Fear, anxiety and control

I used to be one of those annoyingly tidy people; friends would joke when they came to visit that they’d better not sit on the sofa in case they messed up my arrangement of cushions (I resisted the urge to suggest they sat on the floor). Everything had to be lined up perfectly or it would unsettle me and I couldn't relax – I see order and symmetry everywhere and have a highly developed aesthetic sense (I'm fussy). Then I started to read some self-help books and I realised that what I was doing was giving myself a false sense of control over the world. I was acting on deep-rooted fears and trying to control them with control itself. People feel a lot of fear and very little of it is rational, especially as we no longer have to grapple with wild animals and sleep under the stars on a day to day basis. Fear seems to have an energy of its own, and as we’re all reliably informed by scientists you can’t get rid of energy, it just transforms into something slightly less useful and in this case, that is anxiety. Anxiety is fear about stuff that is not happening right now but might happen in the future. Some people who I guess have slightly less efficient ‘fear converters’, or perhaps more fear to begin with, have more anxiety. These fears are intangible so therefore there’s nothing tangible we can do to alleviate the anxiety so instead we start taking comfort in controlling behaviour and we believe that our well-being is dependant upon these behaviours. This could be anything from excessive tidiness, being bossy or perfectionism. One of the most extreme examples of this of course is OCD where control behaviours become obsessive and ritualised.

My observation is that the more someone is affected by these issues, the less mindful they are. Feeling anxious means that you’re not focussing on the here and now, you’re worrying or ruminating about future maybes, or possibly fretting about past should-ofs. This type of thinking is so common that most people don’t recognise that they do it. Absent-mindedness is seen as a trivial thing – we all experience it to some degree or another and it’s comforting to recognise it in another person­­ and have a bit of a laugh about it. I think that it can be a fairly serious issue that is indicative of deeper problems. Of course, we all need to think about the future to some degree or another or we simply wouldn't be able to conduct the most basic life. The problem arises when we focus on the future to the detriment of the present and we lose the ability to enjoy the here and now. This is something that I'm very much working on myself at the moment, I am far too pre-occupied with the passing of time and one of the things that I experience when I'm depressed, mildly or severely, is that I’m desperate for time to pass and of course that only has the effect of slowing it down. The opposite condition is what is often referred to as ‘flow’ – that wonderful feeling when you’re so caught up in what you’re doing that you cease to notice what is going on around you and you time becomes meaningless, we’re often surprised by how much time has passed when we are in flow. I have experienced flow, but I'm aware that I don’t experience it very often and that it is something I would very much like to have more of. 

A few months ago I realised that I had been making a lot of assumptions about myself that weren't true. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t very good at certain things and that there was no point in trying to improve. I'm not talking about anything particularly profound, the two examples that come to mind are swingball and Wii Just Dance (for the record, I will always suck at Wii Just Dance but I like it). At this time I was reading some books on esoteric martial arts (as you do) and I was learning more about the concept of mindfulness which is really just about paying attention to what you’re doing. I pay very little attention to what I'm doing but I was very unaware of that fact because, as usual, I thought I was thinking like everyone else. There was one evening I was playing Just Dance with a friend who happens to be very good at it and she was kicking my arse; I noticed that I was spending a lot of my time coming up with (supposedly) funny things to say (trying to be liked) and my mind was also wandering off thinking about a load of other (trivial) things whereas my friend was focussing on what she was doing and she was also far more relaxed than I was. (Also, to my knowledge, she has never smacked herself in the face with a Wii controller.) After this I really tried to focus on what I was doing and although I’m never going to be an Olympic standard Wii Just Dancer, I have improved. I also applied the principle to swingball (swingball is an awesome tool if you have aggressive tendencies and a lot more socially acceptable than punching people randomly). I got really good at swingball – I taught myself to play well right-handed, then left-handed and then with both hands simultaneously, I then shortened the string to make it go faster (my neighbours probably refer to me as The Crazy Swingball Lady). Not only did I get better at doing stuff, my mood also improved and it became a kind of therapy. Since then I have been aware that it is a lot better for my mental health to focus on the here and now which is something I still struggle with but having the awareness helps.

