Living with PTSD

It is a terrible thing to feel unsafe. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome causes the sufferer to feel unsafe. The feeling of lack of safety is disabling. It creates mental torment and physical sensations of pain and discomfort.

Post traumatic stress disorder can be caused by different types of trauma. Anytime a person is put into a situation of being threatened for a prolonged period of time, they are in danger of damage to the their neurology.

People are not set up to endure a dangerous situation for extended periods of time. We are set up to be able to handle an immediate danger.

C-PTSD is a form of PTSD that happens when someone is exposed to feeling threatened on an on-going basis, for an extended period of time. PTSD is from a traumatic event or from a shorter period of trauma. The same physiological changes occur in the brain.

The amygdala is the part of the brain that kicks into high alert when we are in danger. This puts is into the fight or flight mode. Our brains and bodies are only designed to sustain this mode for a few minutes at a time.

Our body will gear up for a fight to the death, or to run as fast as we can to escape. Some people go into a state of frozen, incapacitating fear.

When people are in a prolonged dangerous situation like domestic violence, front military lines, living in a dangerous gang-type neighborhood, etc, they are forced to sustain the fight or flight level for way too long.

They are afraid to sleep at night because the danger is constant and they could be injured in their sleep.

This causes people to have sleep disorders later, even when they are no longer living in the threatening environment.

This causes the amygdala malfunction. It basically breaks and becomes overactive on a regular basis, It begins to respond to anything that triggers a memory of the original trauma,

Many people wake up the morning in post traumatic stress right away. For some reason the brain wakes up in trauma.

Things that remind the person’s brain of the original traumatic situation, will wake up the amygdala and send them into a terrified state of mind. They feel that they are in immediate danger. They feel threatened in such a frightening way that their body responds with blood pressure raising, nausea, headache and other symptoms, depending on the person.

People with PTSD live with the daily fear that they could relive the terrible feelings of trauma at any time. They develope a new reason for terror. The fear of the possibility of being sucked into the nightmare state is terrifying. They will do things to try to avoid being triggered.

Living with this terror every day is exhausting and disruptive to the person’s life. It gets worse and worse for the person’s mental health to continue to live in the fear of experiencing trauma.

It is critical that people with PTSD can talk to someone about their feelings and what it is like to live this way. It is difficult to find anyone to talk to who will really understand.

This Word Press network has members that suffer from PTSD  and severe anxiety. The more we communicate with each other about our feelings, the more we have the chance to feel validated. PTSD sufferers need to be heard. Our stories need to be told in a safe space.

God bless

Namaste

Annie

Depression; The Darkness That Only We Can See

Depression is like an alternate reality. A dark reality that surrounds us that no one else can see. People do not understand why we are depressed. They point things out to us about our lives that we should be thankful for and tell us to snap out of it.

Depression is an invisible disorder of the mind. There are actual organic and chemical differences in the brain, that are different when someone is depressed, but no one around you can see inside your brain.

There may be things in your life that are making you miserable that are triggering your tendency towards depression. Most likely your brain was primed for depression, during your childhood.

It would not surprise me if you were often in situations that had no control over during your childhood, that were confusing and tormenting to you as a child. Your brain will wire itself to deal with abuse and ongoing anxiety.

The irregular wiring and chemical imbalance, cause by childhood abuse or other trauma in your life, will stay there, long after the trauma. The brain has to be rewired from what happened to us. Your brain needs to be healed.

Many people with mental illness also have C-PTSD from some sort of trauma, physical or mental abuse during their childhood. It is likely that one of your parents had an undiagnosed mental illness.

Maybe one parent was an alcoholic, like mine, and you were constantly on guard because you never knew what to expect next. Maybe you moved often and had one or both parents that were unstable or mentally ill.

The past generation was not as diagnosed with mental illnesses as our is. Mental illness, such as borderline personality disorder was usually not diagnosed or treated in our parents generation. I believe that my mother had borderline personality disorder, since I have looked at the traits of borderline and they are the same as hers.

