Calling a spade a spade

So it’s the next day and I must say that I am really seeing improvement. I am getting control over the anxiety. The trick has been to call a spade a spade. What I mean by that, is that last night I went out to do some supplies shopping and it went great, but of course my brain looked for stupidities to make it look like I’m doing crazy things. Some of the things were typical and expected, and some were due to lack of focus.

So what would happen is, I would open a wrong drawer or bump into something, and it would try to trigger anxiety. I quickly nipped it in the bud by going through the following logic in my head:

• Haven’t you already done things like this and even worse things in the past? What came of it? Did it get worse? Better? Did you go crazy? Did you lose your mind? Look at the history and the pattern and try to predict what will happen this time. Isn’t it patterns you are looking for? The brain will never get the certainty it wants, but it can do what it does best which is to look at past patterns and try to predict what will happen next. And everything you are experiencing now are things that were experienced in the past, if not on a worse scale, and each time what was the outcome? Nothing. So again, as always, the outcome will be nothing! So no reason for anxiety now!

• Okay, let’s see what happened here: I did something absentmindedly and it’s trying to trigger anxiety. But haven’t we established already that it’s the anxiety that’s causing me to do these things and not the other way around where the action triggers the anxiety? So why become anxious about having done something as a result of anxiety? Let’s get to the root of it: I did what I did because I have some level of anxiety which is resulting in reduced focus and concentration on what I’m doing. So the solution would be to tackle the underlying anxiety that caused me to be unfocused in the first place. How do I tackle the anxiety? Calm down. Slow down. Breathe. Address any reasons for anxiety or worry. Get busy with other, real things. Look forward to lying in bed and meditating, relaxing, analyzing the day, my thoughts, etc. Take a slow, relaxing shower. Slow down, focus, and relax.

In short, letting the anxiety-caused actions to trigger additional anxiety is what causes the vicious cycle. To break the cycle, I need to focus, remember that it’s the anxiety itself that’s the issue, and tackle the anxiety by relaxing, addressing my concerns, and getting in touch with my thoughts. Addressing the cause – the anxiety – resolves the symptoms, which in turn removes any further need for anxiety.

And as an added bonus, the anxiety reflex is addressed to with these exercises, in that as time goes on and the anxiety is found to be more and more consciously addressed and is found to be more and more useless, the brain lets go of these behaviors and reactions since it no longer believes them to be useful.

The key, however, is to stop falling into the trap of thinking that the symptom is its own thing, and a reason for concern and a valid trigger for anxiety. It is very difficult in the moment but so crucial to stay focused and remember that it is not the action that is a reason for concern, rather that the action was triggered by anxiety and the resulting hyperfocus or lack of focus, and to take a step back, look at the past patterns, realize what the outcome has always been and is likely to be again, and to slow down and address the anxiety itself.

And this is what I’ve been working on because this is getting to the meat of the issue. Breaking the vicious cycle, and tackling the brain’s beliefs about the usefulness of anxiety and changing the automated worry impulse and reaction.

I am not anyone else

Now, before I could believe in myself, I have to know who I am. But first and foremost, I need to know who I am not:

• I am not anyone else

• Everyone is different, individual and unique

• What applies to everyone else does not apply to me

• Someone else’s misfortune, tragedy, illness is not mine.

• Despite my conditioning in childhood, I am not benefitting others by sympathizing and taking on their misfortunes

• I am not benefitting myself by applying the misfortune of others to myself.

• I cannot avoid the misfortunes of others because avoidance is not helpful

• I need to learn to view the misfortunes or fortunes of others as an outsider – separate from them.

• Just as others are not me, I am not others.

Think about a doctor in a hospital. The doctor is conditioned to see himself as separate from his patients. If doctors would behave like I do emotionally, they would always be applying all of their patients’ illnesses to themselves and wonder if they themselves have the problems that their patients have. Similarly and possibly more intensely, a psychotherapist cannot engage with patients with severe mental illnesses and start to wonder if they too are going crazy, hearing voices, bipolar, schizophrenic, etc. Therapists need to see themselves as individuals unto themselves who went to school and obtained a degree in mental health. This independent individual, licensed to treat individuals with mental illness now opens a practice or works in a facility where s/he listens to patients who are separate people with their individual issues. The therapist speaks with them. The therapist diagnoses the patient. And the therapist treats the patient. The therapist does not become the patient or think that they may have the same issue as the patient.

Think about the therapist I called, the psychiatrist I contacted, or the neurologist I consulted with and visited. They see patients all day and hear about and get deeply involved in their issues. But they do not become intimate or personal with their issues. They understand the roles: I am me, the doctor, and you are you, the patient. You can tell me all about what you are experiencing and feeling and I will listen to your story and tell you want I think you can do to change the way you think, feel and behave.