A further point is that when I have a hypomanic phase, I feel a great sense of wellbeing and I am able to focus on creative projects (I started this blog at very-early o’clock in a hypomanic state). I also care far less about time and ‘just get on with things’. The trouble comes when I have so many ideas running together and I have to force myself to try and just do one thing, otherwise I start to resemble the Tasmanian Devil and the house gets awfully messy.. On the flipside of course, when I'm depressed I’m often engaged in abstract thoughts – what ifs – and I feel no contentment. It’s not a coincidence that when I had my first serious episode of depression I was about sixteen, I had passed all of my Standard Grades by locking myself in my bedroom for about six weeks and studying very intensively (I had done very little work in third and fourth year and latterly didn't bother turning up most of the time – sometimes I turned up, changed my mind and walked out mid-class). I was able to sit down and work when I needed to though. However, when I went to college to do my Highers I found that I had lost this ability and when I read back over my diaries from that period, I thought I had suddenly become ‘dumb’. What had happened of course was that I had lost my ability to concentrate due to depression. It took me two years to pass three Highers and that (you’ll have to take my word for this) does not reflect my academic ability. 

So, was I depressed because I’d stopped focussing in the here and now in a healthy, balanced way or was my mind wandering off because I was depressed? I'm not entirely sure but I know that it’s a question of habit and therefore the longer we do it the harder it gets to stop. I'm currently trying to train my way out of these habits and I'm making slow, steady progress in the right direction.

My slant on bipolar

I have a lot of theories about mental illness and I imagine that it’s a symptom of my own neuroses that I am driven to figure it all out and tie everything up in a neat little package – something I believe is a fundamental problem in psychology itself. However, no matter how many people I meet and how many case histories I read I can’t help noticing patterns, I seem to be able to read and understand people well (a defence mechanism I developed at an early age), whether they be relatively ‘normal’ or severely mentally ill – even delusional. Maybe it’s because I walk a fine line between sane and crazy myself but I just ‘get it’, even the really weird stuff. I can see that people are just trying to protect themselves and sometimes that gets in the way of actually being able to enjoy life or have one at all. 

I have only recently been diagnosed as bipolar although I had started to suspect that may have been the case for some time. I may have theories about the causes of mental illness but I’m well aware that a lot of the symptoms of bipolar (as well as other illnesses/disorders) feel that they come out of nowhere and take on a life of their own. I told someone recently whilst I was in a severe depression that it was most definitely not cognitive – at the time I felt so bad that I could see no logic in it, despite of my very strong beliefs about the origins of these things. I have since revised my point of view: a lot of my depression is triggered by my fear of being unloved and at that time I was desperately trying to gain the undivided attention of the person who made me feel most loved. (We really do hurt the ones we love.) I was actually making myself very, very ill as it was the only ploy my child-self could devise to make him coming running. (Incidentally, he didn't and I’m very grateful to him for that.) 

My theory about my own wild and sudden mood swings is that I am in some ways split in two. I have a very childish emotional centre and an equally strong rational mind; these two are in conflict almost all of the time. It feels quite often like I have two identities and I can imagine how split personalities emerge. I am in the habit of referring to my emotional child-self in the third person and thinking of my ‘rational self’ as ‘me’ (who is she then?). I am constantly being pulled one way and another, from pole to pole. I am literally bipolar when viewed from that perspective. My mission, which I have stupidly chosen to accept instead of pills, is to try and pull these two sides closer together and thus create balance and stability. Sometimes this feels to me like no problem at all, other days I want the drugs. I am very stubborn though and ultimately believe in my own analysis and theories more than Prozac or lithium. I do accept that my version of bipolar is relatively mild and I know people who need the drugs, I’m also fairly sure that they could benefit from an analytical approach to if they chose to do so (and if they don’t, I have no problem with that). My hope is that by learning to get myself through bipolar without medication and broadening my approach to apply to other people I may be able to help the ones that would like to try an alternative.

Medication versus a lot of hard work

I have been prescribed many medications over the twenty years that I’ve been ‘treated’ for mental illness. Various antidepressants, tranquilisers, sedatives, sleeping pills, beta-blockers and one anti-psychotic. A part of me, which varies in insistency and consistency, would very much like a magic pill that took all the nasty symptoms of my condition away (depression, obsessive self-harming ideation, suicide ideation, chronic insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, mood instability, feelings of emptiness, my ‘wobbly’ sense of self..). However, I fundamentally believe that I am the way I am because of a combination of nature and nurture. (I’ve written an in depth analysis of this here if you’re keen enough to know me as well as I do.. (If you are, that makes you at least twice as mad as I am.)

The only pills that I actively want to take (for the moment) are sleeping pills, I know what stops me sleeping (I haven’t slept properly without medication for two years) but I’ve not been able to effect change at that deep a level yet and in the meantime I need to sleep to make any progress at all. The anti-depressants that I’ve taken have varied from having no effect whatsoever to sending me to new and dangerous levels of crazy (now known as Prozac Weekend). For me, tranquilisers are horrible things that just lock the misery up even deeper inside but render me useless to do anything about it. I was first given these during a stay on a psychiatric ward and I realised then that the stereotypical image of mental patients pacing corridors and rocking back and forth was very true and was caused by the medications, not by the being mental.