If you had a parent that used to rage at you for nothing, then you were living in an extreme hyper adrenalized state all the time. This state of fight or flight activates the amygdala. This is not a state of being that we were designed to withstand for extended periods of time.

Maybe you were ignores all together as a child. Your feelings did no count and your opinions were discarded. People were in control of your life and you never had any say about how you were being affected.

If you grew up feeling like you were a prisoner in your life, like you did not matter, then you were primed to have depression as an adult.

Any ongoing situations where you felt your life was out of control and there was nothing you could do about it, could have caused your brain to go into a state of protecting itself.

You probably protected yourself by living in a fantasy world, as a child. You  may have had imaginary friends or some alternate imaginary life, where you had more control. It is the issue of having no control that draws you into depression.

Now you feel that your life is out of your control , but it is not the same because you are an adult. You are “supposed” to be in control of your life. It seems like the other adults around you are in control of their lives and you are the only one who is not.

You feel like something is wrong with you that is making you unable to have the same kind of control over  your life, that the other people have.You feel like there is darkness all around you and it seems to follow you.

There might be someone who is still playing mind games with you. If one of your parents was mentally ill when you were growing up, then they still are. If they are still in your life, then they may still be causing you to feel out of control

You may have ended up in relationships where the other person was mentally ill. It feels normal to be in relationships with mentally ill people, if we grew up with mentally ill parents. I know I have ended up staying in relationships with mentally ill people, and did not realize it until the relationship was over.

We were trained to process our reality in a different way than people who grew up in normal families. We were trained to see the abnormal as normal.

We were conditioned to see abuse as our fault. When someone does something which would normally cross another person’s boundaries, we do not recognize it as wrong.

These continued patterns of accepting abuse, and feeling like we are “supposed to” act happy, when we are not, are still with us.

As a child you could not speak up and say “no.” You could not express your true thoughts and feelings.

We are so conditioned not to express our feelings, that we cannot even identify them sometimes. We may be in situations where we should feel angry or offended, but instead we just go into depression.

We are not used to standing up for ourselves in a healthy wa and may not even know how. Social anxiety, OCD, generalized anxiety disorder and other mental illnesses are usually conditioned responses that were caused by our brains trying to protect themselves.

There was no one to protect us as a child, We never learned what it was like to feel safe. The feeling of never being really safe, is also a cause of depression.

We were never really given the tools to have self esteem or to function autonomously. We may not know how to parent ourselves. Adults take care of themselves and are their own parents. They had examples  of how parents should take care of their children and now they take care of their own emotional and physical needs well.

Maybe your needs were not met as a child. Everyone has basic needs of shelter, safety, food, personal boundaries, and emotional support. If any of those needs were consistently not met when you were growing up, then you were primed for having depression.

As adults, we need to explore what happened to us, during our childhood and teenage years. We need to see what needs of ours were not met and what developmental stages were missed. We need to learn all the things that we should have learned as children and teenagers.

if we are still around our abusive parents, then  we are going to continue to feel triggered and trapped. The only way to have relationships with our parents, is for us to draw the boundaries that should have been there all along.

If we are in a relationship that is a recurrent pattern of our childhood, we need to get out and learn to draw proper boundaries that we should have learned to do, a long time ago.

The lack of feeling like you are as valuable and entitles to boundaries as everyone else, will cause depression. The feeling that others have more rights to say “no” to people and we do not, is a cause of depression.

As long as we continue to feel trapped in the patterns of our childhood and keep re-living them, the worse our depression will become.

We need to educate ourselves about how to parent ourselves and how to draw proper boundaries. We need to read and get materials that will teach us the skills that we are missing to be adults. It is not fair that other people can manage their lives better than we can.

In addition to reading and learning about boundaries and assertiveness, we can watch other people that we feel are functioning well. See what they are doing that is different that you are doing.

Do these people get caught up in being manipulated by others? Do these people follow their own dreams or do they do what others manipulate them into doing?

