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.
This resonates with me. Particularly with regards to physical strain, unable to unwind one's body with the tension of stress.
How, if you wouldn't mind sharing, have you found strategies that actually work for you?
Well, it took literally years, and it did Not feel better at first. But I basically started out by thinking of my fear as an "animal" self, like I was a werewolf and I contained both a human and a wolf, and I would sit there and try to like...talk to the wolf and figure out what it wanted?
It was a progression from this unhelpful idea of fear as an invading "monster." I decided to explore what would happen if I accepted that I was the monster. Instead of trying to be a human, I was going to become the wolf.
Part of that was freely exploring all the wolf's urges and instincts. I wrote down some really violent fantasies of being a wolf and biting and killing people. I used the werewolf as a kind of empowering image of a monster who would kill anything that wanted to hurt me.
At some point during this time, when I was feeling that fear in my body, I would just sit there and kind of...appreciate it, the sheer power of it. I would think about how I was feeling something absolutely ancient, an instinct that existed since the Precambrian, something that studied death for a billion years so that I could live and defended the survival of every ancestor from my mother to her mother to the most distant of creatures hundreds of millions of years ago. The havoc it was wreaking in my body was just evidence of how powerful that instinct was.
And also I did a lot of things like destroying objects by biting them, and going out in the middle of the night and running as fast as I could. I wanted to really embody and feel that ability to do those things, to flee and fight back and do all the things an organism might do to ensure its survival.
Very early in this process, my mental image of the "wolf" was...it's weird to say, but it felt like she was inside my body, like wrapped up in my ribcage, scratching and gnawing to get out.
I guess I skipped some of the steps. I told her I was sorry. I knew now that she had only been trying to protect me, and I'd locked her up and taped her jaws shut, and she'd become more and more desperate.
Over time the mental image changed. The main thing that changed was that the Wolf got bigger. Once she wasn't trapped inside me anymore, she was like a skinny dog that physically wrapped herself around me, clinging to me and guarding my body. And then she started to walk beside me, or you know, with me, and in my mind she slowly became much larger, until she felt like this giant beast as tall as my shoulder.
This was a few years ago. I don't know exactly what made it work. I think it really helped to explore and express those animal feelings in my body as an actual animalistic "self" that didn't care about social norms. It was how I got past my self-judgment. The Wolf was pure instinct; she wasn't capable of determining which fears were socially acceptable and which were not. In that way it became "allowed" to explore what my body wanted and felt and needed.
