I wrote the following about a year ago. I didn't finish it and it goes on a bit which may be why I didn't carry on writing at the time. Apart from the odd correction to punctuation or grammar, the italicised text is exactly how I wrote it. However, I didn't have an entirely healthy state of mind at the time; despite what it says about also being for others, I was writing it for myself and the selfishness that comes with the illness may be apparent. As Sue has pointed out to me, some of the people involved in the story who may read this could/will be offended by things in the original text. So, I have edited it, adding in and changing bits for clarification (non-italics) or removing some of the text and, as it's quite long, I've split it into two parts. This also gave me the opportunity to add in some more recent observations.
"I decided to write this journal / log partly as therapy, paradoxically after I began to feel much better, and partly to record the experience for myself and others of living with an anxiety disorder and living through those events that either caused or triggered the illness. As you may tell from that tortuous sentence there are many questions posed and raised by anxiety.
One of the first questions I keep coming back to is whether this sort of illness is a learned behaviour. Did I, for example, learn to panic because of something my parents did or did not do when I was a child? I was taught early on in my professional career that all behaviour is learned. People tend to see behaviour as just behaving without recognising or understanding its emotional or cognitive content. A 'panic attack' is very real to someone experiencing one; the fear, the thoughts, the physical needs (often to run or hide or both) and the physical experience cannot be easily denied or rationalised. So when did I learn to panic and why did it only materialise as a serious disorder later in life when going through a major life-changing experience? After all, this was not the first major change in my life, even if it was perhaps the biggest and most significant.
Actually, I know some of the answers. Truthfully, there's always been times when I've been nervous and slightly panicky. Everyone's the same, right? Well, maybe. There's always been times when I've put off doing something until I felt right about it. I've always been cautious about money and decisions. I've usually felt more secure in employment rather than risking self-employment. As a young man I was very insecure about talking to women and I think I've continued to be unsure about relationships of all kinds, although a lot of that is about communication skills.
So what was the major life-changing experience? Well, we emigrated from th U.K. to Greece. I don't particularly like using the word 'emigrate' (and all its forms); it doesn't seem to quite apply to moving within Europe now. To me people emigrate to Australia or Canada or anywhere further afield, but perhaps that's just me expressing insecurity in another way. Actually the change and the anxiety started with first steps. I said to Sue (partner/wife), after my first visit to Greece in 1987, that it might be nice to live there. This idea developed into a plan for the future. Whenever we holidayed in Greece we'd look at each place and assess its potential, how much we liked it and what we might do there. One thing I always fancied was trying to establish myself as an artist.
After the mortgage on our house was paid in 2005, Sue started seriously to look at houses in Greece. She says she did this for me, as I had never done anything seriously about planning a move. But things had changed for me; in 2002 I moved from a job I was stale in to an exciting new role. Despite the usual stresses and problems that go with any job, I enjoyed this role very much. Sue started to spend a lot of time on the internet researching estate agents and property. The closer she got to choosing an area and agent, the more worried and panicky I got. Her ideas were based on carefully checking who she could trust and a price based on re-mortgaging our U.K. house. We discussed selling it, but thought that we ought to keep it for a while in case things didn't work out and we had to move back.
My panicky feelings were probably exacerbated by stress and hard work I was putting into a part-qualification over the latter part of 2006 into early 2007. Also in 2005 my father had died and maybe I hadn't (or haven't yet) dealt with this properly. I also felt, although I know it's not true, that Sue was not involving me in the planning; actually I was avoiding involvement because all I wanted to say was "stop, I don't want to do this". And yet, the idea of living in Greece and getting away from Britain still attracted me, so I went along with it despite feeling that I had no control over the process. Ultimately, the source of my anxiety was stress; a perceived lack of control over events."
I know I was expressing and acting out my stress and anxiety at work. My colleagues must have found some of my behaviour quite strange and challenging. One thing I did was to do some odd drawings on the office whiteboard. It started out with doing some characatures of colleagues and (borrowed) one-liners just for fun, but following some political upheavals and questionable management approaches I began doing some satirical stuff. Actually they were quite creative (well, I think so), but also quite bizarre and in hindsight a real indicator of my state of mind. I took some photos of one on my phone so see for yourself:
"So, we set about applying for a mortgage - one which would allow us to rent the house out when we left - and planning a trip to Stoupa in the South Peloponnese to view some properties in our price range. Sue had, for some time, conversed by email with an agent she felt was okay (actually she had fully researched all the agents and knew this one was okay). Then...Two weeks before we were due to go, Sue's father (Don) died suddenly. Perhaps we should have cancelled our trip, but Sue's mother insisted that Don would have wanted us to go ahead. It was all a great shock. In hindsight...I don't think any of us could have been thinking entirely straight (I certainly wasn't); some things were perhaps not questioned or thought through properly. To my mind at this time...it was all wrong. (Maybe that's me feeling that at this moment as I write - I'm not feeling as good as I did when I started to write the log. This is one of the difficulties of anxiety disorder; identifying what is real or appropriate in my attitude).
The reason I'm not feeling as good as I was is that I tried to reduce my medication by just a little bit (a phased withdrawal). It seems that reducing it by even the smallest amount results in negative physical feelings and anxious thoughts. I know it's just the medication causing it; nothing has particularly changed otherwise and I should be able to work through it until I settle again. However, it will probably make me bad tempered and nasty to Sue and is contrary to a doctor's advice. Still I do want to get off the medication; there are other effects I don't like such as weight loss, poor sleep and twitchy limbs. I've upped my intake again and hopefully when I'm settled I can try again, even more slowly next time." My second attempt, reducing the intake even more slowly, was eventually successful and I am no longer taking or feel that I need to take anti-depressants...touch wood! It was a slow process with many days when I was a complete bastard. I can't say that the negative feelings or behaviours have completely gone away, or will ever, but I'm much calmer and in control now. However, all this was after the the second and arguably more devastating eruption of my illness and we haven't even got to my account of the first one yet. This is all covered in Part Two.