People that are living fulfilled lives draw boundaries and they follow the dreams that come from inside of them. People that grew up with abuse are used to living their lives in order to ensure the happiness of others.

We cannot live for other adults. We cannot follow the dreams that other people have for us. We cannot always do things to make other people happy.

it is good to have compassion for other people, and to love them. But loving someone does not mean you have to do everything they want you to do. Other people cannot know what will make us happy.

Take a look at your relationships and see if you do anything that sacrifices yourself for another adult. Other adults, including our parents and partners are supposed to love us. They should want us to follow our dreams. If people are being manipulative of us, then they are not being loving.

Just because you were primed to go into the dark reality of depression, does not mean that it has to stay that way forever. You can learn the things you were never taught as a child.

You can learn to identify what you really want out of life and what would make you happy. You can learn to prioritize your needs , and still love other people. You can learn to stop sacrificing your own happiness, and to stop holding back on the person that you really are

We can find our own identity and do the things that fit in with that identity. We can be the person that we want to be. If other people are upset by any changes we make, they will get over it. If they don’t , then  maybe they did not really love you as much as they told you.

People are happy when they feel like they are being themselves. When we are in depression, we feel invisible and out of touch with our true selves. We feel that we are not living life the way that we would like to be.

You matter. Your dreams matter. You have the right to say “no” You have the right to draw boundaries that are fair. The other people have boundaries that you are expected to respect.

You have a right to feel depressed but you also have a right to begin to re-train yourself to be more fulfilled.

Blessings,

Annie

Lies I Tell Myself

Avoidant Personality Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder Similarities

Avoidant Personality Disorder

 “afflicting persons when they display a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation”  Wikipedia

This part of avoidant personality is associated with social anxiety disorder. Many people that have APD also have social anxiety disorder. There are feelings of fear of being embarrassed and “not fitting in” due to inability to understand and respond correctly to social cues.

So, some people with APD will avoid social situations in order not to feel the extreme anxiety associated with certain types of social interaction. Different people are different about what kinds of social situations trigger their anxiety. Some people with social anxiety disorder, like myself, are very good at one on one interactions, even if they are with strangers.

Avoidant Personality Disorder causes avoidance of more things than just social interaction. Also some people with APD are not afraid of social situations at all. It is other things that provoke anxiety attacks.

APD will cause people to have anxiety attacks related to things that are threatening to them. Anything that makes them feel powerless, inadequate and unable to handle the task, will be avoided. The problem that occurs is that avoiding things that need to get done will sometimes cause more problems for the APD sufferer.

These are things that end up happening, when someone with APD avoids doing things that are important to get done.

1. Fear of opening envelopes that may contain bills, notifications from insurance, Notifications from authorities, etc.

Bills become delinquent. Fees are added on and make the bills higher. Credit is adversely affected. Accounts are closed. Business relations are injured.

More anxiety is created because these things are the very things that the person was afraid of coming true in the first place. They do not want to see money they owe that they cannot afford to pay. They do not want to feel scolded by whatever it says inside the envelope.

2, Avoiding answering and making phone calls.

There can be an extreme phobic fear of making answering the phone. There is a fear of having a panic attack, if you answer the phone. You miss getting certain information that may be about things you need to take care of’

Making phone calls can be impossible. People with social anxiety disorder do not feel that they know how to handle conversations on the phone. Again, different people are different and will avoid different kinds of calls.

Some people become incapacitated to make any phone calls at all. Email can be a good coping skill for this. I often use email and text to interact with family members and certain other people. I am perfectly comfortable talking to my best friend / boyfriend on the phone. I always answer the phone when I see it is him. So for me, it is not a fear of the phone, but a fear of being dominated by people who are aggressive or more assertive than myself.

I wrote a post about being assertive for the kindness blog. I was researching this topic in order to help myself to become better with this. I am currently working on improving assertiveness skills. I have trouble remembering what I want to say and how to say it, once someone become very dominating in the conversation.

