A Compendium of Bits & Pieces about Anxiety

A friend asked me a few weeks ago if I would consider writing some about my experience with anxiety, and I said yes, but I haven't done it yet. And then I remembered that I have in fact done it, in the past. Here are a couple of links to posts at an old dead blog of mine:

On Mental Illness

From the Crazy Days

I will add that I had an untreated anxiety disorder from early childhood until I was in my late 20s, when we stumbled upon it while doing couples therapy. Until then, I thought pretty much everybody was as crazy as I was, though that's not strictly true: I did try to get help. In middle school, I asked my parents to take me to a psychiatrist and they refused; in college, I asked them to help me get therapy and they refused. When I was in graduate school the first time (at Rutgers, in the late 80s), I did get therapy for awhile and it helped some. But it was a revelation to me to find out that most people did not live in constant fear, or with the constant sense that everyone was watching and judging them. An even bigger revelation to consider that I might become one of those other people.

Interestingly, things really fell apart for awhile after I first recognized my anxiety disorder--as I said in one of the links up there, it was like all my dysfunctional coping mechanisms fell away long before I had new, functional ones to replace them. It was a bad, bad time.

Regular generic talk therapy helped in the sense that I came to have a pretty good understanding of what anxiety was, and what mix of temperament and upbringing had constructed mine. But the anxiety itself didn't really improve. Either my doctor or my therapist (I don't remember now) suggested I try cognitive-behavioral therapy, and seeing a good cognitive-behavioral therapist got me over the hump literally in a manner of weeks; I also saw a psychiatrist and used medication for awhile, which was such a life-saver that I kicked myself for resisting it for so long.

Being a person who is recovered from anxiety doesn't mean I don't have anxiety; I'll always be an anxious-ish person with a racing brain. Recovery means I don't have anxiety that interferes with my life, that I have very good coping mechanisms, that I recognize the early signs that a bad patch might be coming and know how to get help quickly. For me, one early sign is what I call "morbid fantasies," these images that jump into my mind of, say, one of my children crumpled, severely wounded, at the foot of a play structure at the playground, or of someone walking out of the water carrying my child's limp, drowned body. I know how to stop a morbid fantasy before it turns into a full-blown inner brain-movie, but if I start having them regularly, something needs to be attended to.

Sometimes I think things are pretty bad, and then I read that second link and I remember that I spent the first 25, 30 years of my life simply dominated by my anxiety. I remember being paralyzed over what to wear to my department orientation at Rutgers because of how people might judge me, good or bad, depending on the choice I made (my therapist at the time: "Su, a little hint here: nobody is paying that much attention to you." This was surprisingly helpful). I remember bursting into tears on a bus at the University of Michigan because I overheard someone I didn't know in a seat near me mention a friend of hers whose gpa was better than mine. I remember 1000 times not trying something because the fear of failing at it was stronger than the hope of success. I remember many times when my revving brain led to overly-dramatic behavior; sometimes I think I ought to make a list of people who were my friends and lovers before I was 26 or 27 and write them all letters of apology for the ways my insecurity strained our relationships (Carol, Jim, and Bill from freshman year at Oakland: this especially applies to you). Likewise my students from the first 3 years or so I was teaching, when my anxiety was so bad that it was much too common for me not to make it to class at all.

I hardly believe it myself, it's been so long since things have been that bad. I am lucky David stuck with me through the falling-completely-apart-and-recovering period, though I'm pretty sure he thinks it was worth it. It is such ancient history now.

Three more things:

Awhile ago, somebody asked at Ask.Metafilter.com, "What does it feel like to have anxiety?" The answers are worth reading (mine is in there, the same as one of the links above.)

One of my children has anxiety. It is a great balm to me to see how much better he is doing than I was at that age. I did recently have a conversation with my old therapist about how to know whether he needs treatment, and she gave me a great rule of thumb for figuring it out: if his anxiety keeps him from doing things he wants to do, or affects his relationships. So far, so good. But I've been applying CBT stuff I know to him: for instance, even though he is afraid of elevators and parking garages, I get him into elevators and parking garages pretty regularly. Avoiding a thing you're afraid of just reinforces the fear.

The other day, I found this as a saved draft for the blog, a fragment that never really got enough to a point that it was worth posting. But it is also a little picture of anxiety, so I'll share it here:

When we were in the middle of our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, I would sometimes have days when I could not stop thinking about what it would be like to lose her. My brain would just keep playing the movie of There Goes Yehva, and its blockbuster sequel, Life Without Yehva. I have an anxious mind and an active imagination, and they could put together a three-reel tear-jerker for me on a moment's notice. I know a thousand ways to distract, quiet, and re-direct my mind when it gets like that. And if that wasn't enough, these little pills my doctor gave me were supposed to be like pouring oil on the water, they were supposed to settle the waves.

Mostly, it all worked. But sometimes--usually just after I'd had a phone conversation with our lawyer and her voice had reminded me that all of this actually was happening to us in the real world--nothing was enough. I had to watch the movies, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

But I couldn't just watch the movies. I had Yehva's diapers to change, and Eric's toast to cut neatly into triangles, and Carl's endless questions to answer, and the dishes to wash, and the parrots to feed. So some days, I watched the movies and they were so sad that tears just flowed quietly down my cheeks the whole time, tears for my present fears and my future grief. I could give a bath, grill a cheese sandwich, clean a toilet, pour juice--all with the tears just coming down as if they were a thing my body just had to do right then, like breathing.

I have a little flair for the dramatic.

David was not subject to this sort of thing. He has a constitutional tendency to be content with things the way they are, and a quiet optimism. His brain doesn't show him crazy movies all day long; it says things like, "life is good," and "everything is going to work out OK," and "nothing to worry about," and "my, my, my, that's just fine, isn't it?"

I am grateful for David's phlegmatic brain, because two people like me going through a thing like that together would have just flown to pieces.

I can't remember why I started telling this story.

I said in one of the old blog posts I linked above that one of the great gifts of my life is that I respond very well to therapy. Short of not having an anxiety disorder at all, which would have been better, that's true. I know people, I have people in my life right now, who are treatment-resistant, and it's so hard to watch them be stuck in that place of pain and to see their brains convince them over and over that none of the steps that their friends or their therapists suggest to them will do any good, so why bother trying? My therapist told me once, "I like working with you...when I suggest you try something, you always come back the next week and tell me you tried it." Well, sure. That's what I'm paying her for, right? I wish nobody I loved had mental problems or mood disorders, but, barring that, I wish they could all be as susceptible to treatment as I have been.

I also cannot recommend cognitive-behavioral therapy enough. Maybe it's not for everybody, but sorting out my own temperament and brain chemicals and all the things my mom said to me when I was 14 and the way my dad did thus-and-such was very interesting, to be sure, but it didn't fix me. Seeing a therapist who just really did not much care about my relationship with my mother but who would send me home with a to-do list and who taught me all kinds of good ways to stop my revving brain and re-direct anxious thoughts is what did it for me. Maybe I needed the other piece first, or in addition, maybe CBT wouldn't have helped without it. But I do not think I would ever have recovered without CBT.

Oh, finally, the book I found most helpful (though you have to be careful reading books about anxiety, as it's possible they'll just give you other things to be anxious about. Thanks to this book, my anxiety improved. But I also briefly developed a fear of driving on freeways, and had one panic attack, after reading about them in this book. So, handle with care, and perhaps only under the supervision of a trained professional): The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook.

That's it for now. Some bits and pieces. I do wish I could reach every person living with untreated anxiety and show them a glimpse of what is possible. That someday you could be so recovered that you can hardly remember what life used to be like.