Withdrawal and Health Anxiety | Part 2

Building layers to protect myself so my mind didn't have to . . .

So last week or maybe the week before I posted about health anxiety and its relationship to an adverse reaction I had to an SSRI drug. I talked about how this adverse reaction went on for months because I was so worried about it and my health. But when I realized I was truly healthy and stopped worrying the “reaction” stopped. This is because the reaction had become a learned stress response that caused all these scary sensations to persist on and on. That’s what happened to me, other people have different experiences, but if you want you can watch that first video as it might provide more context for what I’m talking about today. 

So after the events in that first video stopped it was not happily ever after for me because I was still psychiatrized, on a bunch of drugs, and I remained unaware that deeper emotional “trauma” was the root cause of that adverse reaction that explained why it went on and on in the first place. And as a consequence I remained vulnerable to what John Sarno called The Symptom Imperative. The Symptom Imperative means that until a person truly acknowledges the things that the mind is upset about the stress response may remain active and new sensations may emerge even after the old ones subside. The worst things that happened to me were protracted withdrawal sensations and persistent pain.

And that whole experience was very similar to the adverse drug reaction in that I believed oh no I’m really sick, something is wrong with me, and this health anxiety took off again and I struggled to connect my life trauma with the stress response driving the sensations. Now granted the sensations were really, really horrible and disabling. It’s understandable why I thought I was sick but there’s a reason John Sarno called The Mindbody Syndrome (TMS) the most painful thing he ever saw in clinical medicine. 

So in this video I’ll talk about my experience with health anxiety in relationship to protracted withdrawal sensations and persistent pain that went on for five years and the way it took me months of work to transcend these experiences so I felt healthy again. 

PROTRACTED WITHDRAWAL SENSATIONS AND HEALTH ANXIETY

So when I came off psychiatric drugs I had acute withdrawal that turned into protracted sensations that went on and on. I also strained my back and developed persistent pain that went on and on. I was absolutely terrified of all these sensations. Then I went on withdrawal forums and I became terrified of psychiatric drugs and read that time is the only healer . . . hopefully. I therefore thought I might be brain damaged or something and became completely preoccupied with my health. I mean what else was there to do if time is the only healer but to watch the sensations and wait for them to stop? But sometimes a watched pot never boils. 

It never occurred to me to ask what I now think is a tremendously important question: what was going on in my life at that time? What was going on (outside of all these sensations) that was stressing me out? Well I’ll only mention one life stressor at that time but it was a big one and that was my overwhelming rage toward psychiatry. I’ve talked about this before and I think a relatable one depending on where people are on their respective voyages but there’s lots of anger out there toward psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry and it’s very justified. Now sometimes this is where people might say oh but I’m not anti-psychiatry, I’m not anti-psychiatric drugs—they only think reforms are needed or something as if that will fix things. And, hey, I don’t know other people’s experiences but I think from a TMS perspective it’s really important to acknowledge the depths of our rage, whatever that may be.

For instance I had so much rage toward psychiatry who knows what I would have done if I wasn’t focused on my health, if I wasn’t totally preoccupied by sensations, even disabled by pain. I mean I wanted psychiatry destroyed—I still want it destroyed—but back then when I would get really angry the physical sensations would worsen so I couldn’t get angry. I had to suppress my anger to prevent the sensations from getting worse. Or sometimes when I did get into rages my fear would switch to panic and I’d be in bed scared to death. Either way my preoccupation with my health was actually in some ways I think protecting me from acting out my rage in full. Or at least what my mind thought I might do.

I also think maybe the pain got so bad that I couldn’t leave the house because my mind was protecting me from going out into what it perceived as a dangerous world. Too dangerous to experience with psychiatrists and other oppressive forces out there. I think I experienced derealization to protect me from connecting with human beings who might hurt me again. In short all these perceived threats just kept a danger signal firing again and again and this threat signal just got connected to everything and made me interpret everything as dangerous. Sounds, lights, certain foods, movements everything. But clearly all this spiralled way out of control and this protective mechanism meant to help me became very harmful and the fact that I didn’t know that a protective response was going on, well, I was flying blind.

