I wish I'd known that it was okay to want to feel safe. That I was allowed to want that.
I was surrounded by "everyone gets nervous sometimes, we all have to deal with it" and "sometimes you have to push through even though you feel anxious" and "you have to do things that scare you to overcome the fear" and even now, it's what they say: "Do it scared."
I was also reassured that "everyone feels anxious" about certain things, and "no one likes [thing]."
This affected my understanding of what it meant to "get better." When I imagined a future version of myself that was capable of enduring [The Bad Things], I didn't imagine a feeling of safety. I didn't know how to imagine it. All I could do is try to remove my feelings of dread and horror and revulsion from the scene, as though cutting a shape out of a magazine with craft scissors. But it was unclear how those feelings could be removed in life.
I think my imagination of "getting better" was something like "becoming more dissociated." Everyone felt these things I felt, and they were inevitable and unchangeable, but I felt them too much, and I needed to feel them less, so I could become more compliant.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy didn't even make me feel them less, though; it only made me less capable of acknowledging that I was feeling them, less conscious of what my feelings were.
Eliminating "anxious" cognitions did not make me "better"; when I was 20-21 and had my Big Breakdown, I was not having anxious "thoughts" except as weirdly tactile, intrusive, spewing overflowing jets of imagery and words related to [The Bad Things].
I had trained myself not to have panic attacks, but my body was constantly wound tight with tension. I was in pain a lot. I would wake up with my back hurting, tense with my sheets soaked in sweat. I almost failed a Tai Chi class because I could not make my body relax enough to do the forms.
It was very hard for me to learn that my internal experience of my body was its own reality, that it was a reality separate from my ability to comply with external expectations.
I still remember the horrible, isolating experience of trying to find something real about my experience that I could prove to an outside observer, and of trying to reach a level of distress where I was actually physically prevented from functioning. I was tormented by the fact that I was physically able to "push through" the fear; I hadn't yet reached the point where I became completely consumed with panic and lost control of my body, or collapsed or threw up on myself, and that meant I was choosing to be weak, and my torment was partially my fault, because I had not "pushed myself" to the utmost extent possible.
So I scrounged together "evidence" of how my fear was affecting me: the intrusive sensations and thoughts that seemed to be hydraulically pumped into my brain, the nightmares, the daily pain and soreness, the grinding teeth, but it still didn't feel like enough.
This "evidence-finding" took up a lot of my daily thoughts on my own condition. I was very preoccupied with clinging to bodily "evidence" of distress.
In hindsight, I realize that I did not consider my own subjective experience of suffering to be evidence that I was suffering. At least, I felt that my subjective experience of suffering was irrelevant to whether I deserved care. I felt, in a half-formed and poorly understood way, that my subjective experience could be misleading or "false."
My experiences with therapy, the various workbooks and other tools my mom bought for me, and the resources I found online and elsewhere for dealing with "anxiety" were preoccupied with "thoughts" as the form "anxiety" took. Separately, they taught me breathing exercises and other bodily "relaxation" techniques that were supposed to control the physical processes of anxiety.
I see this as a domination and control-based framework: by erasing "wrong" cognitions and replacing them with "right" ones, and by forcing your inhales and exhales to be a certain number of seconds long, you can make the process of fear in your body stop, or at least override it with the "higher" part of your consciousness. This was accompanied by repeated mantras that my anxiety was not "real," that it was "lying" to me, that it was a monster that was somehow invading and usurping my "real" self, which I could will into being by thinking the right thoughts.
This did not work, at all, ever, and my mental health descended into an incredibly deep black hole before I rejected everything I had learned before and (over several years) discovered and tried accepting some radically different principles about myself:
that my fear was a fundamentally real experience, whether externally judged as "rational" or "irrational"
that my fear was a primal survival instinct inherent to my body's functioning
that my fear's fundamental function was to protect and advocate for me, ensuring that my safety needs were met
This evolved (over several more years) into a further understanding that my fear provided information about what my safety needs were, and eventually developed in me an ability to actually examine safety and unsafety, and to feel both of those things, and to develop deeper understanding of how safety needs can be met.
Little me was not taught how to feel safe, she was taught how to look normal.
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