It is in a patient’s own interest to think that they have an illness that can be cured by some form of medication. Suffering from psychological problems of any nature or extremity is bloody awful and self-perpetuating by nature. Please don’t think that I believe all medications to be a waste of time, I’m well aware that there are many people who would be dead or permanently resident in a padded cell if it wasn’t for the nice pink pills. What I’m saying is that medication should not be the first and only line of defense. What people really need is to be listened to.

It is in the doctor’s interest to treat patients with medication, it’s nice to think you can make people feel better with these little pink pills. Psychiatric patients quite often don’t make a lot of sense when you listen to them and they’re quite possibly doing unpleasant things like cutting themselves, abusing drugs or wearing a flower pot on their head. Giving them medication usually stops them doing that and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and faster than listening to them. It’s no wonder that this culture has developed within Western medical practice (particularly the NHS) and has been adopted by wider society. Further to this, pills now seem to be a trend – people believe that those suffering from psychiatric illness will be fine as long as they stay on the medication. When I say fine, I mean not causing a public nuisance. People see the manifestation of the disorder, not how the person trapped with it is feeling. Many studies have shown that ECT is far more effective at treating extreme depression than anti-depressants but because of the misconception that ECT is a barbaric, anachronistic act of torture, it’s become unfashionable. (I’m not advocating ECT, I’m using it as an example of the trends within medicine.)

My psychiatrist has recently prescribed me an anti-psychotic (aripiprazole). I like my psychiatrist, I feel sorry for him too. I’m not the average patient and he’s not really sure what to do with me. I used to keep telling him about my analysis of myself and what I was doing to try and overcome the effects of all my little defense mechanisms but he really doesn’t have the time to go into all of that (that’s the job of the psychologist I’m waiting to see). I understand his approach; he’s looking at how my problems affect my quality of life and trying to amend that – treating the symptoms not the cause. I’m too self-aware to believe that will really help. Psychiatric medication has far too many side-effects to be experimented with as far as I’m concerned. It is really very scary to take a pill, wait to see how it will affect you both physically and psychologically knowing that if it’s all rather nasty and unpleasant that you just have to wait for the damn thing to get out of your system in its own good time.

I am still very much in the process of fixing what is wrong with me but I do know that all the pills I’ve taken, all the psychiatrists, psychologists, CPN’s, and counsellors that I’ve seen have not really helped me. Or they have, but more from the point of view of realising that they can’t help me so I better do something about it myself. It may sound like I’m contradicting myself (and I never do that) - I have had ‘talking therapy’ in the past and it didn’t do me any good but it was never analytical in any sense. No-one ever tried to help me get to the bottom of why I am the way I am. Even worse, no-one ever explained to me what was actually wrong and what it meant, for example, there’s an entry in one of my diaries from age fifteen where I beat myself up because my mum had an accident requiring treatment at A&E and I wasn’t upset about it. I felt bloody awful about that and even though I was being treated for depression at the time (I was on amitriptyline then), no-one had told me that numbed feelings and emotional withdrawal were a symptom of depression. So I effectively made myself loathe myself more than I already did which would obviously make me even more depressed.

The point that I seem to be taking such a long time to make is that medications, if you’re lucky, address the symptoms and that may be what some people want but I’m so stubborn I believe I can fix myself and I seem to be proving myself right. From reading a lot of personal accounts of severe mental illness and spending time with people who suffer from various disorders and mental health problems – from the wildly delusional to the mildly depressed – I have recognised a pattern. That pattern is that mental illness seems to be an ill-devised coping strategy developed by the unconscious mind in early childhood. I believe that by learning what strategies your own inner child developed, and learning to undo them might be a lot of hard work but it’s a damn sight more pleasant and satisfying than those little pink pills.

A bit about me

I am starting with some background on me. The point of my blog is to explore the idea of mental illness as coping mechanism. I base my belief in this mainly on my own self-analysis which I have been slowly working on since I was about fourteen. I have a fairly comprehensive idea of who I am and why I am, the tricky part is undoing my coping mechanisms so that I can function a little better and with more consistency. That is a work in progress, I am definitely moving forward towards a place of less mental…

I am going to use a passage from my diary that I wrote recently, I had reached a point where I wanted to summarise all of my understanding about how my personality developed the way that it did and why I feel and react the way I do now. It took me quite a long time to piece together all of this analysis and it was a difficult process to go through. When I feel depressed or angry or just profoundly alone I know that is a signal to me to try to work out what is going wrong so I can move towards fixing it. Like I say, knowing why you’re mental is not a cure; it’s the first step to fundamental behaviour change that makes life easier to cope with. Before sharing the following with you I would like to say one thing: I do not blame any of the people mentioned for what has happened to me, least of all my mum who is a remarkable woman who was abused and neglected as a child and through the strength of her character has managed to turn out as different to my grandmother as possible. I may harbour some resentment to my siblings, they still treat me like crap now.. Seriously though, I’m just stating the relevant facts with no judgement attached.

