of support and help.

Through therapy, I discovered that Horrible Harry was actually a terrified little part of me, it was such a stunning breakthrough to realise that this vicious poisonous voice that I’d been swallowing whole-heartedly and believing for years was like a terrified toddler screaming angrily at the world to keep it at a distance where it couldn’t hurt any longer. It was far easier to be angry at myself rather than scared of the world. And I was scared of the world, for a very long time. The world had done some mean things to me, turned my life upside down at times and generally proved itself unreliable and untrustworthy.

Another stunning breakthrough was when I studied Attachment Theory and read my personality and the reasons why I was the way I was in the pages of a book that John Bowlby had written several decades before! That allowed me to start letting go of the harsh judgements of myself and start accepting me just as I was (instead of making my friends and husband perform that duty for me). Was that’s saying again… what we resist, persists… when it comes to emotions, that’s so true. Resisting your emotions just keeps them around. You may hide them for a while, drown them with substances, distract from them with activities, but ultimately they will be there once the lights are off and the noise has stopped, and they are “magnetic” – they draw other emotions to them until finally, feeling ANYTHING at all will link to the painful stuff you’re trying to avoid. We can’t avoid ourselves, and eventually we run out of strength and it’s at this point we experience some kind of breakdown where normal life has to stop for a while until something changes.

So here I am, twenty years after my first breakdown, having gone through several more since then. Actually, the trigger for writing this post is having actually just gone through a couple of weeks of severe anxiety due to work pressure – but this time… it’s fine.

Yes, I was so anxious I could barely breathe, eat or sleep for a week, but not once did I tell myself off for not coping, not once did I think I was a bad person for not coping. The feelings were still there… I was scared, I was panicked, I was overwhelmed, I was a rabbit in the headlights, I broke down and sobbed that I just couldn’t do this to my ever-understanding husband – but as CBT states, just because I feel it, doesn’t make it true. A single day later and I’m singing along to the theme tune of the “Big Bang Theory” happy in the knowledge I got through the week and my emotion now is pride! That one I’m going to take as I’m feeling it AND it’s true!

I was able to separate my feeling state and my rational recognition of a situation that was no one fault, but was too much pressure for me to deal with. Plus, unlike previous times where the fear is that the feeling state will last FOREVER without surcease, I knew this would end and I knew ultimately that I would cope (coping here means getting through and still being in that job weeks later when things had calmed down), I was coping as well as I was able within the limits that my anxiety sets for me. And gradually, through working with rather than fighting, I get to extend the limits of what my anxiety will let me do.

I wrote this for me, to recognise what a big step this was, to mark this moment in the hope that it’s not just a step forward, but it’s a corner turned, a corner that stays turned forever.

I wrote this for you in case you’re someone living with anxiety to try and offer some hope through my story.

For you in case you’re someone who maybe doesn’t really understand anxiety but tries to support a loved one through it.

Or maybe you’re one of the people that has walked with me for some of the past twenty years, maybe you pulled me to my feet when I’d stopped moving, reminded me time and time again that the inside of my head lies to me, or provided a map when I lost my way. If you are… there are no words to express my gratitude at your patience and love. Just know it worked…