anxiety

The Nervous System Remembers

Posted on by SomatiCat

I always have the urge to go to the bathroom before I leave home, especially if I’ll be in a car for a long drive. It doesn’t matter that I went to the bathroom just twenty minutes ago. If I ignore the urge, I feel anxious.

My father used to ask us, his children, “Did you go to the bathroom?” just before we got into his car. If I didn’t take the cue and go “just to be safe,” he would complain, ridicule, and reprimand me if I needed to use the bathroom before his designated pit stop. I was just a kid.

I didn’t realize that my nervous system had been conditioned by my father’s strict rule.

Years later, I took a self-defense class for women. Men wearing ridiculously thick protective gear pretended to be sexual offenders and simulated attacks. The female participants then practiced kicking and striking strategically assigned target areas, just as we had been taught. We trained for several weeks.

At the end of the course, we shared our experiences. One woman said she always felt the urge to go to the bathroom after the simulated attack and defense exercises. She explained that it was exactly what she had done after she was raped. Her story made a deep impression on me.

Our nervous system doesn’t forget.

No amount of talk therapy would have eliminated my urge to go to the bathroom. The body remembers. The nervous system keeps score.

So how do I convince my nervous system that I don’t actually have to pee—that my bladder isn’t full?

Ironically, I learned the answer when I stopped taking an anti-anxiety medication cold turkey.

The medication had been prescribed on an as-needed basis. Over time, for various reasons, I began taking it every day. I didn’t realize I had developed a dependence on it. After the stressful period was over and I went on vacation, I stopped taking it. It was a very low dose, so I had no idea it could cause such severe withdrawal symptoms.

I woke up every hour from nightmares. Throughout the day, I felt a strong urge to urinate every hour, even though my bladder wasn’t full. After ruling out a urinary tract infection—I happened to be staying with a friend who was an infectious disease specialist—I discovered that urinary urgency is a common withdrawal symptom. Because benzodiazepines depress the central nervous system, withdrawal can manifest as an overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system.

If I couldn’t regulate my autonomic nervous system, I worried that I would reinforce the pattern and end up needing to use the bathroom every hour indefinitely.

So I told my nervous system that it was a phantom urge and that my bladder wasn’t going to burst. I held it for thirty minutes longer, then an hour longer. Each day I gradually extended the time before going to the bathroom. After several days, both my bladder and my sleep returned to normal.

One of my friends teaches nervous system regulation techniques for people with CPTSD. I understood the theory, but I hadn’t truly put it into practice. Now I understand how powerful those techniques can be.

I still have moments of anxiety, moments when I used to reach for a pill automatically. Now I see them as signs that my sympathetic nervous system has become unnecessarily activated. Instead, I calm myself with breathing techniques and wait for the activation to pass.

So far, it’s working.

Do I want to see tomorrow?

Posted on by SomatiCat

I lost my anchor.

My dog was my tether to reality, to this life. He was undeniably real. He lived entirely in the moment. When I woke in the middle of the night, lost in the vast nothingness—confusion and darkness pressing in—I would reach out and place my hand on him. He was warm, solid, breathing. Alive. And in his version of reality, if he was alive, then so was I. I felt safe in the world he held for me. It was as if I were drifting in a night ocean of existential anxiety, and he was my life raft.

With his passing, I lost my favorite version of reality.

I don’t have to protect anyone. I don’t have to take care of anyone. I don’t have anyone to come home to. I don’t have to worry about losing him anymore.

What remains is my own version of reality.

Every morning, I wake up and start my routine. I make coffee, brush my teeth, check emails. I function well. I smile. I chat with neighbors. I act normal. But I am not here. I’m floating an inch above the ground, like a plastic bag caught in the wind, weightless and directionless.

Once in a while, I do feel real. On a recent trip, I went to a shooting range and practiced pistol shooting for the first time. In that moment, I was completely focused. The weight of the gun in my hands, the shock waves reverberating through my body, the hot shells grazing my skin—burning, tangible—I felt alive. For that brief moment, the act of shooting was my anchor. (Don’t worry, I won’t shoot any living being, including myself.)

Then I came home, and my fragmented reality returned.

Fortunately, I can hold it together. I don’t have the affliction my cousin does—the one that warps reality beyond repair. I can pretend. I can fit in. I just don’t feel alive.

So I go to the gym. I work out on one of those torture machines. The intense contraction in my quads pulls me back into my body, back into the present.

Do I want to see tomorrow?