I have a problem where my sympathetic portion of my brain is overly sensitized to things it perceives. That, coupled with paranoia and hypochondria, and you have an individual who is so overly sympathetic that every tragedy or illness triggers sympathy and personalization of the other person’s tragedy. One night I’m listening to a news story about mental health issues resulting from years of war in Liberia and thinking that the severe mental illnesses resulting from the extreme trauma the people there incurred applies to me, and the next morning I’m reading the transcript of Michael Jackson’s last words, and thinking that I have the same mental disorder that he had and that ultimately resulted in his early death.

The common denominator is that in both cases:

• I am applying things that happened to others to myself

• The individuals to whom I am comparing myself are extremely, beyond the ability to contrast, different from me

• The individuals to whom I am comparing myself have endured trauma that is extremely, beyond the ability to contrast, different from me

• The individuals whose issues I am “adopting” are extremely, beyond the ability to contrast, different from each other

• The individuals whose issues I am “adopting” don’t benefit from me internalizing their tragedy

• The individuals whose issues I am “adopting” do not want me to internalize their tragedy

• The individuals whose issues I am “adopting” would never care enough about me to internalize my tragedies

This is not a hardwire issue as described earlier. It is a learned behavior. I got it from my father who conditioned me to believe that if you have enough worry, sympathy and pain for someone else, you may actually be able to help them or make their problems easier to handle.

The problem is, that it’s not true. In fact, it’s the furthest thing from the truth. And since it’s not true, it needs to be changed. And the way to change the behavior of internalizing and reacting emotionally to the tragedies of others is to:

• Recognize and acknowledge the behavior or emotional reaction

• Recognize that it stems from a false belief system

• Recognize what the false belief system

• Challenge the false belief system to prove that it is in fact false

• Adopt a healthy belief system

• Begin to react behaviorally and emotionally based on the true belief system.

Getting past the symptoms and isolating the anxiety itself

The way to attack this final frontier is to isolate the anxiety itself and attack it at the core. It’s similar to when a patient is rushed into the ER, covered in blood. It’s easy for the doctor to panic and start cleaning the blood and treating each wound. But the way to treat the patient is to take a step back and analyze the patient, isolate the symptoms and identify the core issue and then treat it. Or like when a person comes to the doctor complaining of headaches, congestion, chest pains, and pain when swallowing. The doctor can treat the individual symptoms, but it would still not solve anything because the underlying illness that is causing the diverse symptoms was not identified and treated, thus treating all of the symptoms with it.

So a good doctor takes a step back and analyzes the symptoms and identifies the underlying issue. And that’s what I’m going to do. You see, the brain thinks that it could use thoughts as its weapon of last resort because who can argue with thoughts? But someone can. And that person is me. I am the only one in my own head who knows me best and who knows the truth about things. Only I can look myself in the eye, figuratively speaking of course, and assure myself of the one thing that no one else can. I am my own worst enemy, but I am also my own best chance at confronting this enemy. And I’m getting good at it, so I know I’m going to overcome this one as well. And it will empower me to self-assure with everything and anything else.

Let’s first touch on something that I told my wife yesterday because it think it is so fundamental and encouraging: Life has 3 types of situations:

• Where there is nothing wrong and no reason for medical attention or emergency services

• Where there is a non-emergency medical issue that requires a visit to a doctor

• Where there is a medical emergency that requires emergency medical services

In the first instance, there is nothing wrong, so you do nothing. In the second instance, you visit a doctor who determines that you have a virus or infection, prescribes medication or refers the patient to a specialist. And in the third instance, the person calls 911 and receives the help they need.

Panic and anxiety – including and especially about issues of health and mental illness – comes when:

• There is in fact nothing wrong

• The brain perceives that something is or might go wrong

• Since there is nothing wrong in fact, there is no doctor to visit or emergency service to call

• As a result, the brain feels trapped, thinking that something is or might go wrong, but there is no one to call

• It goes so far, to the point where it actually forgets that if something were in fact wrong, there are medical and emergency services to call, so it feels even more trapped

• Panic ensues at the brain feels like something is wrong but there is nothing it can do.

• The fact, however, is that there is nothing wrong, and that’s why there is nothing to do.

• And the fact is that if there were something wrong there would be no questions about it, and there are plenty of resources to call who would respond at a moment’s notice.

• It is the cognitive dissonance between the illusion that “something is or might go terribly wrong and there’s nothing I can do”, and the reality that “there is nothing wrong and that’s why there’s nothing I am doing or can do, (and that if there were something really wrong there is plenty that can be done as has been done in the past during real emergency situations)

That said, instead of panicking over the feeling of being trapped by being unable to do anything about a serious situation, the focus needs to shift to the fact that there is no emergency situation and therefore there is nothing to do. And the proof that there is nothing to do is that you are not actually doing anything, because there is plenty to do in a true emergency or even a non-emergency, and your lack of action is because there is no action to take because there is no situation to react to.