I want to get to the point where I can keep my thoughts together in order to stand up for myself. especially if I am being accused of anything, or if the person is doing something that violates my rights. If you are struggling with the same things then this post may be helpful to you.

3. Avoiding dealing with bills and credit companies. Over time the avoidance makes situations worse and the anxiety continues. The longer things go unattended , the longer the anxiety continues and increases. This makes it harder and harder to take any action.

The first thing that happens is that we are alerted to a problem that requires action on our part. The net thing that happens is that our brains go into a mental anxiety loop. Obsessive running thoughts are so severe when we think about taking action, that we become paralyzed to do anything. We put it off, in order to reduce the feeling id anxiety, self criticism. inadequacy, worthlessness and depression.

Anxiety and depression go hand in hand with both Avoidant Personality Disorder and Social Anxiety disorder. We know that other people can do these things much better and easier than we can. We are aware that something is wrong with us, that we cannot take care of ourselves the way other people can take care of themselves

3. Lack of Self Care.

In the end there is a lack of taking care of yourself, when you have these disorders. Other people take care of things that need to be taken care of  They have learned how to “parent themselves” better than we have.

Mostly these kinds of disorders come out of abuse and trauma in our pasts. Most likely our childhood lacked the proper support and guidance to learn how to “parent ourselves” as adults

Somehow we need to learn how to prioritize ourselves and our needs that have to be taken care of. Survivors of abuse can often fall into prioritizing the needs of others to the point of neglecting our own needs.

One of our needs is to learn how to parent ourselves, stand up for ourselves. We need to learn how to feel deserving of things to go in out favor. Being assertive and taking care of things, that invove dealing with other people is a skill. It is a skill we have trouble with but that needs to be tended to.

These mental disorders are associated with real neurological differences between our brains and the brains of other people. These changes occurred over time, from repetitive behaviors. We may have developed behaviors as a child, that were needed to survive.

Once behaviors are repeated over and over, they become wired into our brains, To override the feeling of anxiety at making a phone call, we have to change our behavior slowly over time. Find ways to be able to make that call, even if it means having a friend hold your hand while you make the call yourself.

We can rewire our brains. I am still learning how but I believe it can be done.

But in the mean time, I am writing this, instead of working on the taxes.

Ok. I am getting back to that now

Annie

and avoidance of social interaction.^[2] Individuals afflicted with the disorder tend to describe themselves as ill at ease, anxious, lonely, and generally feel unwanted and isolated from others.^[3]

People with avoidant personality disorder often consider themselves to be socially inept or personally unappealing and avoid social interaction for fear of being ridiculed, humiliated, rejected, or disliked. Avoidant personality disorder is usually first noticed in early adulthood. Childhood emotional neglect and peer group rejection are both associated with an increased risk for the development of AvPD.^[4]

Derealization / Depersonalization Disorder Part 2 / Memory Failure

“I pledge my commitment to the Blog for Mental Health 2015 Project. I will blog about mental health topics not only for myself, but for others. By displaying this badge, I show my pride, dedication, and acceptance for mental health. I use this to promote mental health education in the struggle to erase stigma.”

blogformentalhealth.com 

http://blogformentalhealth.com/take-the-pledge/

This post is has been submitted to the Blog for mental health. The link to the blog is above, and I encourage you to check out this blog which is dedicated to raising awareness about mental health.

This is the second part of my posts on derealization / depersonalization disorder. Part 1 can be viewed here.

One thing that I have experienced is a major lack of disorganization of my thoughts.

The thoughts become disorganized, meaning that they do not flow in a logical order. There are pieces of thoughts here and there, that come and then go, and then come back again.

I try to begin with a train of thought and then quickly do not remember where I was going with it. A little later it comes back to me and I can continue on with it for a minute or two, before it is lost again.

Last night I wrote a post from the state of derealization and I will post it next. I had to pause completely in places, to figure out what I was thinking and in those cases I put a “dot dot dot”  … or …Uhg …or something like that and that is where I was stopping to get my brain back together.

The memory fails to function properly. Once in a while I get into a severe anxiety state, that goes into some level of derealization and then my memory just fails. I cannot even remember a simple direction given to me by a coworker.

They will tell me to do something and when I walk down the hall, the memory of what they told me leaves. I don’t just mean that I forget what they told me. I will will actually forget “that” they told me.

I wonder why I am walking that direction down the hall. I make an educated guess as to what I may have been going in that direction for, but I completely have lost the fact that someone gave me a specific task to do.

The harder I try to keep on track, the more nervous I get over the fact that I am not remembering simple directions, the worse my ability to keep track of things gets.

As I mentioned most people that have episodes of the derealization state have trauma of some kind in their past or present. Sometimes situations occur that are too overwhelming and trigger post traumatic stress.

In the case that you are still living with some kind of mental or other abuse, the actual abuse can cause the derealization and / or the depersonalization mode to kick in. Actually, it is more like parts of the grounded brain function are shutting off, than it is like something is kicking in.

This can occur to perfectly intelligent and logical people. It is not a sign of lack of intelligence. In fact, the more intelligent, sensitive and creative a person is, the more severely their brain is sometimes affected by mental types of abuse.

The brain keeps attempting to put the abuse into some category of ration and logic. Since it cannot do that, the brain becomes more and more traumatized , as it tried to organize the information surrounding the abuse.

Derealization and depersonalization often goes with another disorder such as bipolar disorder, PTSD, dissociative disorder or a severe anxiety disorder.

Later this afternoon, I will post the writing from the night I was still in the derealization state. I had begun to come out of it enough to be able to write. I talk about what it had been like for me earlier that day.

The worst part of the day had been in the early afternoon. The post was written late that night, while I was still struggling with the symptoms, but I was better than the time of the day that I describe in the post.

Hopefully this will shed some light on this less understood disorder and be of help to people who feel very alone about having this disorder.

I think that most people that experience this, keep it to themselves, for fear of sounding crazy or not being understood. This is also true for me and this is really the first time I have decided to be truthful and transparent about these experiences.

Morning Anxiety / Coping Skills for Anxiety Attacks

I just reread this post that I wrote in November. I have changed my way of dealing with morning anxiety somewhat, since then, although the ideas of looking at pretty pictures and cute bunnies are still great.

Now, I usually go to wordpress and read my comments in the morning. I also check in with my facebook groups. These are closed mental illness groups. If you are interested I can give you info about how to join one.

What I still do that is the same as in November, is to try to calm down my brain while I am still in bed. Just forcing yourself out of bed, when you are in post traumatic stress or having a severe anxiety attack, is not the best thing to do.

For people that have extreme anxiety every morning, there is something that is causing the brain to become aroused to fear and danger, right away upon waking up. This could be caused from having to have lived in a domestic abuse situation , in which you had to be alert right away upon waking up.

Soldiers who endured combat also may have had to be alert upon waking up in the morning and ready to defend themselves from threat. Enduring the feelings of waking up to threat and danger for an extended period of time, causes this PTSD condition in the brain.

It is not uncommon for men and women from the military, who were in combat zones, to wake up in post traumatic stress every day.

I still have severe anxiety in the morning, especially if I have to go to work. I think that of you have anxiety that is correlated with something like work, then it is probably time to make life changes. I am currently working on changing out of that job.

We have to prioritize our mental wellness. No one is going to do it for us. If we can identify the things that trigger our depression or anxiety then we need to create a plan to make changes.

Making changes feels scary at first but to quote John Lennon “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done…”

GentleKindness

I get anxiety as soon as I wake up in the morning. This is from the moment I open my eyes. It is like an attack of fear upon consciousness.

I have come up with some tools that help me to decrease the level of anxiety, when I remember to use them.

I have tried to find something to do before I get out of the bed that will help. For a while, I was getting on Pinterest from my cell phone. I would look up pictures of bunny rabbits. I found that those sweet silly creatures are healing to me.

I also like to look up artwork like paintings and drawings of fairies and mermaids. The fantasy world helped take my mind out of the stress of the upcoming day.

I also tried facebook, but personally that did not help me because it brought me into the real world…

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Anxiety Attacks and the Mental Doors that Open in Our Minds

Why do I get such severe anxiety when I have to be somewhere on time, even if I am not really running late? 

This was a question someone posed to me the other day. The first thing I told them was that I do the same thing. Then I tried to picture what happens to me in the same circumstance.

What happens is that we go through a series of “mental doors.” These are doors that will open to something bad on the other side of them. The doors are in succession; if the first one opens, then it is very likely the next door will open. Once that door opens, the next will open and so on.

In the scenario that plays out in our minds, the worst possible thing will happen behind each and every door, ultimately ending in a catastrophic event.  Each of the events  will cause us severe  mental torment and pain and put us in a situation we have no way to save ourselves from.

We are very sure these things will happen basically in the order we picture them. Sometimes we have a very clear picture of the succession of events in our minds, and other times it is more subconscious. If we stopped to write down what is behind each door, we probably could.

Usually what awaits behind the doors are things we have a general fear of happening. They are things that haunt us and control our behavior. We are so afraid of these things happening, that our lives are ruled by these fears.

What am I really afraid of ?

The fears are different for different people. Personally the things I fear are as follows:

losing my job

the house burning down

having my children taken away from me

fear of abandonment

being homeless

losing my mind

You can make your own list. You may share some with me and you may have many of your own. The fear of losing the job is probably the easiest one to use for an example. This one begins with running late for work and has many other nasty doors after it.

I am running late for work.

I will arrive late and the worst possible  supervisor will be there

I will be scolded and humiliated

The confrontation between the supervisor and myself will be overwhelming

I will not be able to deal with the anxiety of it

I will either quit, be fired…  OR …

be too upset to work and screw something up at work to get myself fired… OR ..

.the result of the confrontation will be an unbearable increase in the anxiety level at work from now on that will make me physically ill, more mentally ill, and will end in my losing lob soon

What is the worst thing that could happen?

The loss of my job will be devastating

I will not have enough money to eat or feed my kids, or pay the rent

I will be thrown out of the house by my ex in-laws either with my children or they will keep my children

Any hope for a future will be lost

I will not recover

Where did these fears come from and why do I constantly feel in danger of them?

Most likely these fears have root in our past. There is something about ourselves or things we have experienced that make us believe that these things are chasing us. We are in constant danger of these things happening to us. If we are not careful and always worrying about them, then they will sneak up on us and destroy us.

It could be that some of these fears are due to our present living situation. If we are in a mentally abusive situation, then the fears that other people would consider made up, are actually part of our lives. If we actually have to fear things that other people do not, because of who we are living with, then we are being manipulated by others with fear, which is mental abuse.

Once we think we might be running late for work, our minds go into the mode of opening all of these mental doors. It is not a clear thing in our minds. There are just flashes of thoughts, pictures, scenarios and overwhelming emotion.  We actually experience the feelings of fear , as if these situations were occuring right now.

We suffer the mental torment of the bad experiences we fear, even though they are not actually happening to us at this time. This is part of the anxiety disorder and we cannot just shut it off. The brain goes into this mode on its own.

The obsessive thoughts running through our heads when we are afraid of being late for work, are all about these doors, we fear opening against our will. It is a fear of the future and our mental / emotional inability to handle it. The thing that would help would be strengthening our general mental state. But we are in the lace we are in at this time.

Blessings,

Annie

Combating Anxiety by Activating the Analytical Part of Your Brain Instead

One of the best ways I have found that helps me with a severe anxiety attack is to research something new for a blog post. The act of using the rational side of my brain calms down the running thoughts. I will fill my mind with new information so that it gets filled up to the point where there is no room for anything else.

The next thing I do is to organize the information into categories or by main ideas and secondary ideas. Personally I like to begin reading and organizing from main ideas to details. But some people prefer looking at details first and then the big picture.