“I was evidently born with the characteristics of what has become known as a highly sensitive person. I had three older siblings who didn’t take too kindly to my arrival who took every opportunity to bully and torment me that they could. I clung to my mother because she showed me abundant love and affection but my mother’s own neuroses bled into the relationship, most importantly her unbalanced view of love being based on self-sacrifice and her constant sense that something is about to go wrong at any moment. I had a good relationship with my dad whose open-minded and analytical approach to life encouraged my own natural leaning in that direction. My mum’s ‘no nonsense, common sense’ approach also rubbed off on me, however, her emphasis on her role of mother lead to her unconsciously encouraging my clingy needy dependence upon her. This worked so effectively that I screamed hysterically if she even went upstairs without me. Going to nursery and school was, frankly, traumatic for me. My very apparent sense of vulnerability made me an easy target for bullies, further reinforcing my unhealthy attachment to my mother. In one sense I only felt safe when I was with my mum – no-one could bully me then and I felt soothed by her affection, on the other hand, I unconsciously picked up a strong sense of impermanence, of impending catastrophe that left me fundamentally insecure and vulnerable. To cope with this lack of security I contrived mechanisms which allowed me to ‘read’ people and adjust my behaviour in order to minimise the possibility if them rejecting me and leaving me alone and unloved. Essentially I never felt secure enough to be myself around anyone else. Due to my strong, analytical and over-active cognition I even developed fantasy scenarios that all kinds of people could see and hear what I was doing even when I was on my own, so I didn’t even learn to be myself when I was alone. I also developed the habit of constantly conversing with people in my mind, second-guessing their reactions to my thoughts. I developed these behaviours as a very young child in order to protect myself from the universal fear of abandonment and rejection. Being a very young child I was unable to create strategies that effectively addressed the issues I was having. Inadvertently the part of me consumed by fear compounded the damage already done. I never felt safe, I felt uncomfortable around people and not even comfortable on my own. I withdrew; I was constantly under the influence of my mother’s negativity. I became depressed. Being cursed with more than my fair share of intelligence I started developing ideas about the world; I thought about all manner of things and began to form strong opinions and beliefs. Unfortunately, my rational way of seeing the world clashed rather dramatically with emotionally immature way of coping with life’s perceived dangers. Instead of trying to reconcile the two I continued with my old strategy – deny myself, deny what I feel. I wanted to be what I was not so I told myself that I was. In essence, I developed a very strong personality but it had no firm foundations to rest on. My sense of self was dangerously fragile and evanescent. Inevitably, when I started having romantic relationships I transferred the unhealthy attachment from my mother to my new significant other however, I knew if I acted on my clingy, insecure impulses I would become unattractive so I played the game of emotional stability that I didn’t feel. I was alone, conflicted and tormented inside but hated myself for it. I chose partners who were unsuitable for me because I was grateful to be loved and wanted – I equated sex with acceptance.”

What I'm about

I have been diagnosed as Bipolar II - generally speaking my moods change frequently and rapidly (within a sentence last Monday). I have never become delusional, I have attempted suicide although not for over a decade now. I am very self-aware and have been in a process of analysing myself since I was a teenager by writing in a diary and talking to friends and family (yes, you should feel sorry for them). I have also read a great deal about mental health and disorders. It is my belief that mental illness in its various forms is a coping strategy formed in early childhood, that certain people are predisposed to certain types of reactions and that life circumstances then exacerbate this predisposition to different degrees. It is also my belief that the need by scientists to categorise and 'treat' mental 'illness' is a neurosis in itself. I am very aware that for most people suffering from one of these disorders that my views may feel like an attack or a lack of understanding - please tell me if that is the case and please tell me what you think.

I am writing this blog because I want to understand how people's minds work, I have many theories and ideas, I absolutely love listening to people and learning about their experiences and perspectives. Eventually I would like to write a book that would present a different theory about mental illness and personality disorders. I am writing this blog in the hope that I can learn from as many different people as possible and maybe we can all learn from each other. I would very much like your help.