Dear flyby:

I define anxiety as excessive, ongoing fear. It is clear to me that anxiety is in the core of most clusters of symptoms, that is diagnoses of mental disorders. It is the root cause. It often happens in childhood that the child is overwhelmed by fear, repeatedly, not comforted and so the brain shuts down to various degrees, dissociation takes place and that excess energy of fear releases itself in forms of tics (Tourette Syndrome for one), compulsions (OCD)

It is only these days that I am having memories of childhood that I didn’t have before. Things like the look of a notebook in school, the feel of going to school on the first day, short flashes of such. I was very dissociated my whole life.

anita