Dear Lindsey:

The following quotes are taken from your posts submitted in the first half of 2019.

About your childhood: “My father was always working and I was really just an extension of my mother, kind of like a doll… I was always with her. She did everything for me: picked out my outfits, did my hair, and made most of my decisions for me really”.

Your mother had her doll when she was 19, and for about 12 years she played with her doll. The she had her second child when she was 31, and another two years later.

When you were 12, about the time you entered middle school, you had a sibling for the first time in your life,  and you puberty was new to you: “I remember everything embarrassing me in middle school. I suddenly felt ugly when puberty hit and I was slow to develop”.

At about 17, you “started barely eating”, perhaps wanting to return to the pre-puberty doll stage, when you were your mother’s doll. You also started “drinking and smoking pot”.

Sometime before or after your mother had two additional children, she didn’t want you to need her anymore because she was otherwise occupied; she didn’t want her doll anymore.

Afew years later, “When I went to college, she pretty much said you are on your own now and they moved into a new house without a room for me. She emotionally cut herself off from me overnight. I was very lost for a long time”.

Ever since, and decades later, in 2019, she was/ is still not available for you: “She is away at a tennis tournament and last time I spoke to her she made it clear she has her own problems to deal with and for me to  figure it out on my own. This is her tone 75% of the time”.

You wrote: “I feel a sense of panic when I’m alone it’s hard to describe” you wrote last year. It is the panic of not being with your mother.

About your marriage: “There was abuse mostly verbal in my marriage for the past 6 years…  Prior to our separation, there was about 2 years of coerced sex. It would buy me at least 3-4 days of him not being verbally crazy and a calm house. But I would cry during and after.. being forced to sleep with him has harmed me more than I realize”, “I felt like a prostitute and that I was being used in different ways during the end part of the marriage..I felt over time I was prostituting myself in a sense for him to act nicely.  This was never a strong point in our relationship.  I never really enjoyed it”.

“He hit me once around 2016 and I continued meeting his needs.  I would cry during and after and go in a different room to sleep.  I hated myself after.  Trying to talk about it with friends or my mother was hard.  I got ‘that’s your husband so you have to do it’ or ‘just pretend it’s someone else’ kind of comments. I did not feel like anyone understood what I was going through and I believe it effects me now in ways I am not recognizing… my body was being used to meet a need and I was not part of that need.  I was trading that for nice behaviors from him for the household.

It ended when I felt I could not have sex with him anymore and we cohabitated for 1.5 years…I was still enslaved in a sense for the 1.5 years. I felt trapped in every sense of the word.  It made me depressed and very angry with everyone around me, mostly my family.  Daily I was told by him what I wasn’t doing right and that I gave up on the marriage and stopped trying”.

About your mental state: “anxiety attacks, irritability, poor boundaries.. obsessive thoughts.. shame and embarrassment.. low self esteem.. starving for attention.. drop in focus, poor decision making…My worry is I don’t want anyone to think I’m crazy or desperate or unstable.. don’t understand why I feel ok for a few hours or even a day and the suddenly I’ll get bombarded with feelings of anxiety.  Negative and unhealthy Thoughts  will run through my head and it’s up down up down..  I woke up at 2:30? with a panic attack and was not surprised.  They usually happen with stress, being overtired, and in a new environment… I feel like an irritable walking zombie.  I’ve had to take my Alprazolam.. each night and it’s makes me feel awful the next day… I’m feeling really tired because I have to take Klonopin at night 3-4 days out of 7 the past 2-3 weeks due to panic trying to fall asleep.”

You listed your mental challenges: “Constant worry that others are talking about me or judging me all the time. Obsessive thoughts and worries that go round and around in my head.  Feeling antsy, claustrophobic in my apartment, not able to sit down and read or nap. Getting hyper focused on one thing- usually a man. Not able to sleep. Waking up several times during the night. Feeling panic around 7 pm that slowly gets worse every night for last 2-3 weeks and need meds or have an anxiety attack late at night. Turing a small thing into a catastrophe.”