The very act of sorting and organizing information activated a completely different part of the brain from the anxiety center. The amygdala rules the fight or flight response. It is very primitive and is sort of the opposite of rational thoughts. Once you go into the rational and analytical side of your brain, you will find that the amygdala gets quieter, at least I do.

You would be best to do research on something that is very interesting to you and will draw you in. You want to get completely drawn into the subject matter you are researching.

There are two basic learning styles and if you can identify your style, you will be able to approach your research in the way that works best for you. The two learning styles are Analytical Learner and Global Learner.

AN ANALYTIC LEARNER…

Analytical Learners are tuned into details. They love reading the details of things and get caught up in them. If you are an Analytical Learner then you will find your topic and delve into reading all kinds of details about it.

Go for it and have fun with it. The more engrossed and interested you become in your topic, the more you will find your anxiety level going down.

Analytical Learners usually like to complete the task they are working on before starting another one. They enjoy being engaged with all the small details of the task or project. They work best without distractions. Another typical trait is that they need the project or activity to be relevant to them in order to focus well on it.

A GLOBAL LEARNER…

• Global Learners need to see the big picture before they can focus on details. This is my learning style and my method of researching a topic is general to specific. I may look at 3 or 4 web sites about the topic to get a better idea about it in general. Then I will write the beginning part of my post. After that I will get to the details and the examples and then organize them and decide where to put them in what I am writing.
• Global learners have a tendency to procrastinate on getting to things on their to-do list. We also will start things and leave them unfinished and then go onto the next thing.
• I actually tend to have 4 or 5 posts saved into drafts that are 3/4 finished. There are 3 sitting in my drafts right now.I have enough of working on a particular post and then I save what I have so far. I start another one. When I feel so moved, I go back to one of the drafts and complete it.
• I like the feeling of having multiple projects going at the same time.

Whatever your learning style, the point is to proactively use the researching process to reduce your anxiety attack. I have come home from work in an extreme state of anxiety and sat down to find a topic to research and learn about. As I am opening tabs and looking at different articles, Wikipedia, etc, I begin to get involved in the thinking process.

Then I work on writing about the main idea and putting it into my own words. Once i get into the details and examples, I a, usually busy enough that there is little room left in my brain for the running thoughts. Sometimes when the anxiety goes down, I just save the draft and do go and do something other activity, like talk on the phone or watch Netflix.

I can open the draft tomorrow when I need to calm my anxiety. Sometimes I go back and forth between things I am writing but I usually focus on one for the evening.Of all the methods I have tried for lowering my anxiety attacks, the learning, researching and writing method had been the most helpful to me.

Of course this is only helpful when I am home and with my computer. In a pinch, I can grab a magazine and look through the articles to see if anything is interesting that I might use as an idea to write about later.

This post will be more helpful to some people than others. i used my usual method of looking through topics to pick one, then researching the general topic and getting to the details and personal examples last.

I throw in the personal examples in order to make the post more relatable to you. That is not the most de-stressing part of my writing. In fact I sometimes feel my anxiety creeping back up, as I am putting personal examples for you.

It is in the detaching from my current situation that I find anxiety lowering. By the time I get around  to telling you about my personal experiences, I am no longer in the research and learning mode.

Everyone is different and you may find that the telling of your personal experiences helps you to reduce anxiety. Whatever works for you is the right way!

Happy blogging 🙂

Annie

Severe Anxiety

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Mental Illness Bloggers are in Touch with their Vulnerability and Humanity

Blogs about mental illness are some of the most captivating blogs that I love to read. I am interested in the topics they cover but that is not the only reason why they speak to me.

Bloggers that have struggled with mental illness have had to learn to be in touch with their humanity. In order to write your own mental illness, you have to dive deep into the darkest corners of your mind. The descriptions that they write are very vivid and full of human depth. There is a sense of soul searching that draws you into the posts.