From reassurance to self-assurance

The next item to address is self-assurance. You see, this entire episode of anxiety was triggered by one thing: when the final rug of external reassurance was pulled out from under me. Since this entire chapter was preceded by that event and is clearly related to it, there is no question in my mind that it is one of the core issues at hand. My entire life, I turned to others for reassurance. Since I was not imbued with a healthy self-confidence, I always made it a habit to seek out the reassurances of others. I turned to friends, doctors, siblings, etc. to tell me that I’m doing a great job, that I’m a good person, and that I’m going to be okay. I lived with the illusion – or rather delusion – that I can rely on others to imbue me with the self-confidence that I needed. But that only worked to a point. As I matured, I began to see the cracks in my reassurers. I started to see their weaknesses, that they had vulnerabilities too. And in my image, as described earlier, I always believed that the person providing reassurance needs to be invincible which was why I suppressed my emotions since I felt I needed to in order to provide reassurance to others. I held those who provided me with reassurance to the same standard, needing to see them as invincible. So when I started to see that the doctor I went to for reassurance also got sick, the neurologist had a heart attack himself, my guidance counselor had a son who died a slow horrible death before age 5, and that my friend who was my source of reassurance was going through a painful and depressing health issue.

For some reason, this exposure of the humanity and vulnerability of the people I looked to for reassurance removed the facade that I had created of invincible heroes. To me, if they were vulnerable how could they reassure me?

So one of the new realizations that came with my maturity and growth was that all that is left is me. I can no longer rely on others to provide the reassurance I need, because at the end of the day, no one really can. Only I can reassure myself that I’m a good person and a good husband, father, sibling, son, employee, employer and friend. Because at the end of the day, I am with myself all day and only I can provide for myself what I always sought from others. I became addicted to running to doctors and others for a constant pat on the back. But those people can only handle so much; they don’t live with me, and they are not inside my head. Even my wife’s reassurance is limited by the amount of time and patience she has to provide while she manages a home and four children. And at the end of the day, she goes to sleep and I’m there lying in bed with my own thoughts.

And that leaves just me. Only I need to have the self-assurance, self-confidence and self-esteem that will be with me the entire day and night, since only I am with myself at all times. And only I am in my own head. And only I know myself best.

I was a reassurance addict. Like a person addicted to dopamine, I was addicted to reassurance. And as is the case with a dopamine addiction where the brain, sensing the steady supply of external dopamine stops producing it naturally. Then when the addict stops taking dopamine there is a period of withdrawal, where the person is no longer receiving external dopamine and the brain has not yet resumed natural dopamine production. That leaves a void, and that void is distressing because there is a temporary lack of the needed chemical. That is what leads addicts to resume their habit because the withdrawal is so painful. But if they would just hold out until the brain adapts to the lack of external infusions and kicks in with natural production, they would be alright. It is a matter of having the strength and willpower to hold out during the temporary withdrawal.

And that’s what happened with me. I was a reassurance addict, so I never learned to reassure myself and to have the confidence and self-esteem I needed. Then when the façade of external reassurance was broken and there were no longer any external infusions of reassurance, withdrawal set in because my own brain did not pick up the slack and start to provide me with the self-assurance I always needed. Like with addiction recovery, it is extremely important that I ride out this withdrawal period, all the while tapping into my own, endless supply of self-assurance and self-esteem.

Luckily, I have accomplished and achieved so much in my lifetime thus far and have so much love and support coming my way that I have the tools needed to tap into my own supply of self-esteem and ego. It is now a matter of doing the work of learning to self-soothe and self-assure, and not continue to seek external reassurance. I need to experience the void so that I can kick in with my own sense of self.

But I am imperfect. And I believed until now that heroes need to be invincible. And that’s where the changing of false belief systems comes in. Even heroes cry; heroes bleed; heroes are vulnerable; heroes are human; and heroes need their own heroes. And that’s okay, because nobody is perfect. But we are perfect for ourselves. I am learning to trust and believe in myself and to boost myself, to tell myself that I’ve got it, that I’m okay, that I’m going to be okay, that I’m talented, accomplished and self-sufficient. And I have what to show for it. But I need to believe it. I need to look at myself and tell myself that I am capable of knowing and taking care of myself. And most of all, I am capable of appreciating myself for who I am. My children may look up to me, my wife may love me, and my co-workers may appreciate me, but those external boosts are not lasting. It is only when I can look at myself and tell myself who I am and believe it, that I will be a satisfied individual who does not look to others for reassurance.

And I am well on my way. I stopped going to my employer; I pretty much stopped going to doctors; I use my wife as a support but not as a source of self-esteem. And I am working on facing myself and raising my own ego and self-esteem. And I’m getting there. Step one is recognizing the problem. Step two is stopping to depend on others for reassurance. Step three is where I come in and fill the void and provide myself with the self-belief that I need and that will be with me 24/7/365.

I’m a trooper, forging ahead, recognizing my false belief systems, discarding them, replacing them with true and healthy beliefs, and then tapping into myself – my emotions and my self-belief – to fill the void. And then I will be whole. And more whole than I ever was before. I have my whole life ahead of me and many more years to enjoy once the new me emerges!