Can Health Anxiety Prolong Withdrawal? | Part 1

Well it certainly did for me . . .

If you watch the first minute of the video above you’ll see a short clip from a film I made a long time ago. The scene shows a character talking about his fingernails being longer on one hand than the other and therefore fears he has a life-threatening calcium imbalance. The film is mostly fiction but that’s a true anecdote from my life, that thing about the longer fingernails on one hand. It was a rather perplexing concern. I mean why did I have such a strange preoccupation like that? Where did it come from? And what does this have to do with protracted withdrawal sensations?

Well hi again to another Subtack post here. Before I get into all this I’ll just remind you that I’m not a licensed medical professional but I do talk about how I resolved protracted withdrawal sensations and persistent pain using a mindbody approach primarily rooted in the work of John Sarno. I have multiple videos of Sarno’s work on my YouTube channel, both a lecture and a book, so if you want to check them out for more context feel free to do that.

So I used to have a bunch of preoccupations with my health and general well-being throughout much of my life that predate withdrawal sensations. Now my concerns were mostly not imaginary like the fingernails I also had unexplained rashes, pain, panic, sadness and I’d get checked out by physicians but nothing was ever truly found wrong with me.

Now I bring up my historical concerns or preoccupations with my health—which I’ll get into in more detail shortly—because I think they’re related to why I got protracted withdrawal sensations and persistent pain in the first place and kept them going longer than necessary. So this video draws around my experiences with health and withdrawal anxiety like the fear of withdrawal sensations themselves and where this fear comes from besides the fact that the sensations can be so scary. This video is part one of two on this topic otherwise I think this video would probably be too long.

A Story of an Adverse Drug Reaction

So I’d like to share a story about a reaction I once had to an SSRI drug. I actually talked about this in the first video I made, the long one, but I can flesh it out more here. So some years ago I was doing a university exchange program in a small French-speaking village in Quebec and my French was and still is pretty bad. When I was there I was under constant social pressure to interact with classmates and the whole village exclusively in French and I guess this wouldn’t be so bad except that I’m already very shy and introverted in English-speaking situations. So I found the whole thing very stressful and I was young and I became very lonely, isolated, and homesick.

Now I managed to finish the program but after I got home I started to feel funny. My stomach in particular began to hurt and I became increasingly concerned and preoccupied with this pain. I got some tests done, they couldn’t find anything wrong, so I thought maybe I’m just “anxious” about . . . something. So because I had previously taken an SSRI, which I got off of with no problems, I thought maybe I’d try that again. So I took a tablet in the evening and woke up later that night feeling sick probably the worst I’d ever felt in my life up to that point. And I think it lasted until the early morning. Now after that I didn’t take that drug ever again but these waves of sickness, which seemed to stem from my stomach, continued to come and go for months and the waves were so bad that I thought I was dying. I got increasingly panicky and I was told to go stay in one of those buildings where they tell you you’re crazy and just drug you up to hopefully shut you up.

Now despite this I continued to get legitimate medical testing for my stomach and one day I had a final, definitive test and the results came back negative. And the guy who ran the test was like there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re healthy, it must just be stress. I wasn’t sure why I should be stressed, that French program ended months ago. But the test results struck me as indisputable so the next time I felt a wave coming on I just instinctually reminded myself that I’m healthy and there’s nothing wrong with my stomach and the most amazing thing happened: the wave stopped. I felt the dizziness come, which was always the start of the wave, and then it just stopped. Now why did this happen? Well I interpret it as my mind believed I was sick and tried to get me to believe I was sick but once I knew better, that I was actually healthy and basically told my mind to cut it out, you can’t fool me anymore, the wave stopped. In other words I stopped buying into the sensations, I stopped fearing them. Thankfully I don’t think there were withdrawal forums back or I never found them because otherwise I might have thought it’d take me years to recover, I’d be on special diets and everything and that’s very significant because all this would have reinforced to my mind that I was sick and the waves then would have probably continued because my preoccupation with my health would have continued. That’s what drove this, the thought that I’m sick, that there’s something seriously wrong with me. And I’ll get into that idea a little more later.

But I think another critical question here is why this happened in the first place, why this adverse reaction went on and on because that doesn’t happen to everyone. What was unique about me that I got so pulled into it? Well at the time I never explored this because I was blinded by psychiatric labels that pretended to explain things but didn’t really explain anything. One label I was eventually given was “OCD”. But what is “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?” Its “diagnostic criteria” is basically an obsession that causes distress. But what is an obsession that causes distress? It’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. But what’s OCD? An obsession causes distress. But what’s an obsession that causes distress? Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. If I’m not making sense, well, that’s the nonsensical nature of “psychiatric “diagnosis. It just goes in a circle, it’s circular reasoning that doesn’t tell you anything about yourself, or why you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing, it doesn’t lead anywhere except drugs and therapy and people lining their pockets off of a pseudo-medical diagnosis. So the question remains: why was I really so focused on my body and my health? Was there an explanation?

ORIGINS OF HEALTH ANXIETY

So when someone is experiencing “health anxiety”, as I was, I think a significant question is: what was going on in my life? For myself I think back to the fingernails thing for instance because that’s an easier one to unravel at least in retrospect than the adverse reaction. What was happening around that time? Well that happened in my first year of university when I felt very dissatisfied with life. I felt completely lost at this massive school, lost in a big city, lost to any life direction. It was almost impossible to make friends. I got more and more scared of people. I then withdrew more from people, from attending my classes, which only made this fear worse and worse. I thought I’d never make it in this world. I’m too shy and timid and I looked at these massive buildings and thought how did people build these things? I’m too scared to go eat in the cafeteria. I also discovered social phobia on the internet and learned that my fear of people might be an incurable disease. Then I started thinking things like what’s this bump on my head? Has it always been there? Could this be what I think it might be? Or what’s going on with my hands, could my fingernails be longer on this hand? Is a calcium imbalance a thing?

