Two Faces of Anxiety Disorder

Anxiety Guru has a short posting about the two faces of anxiety. From the blog:

As anxiety sufferers we all understand by now what constitutes an anxiety symptom.  It could be palpitations, chest pain, dizziness, or more thought based symptoms like racing or disturbing thoughts.  In my case I have experienced both, but interestingly rarely have I experienced both at the same time.

That’s an interesting perspective, but not one that I share. My experiences have generally been more linear in nature, where there’s a correlation between the physical issues and the busy brain.

For example, I’ve had problem with feeling pain or discomfort in my chest or side, which often would kick off the panic escalation process.

“What does a sharp pain mean versus a dull ache?”

“What’s this bump? And if I have the same bump on the other side of my body, does it mean the bump is normal?”

“What vital organ is located close to the source of the pain?”

“Is the pain due to a cramp, or do I have fatal pancreatic cancer!?”

One holiday, friends bought me a book for hypochondriacs, which they thought was funny, but all it did was lend credence to justify my anxiety. “See, a certain number of people have strokes from holding their head at an odd angle while holding their phone between their ear and shoulder so they can free up their hands. It restricts the blood flow to the brain, dammit!”

My own situation is entirely holistic, where high stress manifests itself in lower back pain, while conversely physical maladies have a knack for kicking off my panic response.

What do you think? Is your panic and anxiety more physical or mental, and can you keep them separated?

The Two Faces of Anxiety Disorder

What would the child you were say to the adult you are?

My husband will often call me over as he’s writing, to show me some fantastical something he’s found as he’s read what you all are writing on the web. More often than not, it’s something akin to the Mc Gang Bang (a McChicken sandwich inside a double cheeseburger) from thisiswhyyourefat.com, but today it was site where Chino Otsuka creates double-portraits, pictures of herself today, overlaid with photos of herself as a child (via Andrew Sullivan’s Blog).

Some time back, when I started the work to live with my eating disorder, a therapist took the group I was part of through a visualization exercise. Being cocky, cynical, and 26, I rolled my eyes before I closed them, but decided to play along. After some breathing exercises she began: “Imagine”, she said, “you are walking down a small pathway. You pass lovely trees and somewhere in the background you hear water trickling over rocks. You have nothing pressing to do; it’s the kind of day that makes your chattering mind stop pestering you, the kind of day that you find yourself fully present.”

“You come around a small bend in the pathway, and see ahead of you a wooden bench, and on that bench, a small child with their back towards you.  The child turns to look at you over their shoulder, and you realize that this child is you, at 5 years old. The child says to you:…” – and she paused. “What,” she asked, “does that child say?”

It was the first time, in months of therapy, that I cried. Out loud. In the dark, my eyes closed, surrounded by women who had been raped, been beaten, been neglected, all with lives any typical person would have said had been far worse than the 26 year old me had lived.

Because the five year old who was me had turned to me  smiling. “What?”, she said, kicking her legs in her yellow dress with pink butterflies made for me with love by my Papa’s girlfriend Pam, “What’s happened to you?”.  She feels so bad that I have chosen this suffering.

Today I’m sitting in my lovely house, with my lovely trees, and in the background instead of the sound of water flowing over rocks I hear the sound of the young business man who does our lawn aerating our backyard. And the five year old girl that no longer sits on some bench in some visualization, but instead in my head, fully there most every day, says to me as my husband shows me Chino Otsuka’s photos, “What’s happened to you?”.

And I laughed when I told this story to my husband, before I cried as I wrote this, because today I’m smiling back at me.

“..everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news.” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest