Toward Feeling SAFE in Withdrawal

It took a new interpretation to respond to sensations differently . . .

Hi welcome to my channel, I’m Gustav. So as you might know I used to experience protracted withdrawal sensations from psychiatric drugs—and I had persistent pain for years too. And oftentimes during that period in my life I felt a sense of dread. I used to call it the terror this sinking feeling following me around as if fear itself had me on a leash and if I ever got a dash of Oh maybe things will get better the leash would yank me back to make sure I remembered my place. I’m in withdrawal I’m in pain and I’m never getting out of it. It’s weird because I’d be in the same room with other people and yet they seemed to share a common reality and even though I was right next to them I was off somewhere else in the withdrawal dream where strange and unbelievable things happened and I couldn’t wake up.  

That’s the way I felt for years. I never, or seldomly felt safe. Now at the time I never considered my interpretation of my situation (that I was trapped in a nightmare) and how I responded to it (with fear and trembling), how this could actually reinforce this withdrawal dream to make it my actual reality. In other words what kept the nightmare going was that I kept buying into it. This is not just an abstract metaphor. It’s been found in pain research that a learned stress response can maintain pain and some other mysterious syndromes. The good news here is that clinical trials for types of pain and Long COVID and people’s real-world experiences with protracted withdrawal sensations have shown it’s possible to unlearn this stress response by cultivating a sense of safety within ourselves. 

Toward Feeling Safe in Withdrawal 

I’ve called this video toward feeling safe in withdrawal, not feeling safe in withdrawal, because this is a process and withdrawal sensations can be very frightening. And sometimes when people start getting into a mindbody approach they might think Oh no I’m still feeling fear, am I making it worse? But from what I experienced it’s still okay to feel fear, it’s still okay to get preoccupied with sensations because we’re in a learning process. It’s probably not all going to happen overnight. The aim here is to teach the unconscious aspects of our minds, where this stress signal and withdrawal sensations are coming from, that we are safe even if we don’t feel that way. We’re safe even if we don’t feel that way. Now as we do this, as this message is received, our fear will naturally dissipate over time and the sensations will take care of themselves. We’re not trying to fix anything, we’re trying to understand something. Once we fully integrate the understanding that we’re okay that nothing’s wrong with us that there’s nothing to fear, that’s when the sensations start to go away. This is assuming of course you’ve been checked out by a physician (I am not a physician) to rule out other things. Also I am talking about protracted withdrawal sensations here that have been going on and on and maybe for those tapering slowly on and on. I’m not talking about acute withdrawal that’s something that passes on its own.

i. Reinterpreting the Situation 

So my interpretation of my situation for about five years was that I had protracted withdrawal syndrome and there was nothing I could do about it. I was tapering at the time as well and even though I tapered such micro amounts I still often felt sick. And when I’d read the forums I was told there’s basically a withdrawal alarm clock set biologically I guess and I had to wait for that clock to ring to wake me up from the withdrawal dream. Time they say is the only healer. Now some people I think find comfort in this withdrawal clock idea or in some way they’re able to wait out the clock and maybe over time some things shift in their lives or within themselves and the sensations go away. But for me this interpretation didn’t work. I was too scared of the unknown and whether I would ever heal. This did not make me feel safe. I also remember with chronic pain always being told the importance of feeling safe in my own body but it was like why would I feel safe when I’m in so much pain? Or there’s this saying in physio that your hurts can’t hurt you. And I was like Yes they can; they’re doing it right now. Now I guess the point of the saying is that pain doesn’t equal structural or neurological damage but a credible explanation of why I still felt pain was never really provided.

Likewise for protracted withdrawal sensations an explanation was lacking. I mean I felt horrible but what exactly was it that I needed to heal from? There’s some thought it’s persistent neurotransmitter adaptations, particularly serotonin, some withdrawal psychiatrists suggest this. I’ve made a video about that and I’ll link to it below. But very briefly in that video I talk about a study where people stopped SSRIs and then months or years later participants were tested and shown to have fewer serotonin receptors compared to those who never had taken the drugs. And some people are like Oh this is why protracted withdrawal happens, maybe we have to wait for these or other receptors to recover. Maybe. But the kicker is that the people in that study, they felt fine. In fact a prerequisite of the study is that the participants felt well. They weren’t in withdrawal so the brain changes no longer mattered because the nervous system can find other ways to rebalance itself, to heal itself, in ways we might not expect it to. 