I just kept thinking that my body was broken, my mind was broken. You see on these pain or withdrawal forums—and I was like this too— you just have symptom lists. You know, like you tell a psychiatrist. Just a list of perceived symptoms. Boom, boom, boom. Now in some withdrawal contexts this might be helpful but when sensations go on and on and on what do these symptom lists even mean? Do they always explain something? At least for me if all I showed you about myself was a symptom list what would you know about me? What would you know to help me resolve the sensations? The symptom lists explained absolutely nothing about what was truly going on inside me and the stress response causing these sensations to persist. And what did these lists put my focus on? My entire focus was on my supposedly broken body and mind and the concept of protracted withdrawal syndrome which to me became like a psychiatric label and moved me away from understanding what was actually happening to me. Because for that I had to go under that symptom list beyond this bio-bio-bio approach to understand what was going on.

Sometimes in withdrawal culture there’s something conceptualised as neuroemotions or neuroanxiety; that is powerful emotions only come from drug dysregulation. And that makes sense in acute withdrawal or if tapering too fast but for me being so far out and tapering so slowly, at some point I had to move away from this concept and honour my own feelings that I was having and if my emotions sometimes felt out of proportion then I needed to acknowledge why my mind was perceiving things as so dangerous. Why it had become conditioned to be that way. Because there’s a reason even if it’s not visible on the surface. That’s actually how I got out of this situation by honouring myself, my emotions, and my life experiences.

REBUILDING THE LAYERS

I made a previous video where I talked about how I resolved protracted withdrawal sensations through a process of forgetting them by remembering myself. Forgetting the sensations by remembering myself. This is generally not done overnight but a process of de-centring the sensations and bringing myself into the frame and understanding that it’s my mind’s reactions to my life experiences driving the internal stress responsible for these sensations.

So one way I could start to forget withdrawal sensations, pain, and health concerns, was by first remembering, oh wait, this has happened before. And maybe some of you have had historical preoccupations with your health or preoccupying thoughts or ideas before protracted withdrawal sensations. Unexplained things like skin problems, panic, pain, migraines, sadness, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, whatever. A significant reason it seems for these preoccupations is “trauma”, growing up feeling unsafe in some way, or they start after a stressful period. In other words it seems like some of us have perceived danger before in our lives, a stress response then kicked in, danger signals fired and we started feeling or thinking something unusual to us and we became preoccupied with that unusual thing. Once that happens once it might be more likely to happen again and these withdrawal sensations might just be the latest incarnation albeit probably the worst incarnation of them all.

So to stop this cycle I needed to remember what had happened to me, what had made me so upset for my mind to perceive so much danger, and acknowledge that my emotions, even the repressed ones from long ago and that I couldn’t feel, could participate in maintaining a danger signal manifesting now as protracted withdrawal sensations, as persistent pain. I needed to teach my mind that this was just a stress response, that I was physically and emotionally safe even if I didn’t feel that way, so I could begin to bring down that danger signal. I could tell my mind I don’t need you to protect me anymore because it’s okay to have and feel emotions. And I could take some specific actions to rebuild layers in my life to act as defences on my behalf so I didn’t need my mind to maintain sensations to protect me. So I didn’t need this health anxiety or focus on my body to protect or distract me from what was going on deeper inside. 

Death Layer

So the deepest layer that I needed to rebuild was my fear of death. Death is something we all have to face, many people fear it. As I talked about in Part 1 of this video this was particularly important to me because of my Christian religious trauma and my fear of going to hell, my deepest fear. So I needed to research alternatives to help quell this fear. One thing I found some comfort in was Near Death Experiences which seem to be universal phenomena where people basically die then come back to life and report positive experiences in this loving Being of light that seem to suggest that following a religion for salvation is not necessary. What people are often told in Near Death Experiences is that the most important thing in life isn’t following this god or that god but loving people, and kindness to people, that’s what truly matters in this life. Now I’ve had some major failures in this way but in these Near Death Experiences people lovingly learn these lessons and it seems in these Life Reviews that it’s we who judge ourselves. So I also think developing self-compassion can be helpful just in navigating this world because it seems like self-compassion is something incredibly important somewhere inside us. It has some sort of cosmic significance—self-compassion. Anyway for myself having some existential placement in the universe, some orientation, I mean I don’t truly know what happens after we die, but having something cosmic orientation toward something peaceful, I think that was really important for me in helping to calm down an inner unrest.