Now when I think about my life back then I think what happened is that I was in an overwhelmingly stressful oppressive circumstance that I felt ill-equipped to adapt to and so a danger signal was almost constantly firing in my mind and it blinded me with fear and I started to perceive danger everywhere. I’d see a spider on the dorm wall and it was just the end of the world. Throwing my shoe at it as if my life depended on it even though I live in Canada and there’s no way that spider was seriously poisonous. But because this alarm just kind of seemed to be stuck I started looking for danger that wasn't even there, not a person, not even a spider, so there’s just my fingernails. And a preoccupation might begin if my mind latches onto the idea that something is actually wrong and I buy into the idea as well and then I might start thinking about it all the time.

Now I think why the mind did this, why it latched on, at least in my situation, is it gave me something else to think about rather than what was truly bothering me. In other words it’s a protective mechanism. So instead of having to navigate this oppressive social structure and confront my fear that I’ll never fit into this world, that I’ll be an outcast forever, I could instead think about my fingernails, I could instead think about a bump on my head. These were distractions from my deeper problems. In fact I didn’t even finish the year at university because I was just so scared and worried and I started thinking I was “depressed” and I thought oh no now I have this “disease” that psychiatry says people will have for the rest of their lives. But that was just another thing to fear, another distraction from life but quite a natural response to feeling overwhelmed. This was something I needed to understand and explore more to grow and evolve as a person but instead I was just told there was something wrong with me and given a drug.

Finishing Drug Reaction Story

Now when it comes to the adverse drug reaction, which happened several years after those events, I think it’s much the same thing although it’s not so obvious. When I was at the exchange program in Quebec and suffering what felt like constant high-pressure social situations —and remember I already had challenging social experiences in my first year of university—I think a danger signal went off again in my mind and even after I returned home it just didn’t shut off. It kept going. Why is that? Well I think part of this was there was something deeper going on. And this is often the case, I think, that something deeper is going on.

So one of these things can be earlier life “trauma” that gets reactivated by the stress in our present lives and when those trauma-memories start to get really stirred it might be harder for them to shut off. So for me I had religious trauma in my youth and I had a fear of going to hell and that the Rapture would happen that would take my family to heaven and I would be left behind. This is one of the earliest or certainly one of the most powerful danger signals that was active in my childhood. But as I got older my conscious memory of this religious trauma got repressed but it remained in my mind as vague emotional or existential danger and the trauma-memory could get reactivated with sufficient life stress.

And that happened when I went on that exchange program in Quebec, maybe part of that was the Catholic Church was an imposing presence there every day, this massive cathedral towered over the village. I was going to a religious university at the time well so that kept this trauma stirring. Then with the constant social pressures giving me such terrible daily stress all this created a powerful swirling vortex of perceived danger that reverberated throughout my mind. So even after I got through that French program I was still wound up and my trauma-memories were threatening to rise to the surface, and I was not ready to deal with that, which might sound weird, but I think that happened because of the following.

So a few months later after I returned home that adverse drug reaction to an SSRI. Now maybe that was a genuine kindling reaction or maybe my nervous system was so sensitive, so on the lookout for danger, that a toxic SSRI drug was too much for my system to take. Now granted the adverse reaction was very scary, anyone would have been scared, but for me and my mind I think this danger signal from that reaction was just the final straw. Just full emotional-fear overload. Because the subsequent waves I had from this adverse reaction weren’t just vague terror and physical sensations but somehow these waves made me feel as if I was descending into hell, my absolute worst fear. My trauma was rising to the surface or I was descending to meet it in the depths of my mind.

However instead of focusing on this fear of hell, and maybe addressing this past religious trauma in my life which I really needed to do, I think my mind tried to protect me by latching my attention onto this adverse reaction idea or that something was wrong with my stomach or I was sick with a disease. And so I developed a preoccupation with my health, and my fear was displaced which, again, I think functioned as a distraction or protective mechanism from what was truly bothering me. And now looking at the history of my life, back to my fingernails, back earlier to the unexplained pain and rashes and everything I had in my youth I can see that my mind had used this technique many times before and now it was using it again: this adverse drug reaction was merely a trigger for what John Sarno calls The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS) to begin.

Now of course the particular waves from this adverse drug reaction, they resolved when nothing was found wrong with my stomach and I believed I was healthy. I turned the danger signal turned off. But only temporarily. Because while I felt safe from that particular drug reaction or stomach problem I still did not feel healthy in general nor did I feel safe in the world for very long. John Sarno talks about something called the Symptom Imperative, that is, until someone acknowledges what’s bothering them, or even if you start to do that, the mind will produce more health distractions to protect us from feeling how badly we’re wounded. For me then the religious Rapture stuff and later things in my life were never addressed because I was blinded by psychiatric “diagnosis” and psychotropic drugs and because our society doesn’t value the connection between the mind and the body so I had no idea I even had work to do. Eventually then I would experience protracted withdrawal sensations and persistent pain that would emerge as the worst manifestation of TMS I ever experienced. And I’ll talk about that, how I resolved that experience, and if I still get mindbody sensations today in the second part of this Substack post/YouTube video that I’ll release probably next week. So if you’re interested in that keep following along here and we’ll meet again.