I would also just add that, in my experience, if protracted withdrawal sensations were always a persistent brain injury, I don’t think the sensations would sometimes go away, come back, and shift and change around so much. Now I had some very persistent things but I still had some version of waves and windows. Some of that was conditioning. The brain can learn when it’s withdrawal time, just like how Pavlov’s dogs would salivate at the ring of a bell, and one of the biggest bells for many people with withdrawal sensations is higher stress levels. An apparent example of this or a reverse example rather is that I’ve heard of multiple people who go on vacation and the withdrawal sensations get better. They feel almost like themselves. They have a good time. Then when it gets close to coming home the sensations start again and they’re at an utter loss. But if there’s always a brain injury there it’s not going to take a vacation with us. I don’t think injuries take vacations. So I’d think if it’s possible to feel better on vacation it seems like it’s also possible to feel better at home. But maybe home is stressful or maybe it’s a conditioned response because this home has become associated with suffering. Now I wasn’t able to go on any vacations, usually I couldn’t even leave the house, but in a similar vein a more common example is if it’s possible to have windows then maybe that’s a sign that healing has already taken place. Or if we can have better days, maybe that’s a sign that we’ve already healed from our worst days or maybe completely. I mean why would a brain injury pause for a few minutes or a few hours or days or weeks or months and then come back? I find it hard to make any sense of that other than the following reinterpretation.

So what did end up making the most sense to me is that there’s an ongoing stress response happening that could get switched on or off even if in some ways it was kind of on all the time. Now why did this make sense to me? Well was I angry or upset about anything in my life? Yes. Extremely. Did I have any past trauma that might have been getting reactivated by all this stress? Yes. Do I have a personality that’s really hard on me and creates all this internal pressure? Yes. Has this stress response signal or TMS approach worked for people showing it’s a credible idea? Yes. It’s proven to work for chronic pain, Long Covid without tissue damage, and success stories abound for fibromyalgia, eczema, chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, and lots of these mysterious syndromes. So why not protracted withdrawal sensations, especially when nothing else could really make sense to me? Now I did not come to this conclusion right away, this is something I wrestled with, but as I accepted this reinterpretation for pain and started seeing success with that, withdrawal sensations started fading at the exact same time and I was kind of forced to reject the concept of protracted withdrawal syndrome for myself or that micro tapering was causing my problems. Because quite clearly the reality for myself was that I was calming down this stress response by moving away from the scary interpretation that something was wrong with me. And not only that but with this new interpretation I could respond to the sensations in a new way.

ii. Responding to Sensations in a New Light

So now if we can maybe, even a bit, start to reinterpret withdrawal sensations as not coming from damage but from a learned stress response one of the most powerful ways to teach our minds safety is by the way we respond to the sensations themselves. I really needed a response overhaul.

I mean I used to get withdrawal sensations or pain and I would just completely freak out. I was always scared of things getting worse or spreading. And sometimes they did. So I tried to dull my mind by watching films or whatever which I kind of had to do anyway because the pain was so bad that I was disabled for large portions of the day. So I constantly lived in fear and this fear was always percolating whether I was focused on sensations or not.

Now while I think my initial fear-based reaction to withdrawal sensations is a reflex, a conditioned response. It wasn’t my fault, just the way it was. But after that initial reaction there existed an opportunity where I could teach myself to respond to the sensations and my own reaction differently. Instead of thinking Oh no I’m damaged, it’s happening again, I’ll never get better I could say to myself I’m okay, I know I’m not damaged this is only a stress response. And I could soothe myself further by saying Hey I know an alarm bell is going off in my mind because there are things in my life that have really upset me and these scary sensations are a message that I’m in danger but actually this is no longer the case. I’m safe now so this message, these sensations, are no longer needed.

This is very different from my previous responses. I used to get so angry and scream at people or God or the psychiatrist who haunted my dreams. But oftentimes I was alone in my room with spinning thoughts, my heart pounding, this great fear response, but then I could step outside of myself and ask, who am I responding to? There’s no one here. There are four walls, a window in that one. The only person talking to me, putting pressure on me is me, coming from my memory of sinister psychiatrists. But in reality there’s no one here to harm me anymore. In fact I was fortunate enough to have people in my life who were helping me. 

