A Polite Melody

I was surrounded by "everyone gets nervous sometimes, we all have to deal with it" and "sometimes you have to push through even though you feel anxious" and "you have to do things that scare you to overcome the fear" and even now, it's what they say: "Do it scared."

I was also reassured that "everyone feels anxious" about certain things, and "no one likes [thing]."

This affected my understanding of what it meant to "get better." When I imagined a future version of myself that was capable of enduring [The Bad Things], I didn't imagine a feeling of safety. I didn't know how to imagine it. All I could do is try to remove my feelings of dread and horror and revulsion from the scene, as though cutting a shape out of a magazine with craft scissors. But it was unclear how those feelings could be removed in life.

I think my imagination of "getting better" was something like "becoming more dissociated." Everyone felt these things I felt, and they were inevitable and unchangeable, but I felt them too much, and I needed to feel them less, so I could become more compliant.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy didn't even make me feel them less, though; it only made me less capable of acknowledging that I was feeling them, less conscious of what my feelings were.

Eliminating "anxious" cognitions did not make me "better"; when I was 20-21 and had my Big Breakdown, I was not having anxious "thoughts" except as weirdly tactile, intrusive, spewing overflowing jets of imagery and words related to [The Bad Things].

I had trained myself not to have panic attacks, but my body was constantly wound tight with tension. I was in pain a lot. I would wake up with my back hurting, tense with my sheets soaked in sweat. I almost failed a Tai Chi class because I could not make my body relax enough to do the forms.

It was very hard for me to learn that my internal experience of my body was its own reality, that it was a reality separate from my ability to comply with external expectations.

I still remember the horrible, isolating experience of trying to find something real about my experience that I could prove to an outside observer, and of trying to reach a level of distress where I was actually physically prevented from functioning. I was tormented by the fact that I was physically able to "push through" the fear; I hadn't yet reached the point where I became completely consumed with panic and lost control of my body, or collapsed or threw up on myself, and that meant I was choosing to be weak, and my torment was partially my fault, because I had not "pushed myself" to the utmost extent possible.

So I scrounged together "evidence" of how my fear was affecting me: the intrusive sensations and thoughts that seemed to be hydraulically pumped into my brain, the nightmares, the daily pain and soreness, the grinding teeth, but it still didn't feel like enough.

This "evidence-finding" took up a lot of my daily thoughts on my own condition. I was very preoccupied with clinging to bodily "evidence" of distress.

In hindsight, I realize that I did not consider my own subjective experience of suffering to be evidence that I was suffering. At least, I felt that my subjective experience of suffering was irrelevant to whether I deserved care. I felt, in a half-formed and poorly understood way, that my subjective experience could be misleading or "false."

My experiences with therapy, the various workbooks and other tools my mom bought for me, and the resources I found online and elsewhere for dealing with "anxiety" were preoccupied with "thoughts" as the form "anxiety" took. Separately, they taught me breathing exercises and other bodily "relaxation" techniques that were supposed to control the physical processes of anxiety.

I see this as a domination and control-based framework: by erasing "wrong" cognitions and replacing them with "right" ones, and by forcing your inhales and exhales to be a certain number of seconds long, you can make the process of fear in your body stop, or at least override it with the "higher" part of your consciousness. This was accompanied by repeated mantras that my anxiety was not "real," that it was "lying" to me, that it was a monster that was somehow invading and usurping my "real" self, which I could will into being by thinking the right thoughts.

This did not work, at all, ever, and my mental health descended into an incredibly deep black hole before I rejected everything I had learned before and (over several years) discovered and tried accepting some radically different principles about myself:

that my fear was a fundamentally real experience, whether externally judged as "rational" or "irrational"

that my fear was a primal survival instinct inherent to my body's functioning

that my fear's fundamental function was to protect and advocate for me, ensuring that my safety needs were met

This evolved (over several more years) into a further understanding that my fear provided information about what my safety needs were, and eventually developed in me an ability to actually examine safety and unsafety, and to feel both of those things, and to develop deeper understanding of how safety needs can be met.

It was a progression from this unhelpful idea of fear as an invading "monster." I decided to explore what would happen if I accepted that I was the monster. Instead of trying to be a human, I was going to become the wolf.

Part of that was freely exploring all the wolf's urges and instincts. I wrote down some really violent fantasies of being a wolf and biting and killing people. I used the werewolf as a kind of empowering image of a monster who would kill anything that wanted to hurt me.

At some point during this time, when I was feeling that fear in my body, I would just sit there and kind of...appreciate it, the sheer power of it. I would think about how I was feeling something absolutely ancient, an instinct that existed since the Precambrian, something that studied death for a billion years so that I could live and defended the survival of every ancestor from my mother to her mother to the most distant of creatures hundreds of millions of years ago. The havoc it was wreaking in my body was just evidence of how powerful that instinct was.

And also I did a lot of things like destroying objects by biting them, and going out in the middle of the night and running as fast as I could. I wanted to really embody and feel that ability to do those things, to flee and fight back and do all the things an organism might do to ensure its survival.

