Dear EscapeNeeded:

It may be that your escape-needed current experience of life is not something new but something old. It may be the experience you had as a child growing up. We often re-experience our childhood experience. A feeling happens and we think: what is wrong now? But the wrong was in the past, and we keep experiencing he feeling that fits what was wrong in the past.

What do you think?

anita

Dear EscapeNeeded:

I will explain. First a summary of your share: you have been married less than a year, have a boring job, working for the best company you ever worked for (salary, benefits, people, I imagine), have a small side business that you started, family close by, two cats. And you feel that you have no goal, no aim, nothing that you want except one: to run away, to escape (escape needed is your user name). You want to run away and travel around the world.

Before you got married you had “the worst job in the world”. You  left that job just before the wedding, then had “the most amazing honeymoon”. Following that you put on some weight, “can’t stop eating… boredom eat”

As a child you lost family members, “lost all but 1 grandparent”. You are currently dreading, you wrote, getting a phone call regarding another death. “I feel in a limbo waiting”

My input: it may be that before you got married, you had hope that when you leave the worst job you ever had, then, at that time in the future,  you will be happy, and you had hope that when you get married, then, at that point in the future, you will be happy.

Those two things happened but the happiness part didn’t happen. Now there is no job to quit and no wedding to take place. And the amazing honeymoon is in the past, none to anticipate.

I think that as a child you suffered anxiety as a result maybe of family members dying. Maybe you were alone with the fear and that fear remained for a long, long time, days and nights seeming very long, maybe, as the fear festered in you. You felt in limbo waiting as a child and you are still experiencing the same waiting (“I feel in a limbo waiting”).

(I am thinking that it is this fear that is driving you to eat, needing to do something to make the long, long boring days move along, maybe. The physical discomfort of exercise increases your anxiety, so you avoid it).

Is my understanding correct?

anita

Dear EscapeNeeded:

So you were not afraid as a child that relatives will die. Then what was your fear/ anxiety about as a child?

I ask because you want to escape. Figuring out what it is exactly that you want to escape is necessary so to accomplish the escape you want.

anita

Dear EscapeNeeded:

I think I understand better. You have been scared all these years, ever since you were a child, of that “blackness forever”. I have a few thoughts at the moment, I will let them develop as I type to you.

Your solution to “blackness forever” has been to escape the forever-feeling in your job, in your life, whatever is boring and feels like forever. You think that if you lead an exciting, unpredictable perhaps, non routine, very active life, then there will be no forever-feeling to your life now.

I think you were scared of this thing: the forever-feeling now. Not death later, really, but the feeling of death now, that forever-boring-this will never end feeling.

I think it is this very feeling that you want to escape.

Before I type anything else, I will ask for your thoughts at this point.

anita

EscapeNeeded,

You want to run away
You are scared of dying
You don’t have any goals
You are bored and get bored quickly
You don’t have any hobbies or anything that holds your interest
You are lazy
You burst out crying randomly
But you use to be a very happy person.
I wonder what changed from you being a very happy person to someone who is afraid of life.
Can you pinpoint what happened to change you from that very happy person to now?

Mark

Dear EscapeNeeded:

I doubt that you are following your old, short thread, but it would be exciting if somehow you will be reading this and reply. It’s been 3.5 years since you submitted the five posts on this thread. It was more than a year before anyone in the whole world heard of Covid-19, a time when most people had no fear of being around other people, a time of economic promise. It was a time before the 2020 and onward severe escalation of extreme weather events related to climate change… the good old days. But…  not really.

You wrote back then, at 28 years old: “from the outside I have a great life“: at the time you left the worst job you ever had for a job with the best company you ever worked for, you started a side-business, had an amazing honeymoon with your amazing new husband, owned your own home, and yet, on the inside, “I just feel crap. I feel pointless. I have no goal. I have no aim. I have nothing I want to do. Except currently, run away… I also keep panicking about death. I am terrified of death“.

When you were a child, you asked your sister what she thought death was about, and she said: “it’s nothing, just blackness forever“. After she said that, you did the following: “I would go lay in bed close my eyes, lie as still as I could and imagine that forever. I used to feel ill and the only way I would feel better was to go sit on the stairs so I was near my family – bad nights I’d say I felt sick, and my mum would let me sit up a bit longer with them” –

– This blackness-forever was imprinted in your brain as a child and that imprint did not disappear because you changed jobs, got married etc. External circumstances do not undo strong neural imprints.

“I’ve put on weight since the wedding, but I can’t stop eating. I’m hungry all the time, and I boredom eat” – the pleasure that eating sometimes provides does not dissolve the forever-blackness, it does not turn the lights on.

“I hate exercise, it does not give me the feeling everyone says it should, how it helps depression etc. It just gives me headache and I hate the sweaty part and the aching afterwards” -exercise does not turn the lights on either.

“I’m too impatient, I want results after a week” – anyone living in forever-blackness would be impatient, wanting the lights on ASAP!

“I just don’t know what to do anymore. Mindfulness just doesn’t work for me, and meditation doesn’t either…  last night I just couldn’t stop crying it was a constant stream. Nothing entertains me anymore, I’m just so bored of everything” – there is just one way to escape the forever-blackness and turn the lights on, and that is to figuratively, in the context of quality psychotherapy, go back to the stairs where you sat during those bad nights, and reconnect to what you felt then in the circumstances that existed then, then process the thoughts and feelings of that time, undoing that blackness-forever imprint in your brain. When enough of that old imprint is dissolved, your life on the inside will change and better match your life on the outside.

anita