I am not just counting the blogs that identify themselves as having mental illness. There are also some bloggers that suffer from OCD, depression, social anxiety and severe mental turmoil that chose not to identify their blog as such. However the content of their posts has very vivid descriptions of the mental torment they experience.

The level of depth to the mental illness blogs makes me feel in touch with my own vulnerability and humanity.

People with mental illness are used to being vulnerable. I am not saying that we enjoy it, but that we have had no choice but to accept it.

There is a strong ability to identify and describe the human condition, amongst mental illness bloggers.

There is also support between the bloggers to deal with the most painful aspects of being human.

We have had to endure such tremendous trials on a day to day basis that we are keenly in touch with human mental and emotional suffering. The reality of our daily suffering is part of our lives. People with mental illness have to deal with extreme levels of emotion every single day.

Our brains cause us to suffer on a regular basis, in ways that most people do not understand.

Other people experience severe emotional suffering when someone they love dies or is severely ill. They experience loss when they lose someone they love to a break up or to death.

People experience fear when they are in a situation of immediate danger, like a car accident of a fire. They feel fear over losing a job and feelings of depression over having to settle for things in life to be less that they hoped for.

People with mental illness experience the extreme levels of depression, severe anxiety, loneliness, fear and trauma on a daily basis.

 We experience the fear of being triggered into any of those severe emotional states. Our brains are a constant threat to our emotional well being and our ability to function.

 The phrase “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” is not a comforting one to us.

Life is always a risk to us. Every decision we make and everything we attempt to do, has the potential to utterly destroy our mental state and in some cases… our lives.

Many of us are in constant fear of interacting with other people due to stigma about mental illness.  We  also fear our inability to interact with people in a “normal” and acceptable way.

Many social activities that other people take for granite are potentially hazardous to us either in a physical way or in a mental way.

We can be easily triggered in a matter of seconds into a completely different mental state.

Since we go through the extremes of human emotion so often, we are very in tune with the human condition. We are very aware that we are vulnerable. We are constantly subject to our own mental vulnerability.

All people are vulnerable but they do not realize it in the same way  that   people with mental illness do. The brain is a very fragile thing. It can become traumatized and damaged. Everyone is in danger of having their brain organization becoming disrupted. People take for granite that their brains will always function in the same way they are currently functioning.

The mental illness bloggers talk of fear and anxiety in a very human and real way. We are in touch with the human condition of fear. We can write descriptively about fear very well.

We are also very in touch with depression and sadness. Mental illness bloggers can write very descriptive, artistically worded pictures of sadness and emptiness, that other people cannot access.

Sadness is a very human state. The vulnerability to depression , emptiness and loneliness makes us very in touch with our human side. Being in touch with the humanity in ourselves allows us to perceive life and ourselves in a way that is different from other people.

We have to feel things in a very extreme way. This is what our brains do… They force us to feel… often times..  too much.

If we were a painting, it would have very black blacks and very red reds. The colors would be very dark in places and very bright in others. The grays are harder to come by, unless you are currently on a medication cocktail that will allow for some calm colors for a while.. that is…until you build up a tolerance or …for some reason known to no one…your brain chemistry just suddenly decides that the particular med combination no longer will work.

The struggle to find the right medications, self medicate, and reach out to any form of relief that will hold you, is a constant and daily struggle.

We know what is feels like to be constantly reaching out for help, only to find that real help is hard to come by.  Mental illness bloggers are very in tune with their need for other people. They are able to reach out with their writing to others who are suffering.

Although I am sorry for the suffering of my fellow bloggers, I treasure your blogs. I love to read posts and feel the humanity in them.

Mental illness bloggers have the unique ability to be in touch with the tormented human brain and to write mental pain, in a way that others can feel.

The humanity of the mental illness bloggers staggers the reader’s mind and stimulates the senses. When I read the posts, I feel connected with emotions in myself. I feel validated about my own mental suffering. I feel a kinship with not just people with mental illness, but with humanity.

Blessing to all,

Annie