Diagnoses and drugs: At 19 you were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. In your twenties and thirties you were prescribed SSRI antidepressants from time to time: Zoloft, Lexapro and others, but these either didn’t do anything for you, or made you want to sleep all the time, appeared drugged, you almost lost your job, and some increased your anxiety and panic attacks. Because Lithium is prescribed to treat major depressive disorder when SSRIs don’t work for the patient, you were prescribed Lithium at 35. At 39 (while you were taking lithium?) you were told by a psychiatrist that you were on a “bipolar spectrum meaning my  highs and lows are not major and don’t meet the basic criteria (of a bipolar disorder)”, meaning you were not diagnosed with bipolar, but were told that you suffer from a mood disorder (ups and downs) similar to bi-polar, but not as severe enough to fit you into the bi-polar diagnosis. You pointed to me that you have never suffered from psychotic symptoms that often characterize a bi-polar disorder such as hallucinations, delirium, delusions, and/ or a total break from reality.

In April of 2019, soon after we started communicating, you were taking Lithium (used to treat bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder..), Vibryd (used to treat major depressive disorder..), Risperdal (an atypical antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, therapy-resistant OCD..), Klonipin and Xanax (tranquilizers of the benzodiazepine class, used to treat seizures, and anxiety disorders, specifically panic disorders or generalized anxiety disorder). But there were other psychiatric medications you took and stopped taking before, in your twenties and thirties (if not earlier, during your teenage years).

My Understanding Today: when your mother “did everything” for you for the first decade of your life or so, treating you like a doll for way too long (picking out your outfits, doing your hair, making most of your decisions), what happens is that you learn to do nothing for yourself.

You are a doll, an object under the power of her owner. You get used to her doing everything for you, you relax into  it, you adjust to it. You learn to expect it. The doll doesn’t develop into an increasingly independent child and teenager. Instead she remains dependent, feeling like an extension of her mother: t is not her arms that she uses to take care of herself, it is her mother’s arms dressing her, feeding her, combing her hair and so  on. And it is not her brain she uses to make choices, it is her mother’s brain making choices for her.

And then, out of nowhere, at 17 or 18, or 19, your mother decided she doesn’t want her doll anymore. The doll is then terribly lost, not knowing of her own abilities to take care of herself, to make sensible choices, and to go about living in an adult world not suitable for dolls.

Fast forward, this man you married used you as a sexual doll. And your mother was okay with it, excusing this man’s behavior when you complained to her, supporting him throughout, being on his side.

You were diagnosed with major depression at 19. Then a variety of powerful prescriptions drugs started to flow into your system, starting with the relatively mild antidepressants of the SSRI group.  But there is a rule that psychiatrists follow: if antidepressants don’t work, prescribe lithium, a heavy duty drug. A person doesn’t have to suffer from a bi-polar disorder to be prescribed Lithium; depression will do. You told psychiatrists that the SSRIs didn’t work for you and even hurt you, so you were prescribed Lithium. One or more anti-psychotics and the notorious benzodiazepines (Klonipin, Xanax) were added to the mix, and … it is impossible at times to tell what symptoms are being treated by these drugs, and what symptoms are caused by these drugs.

As I see it, you were not born with a predisposition to be depressed or anxious any more than any  baby. Your anxiety and depression, like mine, came about as a result of your upbringing, or more accurately, a down-bringing.

Understand your symptoms: when your brain feels foggy, when you can’t concentrate, when you rush, not paying attention to what you are doing, all these are a result of hormones being released into your blood when anxious, diverting your blood away from your brain and to your extremities (arms and legs). Because there is less blood going to the brain, there is less oxygen and nutrients going to the brain, and as a result the brain doesn’t function well: it pays less attention, if any, it can’t focus, it feels foggy, and so forth.

There is a natural reason for that: an doe (female deer) in the wild, while fearful (a predator is approaching), is rushing as fast as she can to escape the predator. Blood is diverted from her brain (she is not paying attention to where she is going or what food is available for her as she runs away), and is flowing into her legs, making it possible for her to run fast.

When you get fearful/anxious, same thing happens. But if you are not familiar with the biochemical/physiological process I mentioned, you think that you must be a freak of nature, as in: why am I feeling foggy, why am I not paying attention, why am I rushing, why am I talking so quickly, what is wrong with me.. I must be mentally ill, etc.

There are natural, normal biochemical/ physiological reasons behind the behaviors you think of as unnatural and abnormal.

Lack of sleep, moving apartments, changing circumstances, these increase anxiety, while routine decreases it; being exposed to people who harm you increases anxiety, removing yourself from those people decreases anxiety. Learning to take care of yourself well increases your confidence and lowers your anxiety.

anita