I don’t know.

But I want to be here now. In my body.

Is it how normal people are feeling?

Posted on by SomatiCat

I sent my beloved dog across the rainbow bridge one month ago, and I’ve been depressed ever since. I still cry and feel his absence deeply. The sharp pain and heaviness in my chest have lessened, but they’re still there.

I go out every day—talking to neighbors, having lunch with friends, attending events I’m invited to, and spending hours at the gym. I’ve been working out daily.

Without the need to walk my 80+ pound dog three times a day, I suddenly have more uninterrupted time. I’ve been channeling that into my writing project, which is progressing well.

I also have two trips planned, something that would’ve been impossible when I was caring for a 13-year-old large dog. I’m doing everything I can to avoid spending days in bed, mindlessly watching Netflix all day and night. I’ve been there before. I know how it happens, and I know how to prevent it.

At the same time, multiple changes have happened in my life—not particularly happy ones.

From the outside, I probably look fine. I’m functioning well. But I’m not okay. I don’t feel alive.

Even when I laugh, enjoy conversations with friends, or run on a treadmill for an hour, I feel… hollow. Like a cow, grazing mindlessly on grass, waiting to be slaughtered, unaware of its fate.

And I ask myself: Am I depressed? Or is this just how most people feel, going through the motions of everyday life?

On Facebook, everyone presents their happy, vibrant lives. But are they really alive, or do they just think they are?

As the old Chinese parable says: Am I a monk dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a monk?

My own very personal storm

Posted on by SomatiCat

In Frozen, Olaf, the funny snowman, gets his own personal flurry to prevent him from melting in the sun.  Some of us were born with our own personal weather system. Having dysthymia is like having a personal weather which might not be so cute as personal flurry.

If your baseline is dysthymia and you have recurrent major depression, your life probably sucks.  A gloomy day is a good day and before you take one breath, voila! you are in a storm of one kind or another.  You can’t breathe, you barely can keep your eyes open.  You can’t see clearly.  You always walk against vicious winds.  Hail, lightning and heavy rain overturn what you know, and knock down what you hang onto.

You see your friends and wonder why they can move so easily; why they can read in the torrent of rain; why they can laugh in the sand storm without feeling choked while you taste the deadly ash of volcano eruption in your mouth even though you close your mouth so tightly shut that your face start to hurt.

What is wrong with me?  Am I weak?  Am I lazy?  Am I stupid?  Or what?  I am trying to do what they do as hard as possible, and still I can’t catch up.

What I didn’t know was my friends lived in a different land, where everyday was a normal weather day: sunny with some cloud, and slight chance of rain.  They have storms, but after a couple of days, it returns to normal sunny days.

What I didn’t know was that it takes a courage, endurance, and focus of athletes of extreme sports for us just to live a day in such a severe internal environment.

Once in a while, I experienced a beautiful day with blue sky as high as eternity and it scared me because if I would ever enjoy the weather, if I would ever even slightly believe it was real, then I would be punished multifold.  The storm shall follow and strike me down, on hands and knees, with my face in a gutter.  So I held my breath, close my eyes tight, and made myself hard.

So if your personal weather sucks, it’s not your fault that you can’t move gracefully.  And your friends who live in a normal weather land could never imagine how it is to be you. (They won’t survive in your personal weather.)

I hope you will find your way to change the weather.  It is possible.  After decades, I’ve changed my weather.  Everyday is just an ordinary weather day and it’s beautiful.   Even when a hurricane hits me, I now know it will pass and that I will breathe easily tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lifeline

Posted on by SomatiCat

I have never been prescribed meds for anxiety.  I have had severe anxiety but it was always a precursor or aura of major depression.  When I experienced anxiety attacks, I was already on the way to major depression and almost immobile.

I am one of the lucky few.  After years of psychotherapy, a straightforward generic SSRI and Crossfit have been working for me and I haven’t experienced a major depression for several years.

Still every night for a couple of seconds before I fall asleep, I feel anxiety.  It’s about nothing and everything.  It’s about being.  Suddenly I have a hole in my chest and I feel like I am being sucked into the hole in my chest into a heavy black mass of nothingness.  I know if I allow it happen, I will lose my sleep and fall straight down to the bottomless depression.

So I reach out and hold the tail of my dog sleeping next to me, as if it were a lifeline.  My 80lb 12 year old mutt’s tail is thick and feels substantial, warm and alive.  I feel tethered to his life.   And I fall asleep.