Now sometimes it seemed my biggest fear wasn’t that I was going to die but that these sensations would just go on and on forever or I’d get worse. So for me this death layer also included my preoccupation with my health, the perception that I was sick. So I needed to move on from the concept of protracted withdrawal syndrome because that also kept the attention on my body and kept this danger signal going, kept this health anxiety going. Like this cosmic reorientation though this didn’t make the sensations dissipate overnight but it was getting pointed toward this direction and by working toward understanding the situation in a new light I could start to bring my own life into focus.

Remembrance Layer

The next layer that I needed to build myself back up was a layer of remembrance and honouring myself. Because I had forgotten who I was. I was out of touch with how the events in my life had affected me emotionally and affected my nervous system because I just blamed everything on drugs. Now I hate drugs don’t get me wrong but at some point, again, what I was experiencing was a stress response. So one thing I did here in this regard was journaling. This was so important for me to acknowledge the past and see how angry and sad I truly was. To finally write down my feelings about the religious trauma, psychiatric trauma, about all the things that had upset me and, significantly, I learned to connect how this trauma kept this stress response alive and allowed persistent pain and withdrawal sensations to continue. I made a video about journaling and I also talked there about remembering my personality traits, perfectionism, the need to be good and how those various internal pressures my mind put on me also caused this stress response to keep going. So I needed to learn to have some self-awareness about how my mind was pressuring me and try to exercise some compassion toward myself that my mind honestly doesn’t give me much of although I am getting perhaps a bit better at that.

Things I enjoy

The third layer on building myself back up just getting back to the things I enjoyed doing. Sometimes when sensations are really bad this is impossible to do but by doing the work above in the previous layers my perspective started to shift a bit and I could slowly get back into some activities that were second nature to me, that I could maybe get lost in, where I might even forget withdrawal sensations for some time. Maybe. Because I was avoiding so much of what I previously enjoyed. For me playing hockey, running, and doing things where I could place my focus on something else in a meaningful way. Not just passing the time watching TV or whatever but something that I loved to do, that made my life begin to feel worth it again. Now again I had to build up to this, I had to practice outcome independence as well because sometimes this wasn’t successful or was painful but I had to develop the mindset that I do what I want now. I will do what I want. Period. I’m in control, not my mind.

Social Roles and Human Connections

Just a final few layers I’ll say here, I needed to get back to some societal role. For years I had no role. I couldn’t function or do anything, I was miserable all the time because I hated my life and I had no meaning in my life. I had no meaning. What are we to do without meaning? So I needed to get back into some of the daily routines of life, to participate in life. Again this took time but it can help fend off this feeling of being lost and scared and hopeless. I mean I still feel lost at times—I’m not sure what to do with my life—but occasionally I do feel like I’m at home in the world and occasionally I do feel at home in the universe. One massive part of doing that is not just participating in society but making human connections and talking to people again. I barely talked to anyone for years. Making social connections can be hard but they can be very enriching and just having banter again I think is so important. I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone really because all I talked about were the horrible sensations and my horrible life and that I’d never get better and so on. I needed to have actual conversations again. In fact I stopped talking pain sensations or withdrawal sensations altogether. I only mentioned them indirectly if I was sharing how I was feeling hurt inside.

So I think by building these layers, which are not necessarily linear, like step-by-step layers but intertwined, I could stop wallowing and waiting to one day get better by some miracle. Some people do seem to wait it out and it seems to work. But I needed something to do. And this kind of gave that to me. And these layers I think gave me some more solid footing on the ground and showed my mind that the world is okay, I’m okay, and I don’t need to be protected anymore because look I’m going back into the world and it’s okay. This helped take my mind off of health anxiety and moved me toward a return to life. Now this is all easier said than done but if you’re interested in this approach that I used I would encourage you to read a John Sarno book or Howard Schubiner book or Steve Ozanich book; these people are also on YouTube and will give you far more information about this process than just this video. Because this process does require some effort and work to fully understand why these ideas can work and how they might be relevant to you. Anyway that’s it for this week. Perhaps I’ll see you again next time.