I used to have a mantra, I’m not a victim, I’m not a martyr, I’m a survivor. I’m not a victim, I’m not a martyr, I’m a survivor. And while I technically am a victim of psychiatry and I’d like to get reparations if we lived in a just world, I didn’t want that to become my identity. I didn’t want to be a martyr for psychiatry. To say look at me look at how bad psychiatric drugs can destroy people. Now I’m not saying anyone wants to be this, it was just a motivational mantra for me saying that psychiatry will not get the best of me, I can survive it and, significantly, I already have. There are no more psychiatrists here. I have no appointments. I’ll never have an appointment again. I’m safe.

Obviously for me the perceived threat of psychiatry was one thing that helped keep this stress response going, that kept these sensations going, and I’ve been talking more about psychological sensations, dread, fear, spinning thoughts, rage. But alternatively if I was feeling more of a physical sensation I could still have a similar response to cultivate safety by reminding myself that, again, there’s no threat here. Because sometimes this danger alarm goes off for reasons we might not know, whether it’s unconscious emotions or a conditioned response, but we can always remind ourselves that we’re okay even if we don’t feel okay. Even if the mind is still perceiving a threat, we know better and we can tell it that. Now it’s also possible that there is ongoing significant life stress in which case we can tell our mind we’re aware of this stress and we don’t need to be distracted by these sensations. This a standard John Sarno approach as Sarno saw sensations as trying to protect us from feeling painful emotions. So we can also tell the mind that emotions are safe and we don’t need the sensations to protect us from them.

Now as to why our interpretation and responses are so important, well, I talked a little bit last video about something called predictive coding. It’s a theorized brain function that the brain is constantly trying to predict what is going to happen next. The brain builds a model of reality and just uses it over and over again because it’s more efficient. What this means perhaps for us is if we buy into the idea that we have an ongoing drug injury and we respond in that fearful way and that only time can heal us, what is the brain going to predict? It’s going to predict withdrawal. But by changing our response to the sensations we can change what the brain is going to predict. So instead of feeding this prediction fear, which is what these sensations live on—they live on fear—we can change the input we can change the predictive formula by inserting this new message that we’re okay even if we don’t feel okay. But we have to mean it or come to mean it and confidence in this process increases as we understand that these sensations are coming from stress, from powerful emotions, from conditioned responses and that we’re not damaged and it’s safe to have emotions. Then we can calm the brain’s danger signal, the fear can dissipate, and the sensations can take care of themselves. We can also do this preemptively by just regularly reinforcing this message by reading or listening to John Sarno books, doing some journaling which I made a video on, I also have a page on Substack with lots of different TMS resources to help integrate this knowledge. And our minds can then start shifting. I could almost feel the click in my mind sometimes as I inputted this new TMS knowledge from external materials like a podcast or audiobook and then again when I reinforced this message internally to myself, like talking to myself or journaling, as I dealt with sensations.  

Now it can take a while to get this understanding deep within ourselves to where our minds completely accept this but that is when fear starts to dissipate and a sense of emerging from this withdrawal dream happens. And in this regard it might also help us to return, as we’re ready, to activities we’re avoiding or putting off so we’re not held hostage by the fear of doing things and maintaining a danger signal that way. So I learned to respond to things I’m scared to do with well I’m doing it anyway even if I have to slowly work my way back up. I remember when I went to the grocery store for the first time in years and my eyes were tearing up. Who knew walking into a grocery store could be such a cathartic experience? I remember just playing hockey, just moving again was pure delight. I didn’t even think about being safe in those moments, I was just carried away by the activity. That’s why second nature activities can be so helpful in forgetting withdrawal because they provide a safety message and we don’t even have to say anything, we can just do things. Now it took me a while to build up to this but that’s what all this TMS knowledge is about, to give us the confidence and ability to get back there, to live life, to get out of this nightmare. And when I think back on my experiences now that’s what it feels like, a bad dream. I mean it still affects me today sometimes because it was real and heartbreaking but there is life on the other side and it’s possible to reimmerse in life in a wonderful way that I never thought would be possible again. So I’m going to leave you here with two videos, a Pain Free You video on feeling safe with sensations which I’m sure I stole from and another video with Alan Gordon on actively learning to feel safe with uncomfortable sensations. So I hope that’s helpful in some way and I’ll see you next time.