Dear Ian:

You asked: “Do I have to mentally re-live all the breakup events, processing each one… this doesn’t sound very safe to me”- from personal experience, being still engaged in the process of healing, it is unsafe for you to “mentally re-live all the breakup events.” Anxiety limits how much we can process at any time, therefore processing traumatic events has to be done very, very gradually, each processing step has to be taken when safe.

You wrote: “but I must do something so I can heal and not suffer such depression and anxiety again. My hands are shaking badly now having just wrote this and I have a bad headache..”-

This is indication that you must be very gentle and patient with yourself and the process. Trying to remember traumatic events when your hands are shaking is counter-productive, the wrong thing for you to do. You should relax, instead, distract yourself with calming music, aerobic exercise, and such.

In your original post you wrote that you had “3 long term (6-10 months) of therapy with a counsellor,
blaming my childhood and never getting any better”

My comment on the latter: the fact that you did not get better for blaming your childhood does not mean that your trouble didn’t originate and start in your childhood (being “primed” as your psychiatrist suggested). The fact that you didn’t get better as a result is probably because the therapy did not progress beyond the blaming. Maybe you were waiting for the therapists to validate your experience in childhood, to give your blaming an outside, reliable validity. Maybe you didn’t get that validity and this is why you didn’t get better.

I hope you post again.

anita

Dear Ian:

When you experienced “repeated very young abandonment”- how old were you when you were first abandoned and how old were you when you were last abandoned? Were you aware, at the time, that you were abandoned?

I don’t think you want or need to re-tell your childhood, and so, I am asking only for your ages when that happened and a yes or a no on whether you were aware as a child that you were abandoned.

anita

Dear Ian:

I read your last post and went back to one before it where you were wondering how you should grieve the ending of your first marriage.

This is how I see it: thoughts and emotions are mingled in our brains, neuropathways were formed in childhood (those Formative Years) and those connections, aka pathways, remain through adulthood. They do not disintegrate with time. Future emotional learning means more pathways, inserting a new connections into the old. With successful therapy, difficult pathways, those that cause you most suffering, can being undone, little by little, over time, mindfulness and work.

The pathways formed in the young Ian during those experiences you described (and those you forgot), exist. These pathways are not separate from the new pathways formed as a result of your divorce twenty years ago. Pathways are interconnected, old and new.

When you were a young child, you didn’t have past experiences to project into your present, so what you felt accurately fit with reality. For example, when you felt hurt, it meant someone really hurt you (you didn’t misunderstand; it really happened).

What you feel now is often what you felt as a child (those childhood pathways activated), therefore, your current feelings carry the information about the reality of your past. You don’t have to remember events and details. Your feelings indicate that you were in danger, that a parent hurt you, etc.

I hope this is somewhat helpful. I will be back in a few hours.

anita
anita

Dear Ian:

What is important is not how much therapy you had, how much knowledge you have, what is most important is that you feel safe now of the dangers you experienced as a child and during the breakup of your first marriage. The danger then was being left alone, uncared for and unprotected by your mother (as a child) and later, by your first wife.

Now you are safe from those dangers because as an adult, you can feed and protect yourself. You can live without your mother (as you have) and you can live without your ex wife (as you have). From those dangers, you are safe.

anita

Dear Ian:

I have suffered a lifetime of anxiety and still do. The process to reduce it, minimize it, requires a whole lot of patience with the process. I call it “excruciating patience” because a moment of “I got it!” is often followed by: oh, I didn’t, there is more.

The process requires an equal amount of gentleness with yourself, empathy for yourself, as if you are taking the hand of a small, scared child, be soft, tender to that child.

The “outside approach” to reducing anxiety- current relationships with other people. Two things:

1. Cut contact with abusive people, and with people who were abusive to you in the past and still trigger in you the same anxiety response. There is no way to reduce anxiety long term when still interacting with people who are disrespectful to you.

2. Be effectively assertive with the non- abusive people in your life, state your needs, negotiate, make it a win-win relationship. If you regularly interact with a person whose habit is annoying to you and it is reasonable to ask that person to stop that habit with you (allowing for imperfection in the process), then ask that person just that. Otherwise, you repeatedly get triggered. The scared child whose hand you are holding, needs you to voice his needs, to take care of him. Be his voice.

3. Daily or every other day aerobic exercise, like fast walking, 30 minutes or so; other exercise, yoga/ other slow stretching. It is important to take the elevator, so to speak, down from the overthinking brain, to the body. Get physical.

4. Ongoing Mindfulness practice, making your everyday movements purposeful and slower, slower… making your movements matter for themselves, not only as a means to an end. Exit the overthinking brain more often, listening to sounds, feeling a soft object in your hands, looking at the clouds in the sky…

5. As you prefer: hot showers, hot baths, saunas; music, fresh air, a bit of sun, a bit of soaking in a light rain, petting a dog.

6. Let yourself know that you survived all the intense anxiety of many years of life. The anxiety you suffered did not kill you. It is not deadly in itself (the “solutions” we find for it, as in taking drugs can be deadly). You will survive this one too. This is the truth and it may eliminate the fear-on-top of fear.

7. Do not resort to the ineffective past ways of reducing anxiety, those “solutions” I referred to, such that cause additional problems. When you develop trust in yourself to operate effectively, that self-mastery, reduces anxiety. It lets that scared child whose hand you are holding know that he is “in good hands.”

anita