Very early in this process, my mental image of the "wolf" was...it's weird to say, but it felt like she was inside my body, like wrapped up in my ribcage, scratching and gnawing to get out.

I guess I skipped some of the steps. I told her I was sorry. I knew now that she had only been trying to protect me, and I'd locked her up and taped her jaws shut, and she'd become more and more desperate.

Over time the mental image changed. The main thing that changed was that the Wolf got bigger. Once she wasn't trapped inside me anymore, she was like a skinny dog that physically wrapped herself around me, clinging to me and guarding my body. And then she started to walk beside me, or you know, with me, and in my mind she slowly became much larger, until she felt like this giant beast as tall as my shoulder.

This hasn't been fast. It's a work-in-progress, and progress is not linear. At first, I could only do this with one (1) safe person I knew was receptive to hearing how they could help me get what I needed to feel safe during challenging situations. I've added a second person who is safe to communicate these needs with fairly recently. But I also notice it in my ability to be more assertive in my day-to-day life, even if my version of that is still more mild than average. I've become more comfortable having an opinion on things, especially things I'm familiar with, and expressing my competence. These sound like very simple things to someone who didn't grow up being told to suck it up, "life's tough, get a helmet and a box of bandaids" type emotional suppression.

Things that have helped me, in no particular order:

My body's signals require my attention, care, and response. This does not mean I must react to them immediately. But neither can I ignore them or stay dissociated from them. I must make time to care for my animal self, or it will force me to make time by destroying me from the inside.

Sitting with my feelings and processing them is very uncomfortable at first, but it has helped me in my journey to understand the connection between how I feel emotionally and how my body feels. I'm trying to learn to be patient with this process.

Creative endeavours help me a lot. When I can't get to the bottom of a feeling, or it feels like it's spinning without getting traction, I make something. It might be a playlist or a painting, it might be writing, it might be scribbling on a page until I'm done. Getting it outside of me makes it easier to sort through.

This isn't accessible for everyone, but my therapist gets me. She cares what my goals for therapy are, and we set reasonable goals to work through. She gives me relevant resources. The best one, easily, is a detailed emotion wheel that helps me name how I feel, which I've always struggled with, because I was never taught how to process emotions.

Be patient with yourself. I felt really ashamed when I was first learning this and saw myself slip into old patterns. Previously, when I hurt people, I couldn't understand where I went wrong. Once I could see it, it started with seeing it in retrospect, and I was just horrified. I had to forgive myself and learn from what went wrong. I started doing postmortems with my spouse to help untangle that. It helped.

I'm now at the point where I can tell them when I'm starting to feel distressed, before it's overwhelming. Then we talk through what coping strategies might help. Solving the problem is a legitimate way to cope, but not everything can be solved on the spot. So there are ways I cope, like driving and listening to music loud, or making art, or even distraction.

Distress tolerance is a skill, but that doesn't mean you should always be afraid. Fear is not distress, it is straight up toxic stress. Distress is feeling nervous (not terrified) before an interview or a speech, which is pretty typical (but most people aren't AFRAID, and anxiety is NOT the same as "nerves").

Distress tolerance is also not silencing your feelings. It is acknowledging them, making space for them, but not being consumed by them. It is pulling up a seat at the table for them, hearing them out, and offering reassurance, coping skills, and occasionally bribes lol. A recent example: My best friend's elderly dog died, and she was sad. I felt sad for her, and helpless to do anything to soothe her grief. This is distress. I was not afraid, I just felt badly. I self-soothed and talked to my spouse, so it wouldn't spill out onto my friend while she was struggling.

The animal NEEDS enrichment in its enclosure. If it never receives pleasure, it will become miserable. This is what I mean about "bribing" myself.. I can't just work, eat, and sleep. I have to let my animal go out and pace the perimeter. I have to let it rest, and feed it nourishing foods, and give it water, but I also have to make time for play. Restlessness turns into anxiety so easily. Let the animal touch grass.

Get to know the sangay shrew opossum (Caenolestes sangay)! This species—which inhabits parts of Sangay National Park, located on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador—wasn’t scientifically described until 2013. Like other South American shrew opossums, it is a pouchless marsupial. It’s primarily nocturnal, and feeds on a diet that consists mostly of insects. However, as a newly described species, there is still much to learn about this critter. 

“Psychotic/Schizophrenic” when you mean: unpredictable, unrestrained, unreal, etc.

“Bipolar” when you mean: polarized, scattered, fickle, unstable, etc.

“Delusional” when you mean: unrealistic, unreasonable, close-minded, stubborn, etc.

“[insert “R” slur in relation to intellectual disabilities]” when you mean: unreasonable, ridiculous, scatterbrained, immature, etc.

“OCD” when you mean: particular, neat, overbearing, etc.

“Narcissistic” when you mean selfish, abusive, manipulative, etc.

It's a yellow bittern! They are very creechur.