"I decided to write this journal / log partly as therapy, paradoxically after I began to feel much better, and partly to record the experience for myself and others of living with an anxiety disorder and living through those events that either caused or triggered the illness. As you may tell from that tortuous sentence there are many questions posed and raised by anxiety.
One of the first questions I keep coming back to is whether this sort of illness is a learned behaviour. Did I, for example, learn to panic because of something my parents did or did not do when I was a child? I was taught early on in my professional career that all behaviour is learned. People tend to see behaviour as just behaving without recognising or understanding its emotional or cognitive content. A 'panic attack' is very real to someone experiencing one; the fear, the thoughts, the physical needs (often to run or hide or both) and the physical experience cannot be easily denied or rationalised. So when did I learn to panic and why did it only materialise as a serious disorder later in life when going through a major life-changing experience? After all, this was not the first major change in my life, even if it was perhaps the biggest and most significant.
Actually, I know some of the answers. Truthfully, there's always been times when I've been nervous and slightly panicky. Everyone's the same, right? Well, maybe. There's always been times when I've put off doing something until I felt right about it. I've always been cautious about money and decisions. I've usually felt more secure in employment rather than risking self-employment. As a young man I was very insecure about talking to women and I think I've continued to be unsure about relationships of all kinds, although a lot of that is about communication skills.
So what was the major life-changing experience? Well, we emigrated from th U.K. to Greece. I don't particularly like using the word 'emigrate' (and all its forms); it doesn't seem to quite apply to moving within Europe now. To me people emigrate to Australia or Canada or anywhere further afield, but perhaps that's just me expressing insecurity in another way. Actually the change and the anxiety started with first steps. I said to Sue (partner/wife), after my first visit to Greece in 1987, that it might be nice to live there. This idea developed into a plan for the future. Whenever we holidayed in Greece we'd look at each place and assess its potential, how much we liked it and what we might do there. One thing I always fancied was trying to establish myself as an artist.
After the mortgage on our house was paid in 2005, Sue started seriously to look at houses in Greece. She says she did this for me, as I had never done anything seriously about planning a move. But things had changed for me; in 2002 I moved from a job I was stale in to an exciting new role. Despite the usual stresses and problems that go with any job, I enjoyed this role very much. Sue started to spend a lot of time on the internet researching estate agents and property. The closer she got to choosing an area and agent, the more worried and panicky I got. Her ideas were based on carefully checking who she could trust and a price based on re-mortgaging our U.K. house. We discussed selling it, but thought that we ought to keep it for a while in case things didn't work out and we had to move back.
My panicky feelings were probably exacerbated by stress and hard work I was putting into a part-qualification over the latter part of 2006 into early 2007. Also in 2005 my father had died and maybe I hadn't (or haven't yet) dealt with this properly. I also felt, although I know it's not true, that Sue was not involving me in the planning; actually I was avoiding involvement because all I wanted to say was "stop, I don't want to do this". And yet, the idea of living in Greece and getting away from Britain still attracted me, so I went along with it despite feeling that I had no control over the process. Ultimately, the source of my anxiety was stress; a perceived lack of control over events."
I know I was expressing and acting out my stress and anxiety at work. My colleagues must have found some of my behaviour quite strange and challenging. One thing I did was to do some odd drawings on the office whiteboard. It started out with doing some characatures of colleagues and (borrowed) one-liners just for fun, but following some political upheavals and questionable management approaches I began doing some satirical stuff. Actually they were quite creative (well, I think so), but also quite bizarre and in hindsight a real indicator of my state of mind. I took some photos of one on my phone so see for yourself:
"So, we set about applying for a mortgage - one which would allow us to rent the house out when we left - and planning a trip to Stoupa in the South Peloponnese to view some properties in our price range. Sue had, for some time, conversed by email with an agent she felt was okay (actually she had fully researched all the agents and knew this one was okay). Then...Two weeks before we were due to go, Sue's father (Don) died suddenly. Perhaps we should have cancelled our trip, but Sue's mother insisted that Don would have wanted us to go ahead. It was all a great shock. In hindsight...I don't think any of us could have been thinking entirely straight (I certainly wasn't); some things were perhaps not questioned or thought through properly. To my mind at this time...it was all wrong. (Maybe that's me feeling that at this moment as I write - I'm not feeling as good as I did when I started to write the log. This is one of the difficulties of anxiety disorder; identifying what is real or appropriate in my attitude).
The reason I'm not feeling as good as I was is that I tried to reduce my medication by just a little bit (a phased withdrawal). It seems that reducing it by even the smallest amount results in negative physical feelings and anxious thoughts. I know it's just the medication causing it; nothing has particularly changed otherwise and I should be able to work through it until I settle again. However, it will probably make me bad tempered and nasty to Sue and is contrary to a doctor's advice. Still I do want to get off the medication; there are other effects I don't like such as weight loss, poor sleep and twitchy limbs. I've upped my intake again and hopefully when I'm settled I can try again, even more slowly next time." My second attempt, reducing the intake even more slowly, was eventually successful and I am no longer taking or feel that I need to take anti-depressants...touch wood! It was a slow process with many days when I was a complete bastard. I can't say that the negative feelings or behaviours have completely gone away, or will ever, but I'm much calmer and in control now. However, all this was after the the second and arguably more devastating eruption of my illness and we haven't even got to my account of the first one yet. This is all covered in Part Two.
No comments:
Post a Comment